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Comment by sliverstorm

13 years ago

We live in a republic, but is a republic not extremely similar to a representative democracy?

"Republic" is essentially orthogonal to "representative democracy".

The United States of America has a government which is both a republic (and, more specifically, a federal republic) and a representative democracy.

There are republics that aren't any kind of democracy, and representative democracies that are not republics (e.g., the United Kingdom.)