<P> The Roman Republic was the first government in the western world to have a representative government, despite taking the form of a direct government in the Roman assemblies . The Roman model of governance inspired many political thinkers over the centuries, and today's modern representative democracies imitate more the Roman than the Greek models because it was a state in which supreme power was held by the people and their elected representatives, and which had an elected or nominated leader . Representative democracy is a form of democracy in which people vote for representatives who then vote on policy initiatives as opposed to a direct democracy, a form of democracy in which people vote on policy initiatives directly . A European medieval tradition of selecting representatives from the various estates (classes, but not as we know them today) to advise / control monarchs led to relatively wide familiarity with representative systems inspired by Roman systems . </P> <P> In Britain, Simon de Montfort is remembered as one of the fathers of representative government for holding two famous parliaments . The first, in 1258, stripped the King of unlimited authority and the second, in 1265, included ordinary citizens from the towns . Later, in the 17th century, the Parliament of England pioneered some of the ideas and systems of liberal democracy culminating in the Glorious Revolution and passage of the Bill of Rights 1689 . </P> <P> The American Revolution led to the creation of a new Constitution of the United States in 1787 . with a national legislature based partly on direct elections of representatives every two years, and thus responsible to the electorate for continuance in office . Senators were not directly elected by the people until the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 . Women, men who owned no property, and blacks, and others not originally given voting rights in most states eventually gained the vote through changes in state and federal law in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries . Until it was repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment following the Civil War, the Three - Fifths Compromise gave a disproportionate representation of slave states in the House of Representatives relative to the voters in free states, </P> <P> In 1789, Revolutionary France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and, although short - lived, the National Convention was elected by all males in 1792 . </P>

When did the us become a representative democracy