Comment by int_19h

It's not the only two options. You can have direct democratic assemblies at the lowest level, and then use the delegate system to form assemblies above them, scaling as high up as needed. It's still radically different from representative democracy as we practice it today, because delegates are delegates - they receive explicit instructions from the assemblies that send them on how to argue and how to vote, and they're instantly recallable if they disobey those instructions.

And yes, those systems do exist in real world. AANES (Rojava) has been operating under such a system for over 10 years now.