the history of democracy
Democracies originate in Ancient Greece, with the work “democracy“ coming from the two Greek words “demos” meaning people and “kratia” meaning power of authority. A democracy is a type of government that gives power to the people. There are different types of democracies, changing depending on how much power is given to the people, how that power is given, and when this power is given. The Ancient Greeks practiced “direct democracy,“ the system in which citizens meet to discuss policies, then making a decision based on
majority rule. But only free males were considered to be citizens during this period, making this form of democracy flawed and limited. Because the United States is made up of a large, diverse, population, the Founding Fathers decided to use a “representative“ democracy. A representative democracy is a system where voters vote for representatives and those representatives make the final decisions. For example, when we vote for the president, we vote for representatives, not the candidate themself. The representatives that we vote for then vote for the candidate that they choose.