Among the assemblies created in Europe during the Middle Ages, the one that most profoundly influenced the development of representative government was the English Parliament. Less a product of design than an unintended consequence of opportunistic innovations, Parliament grew out of councils that were called by kings for the purpose of redressing grievances and for exercising judicial functions. In time, Parliament began to deal with important matters of state, notably the raising of revenues needed to support the policies and decisions of the monarch. As its judicial functions were increasingly delegated to courts, it gradually evolved into a legislative body. By the end of the 15th century, the English system displayed some of the basic features of modern parliamentary government: for example, the enactment of laws now required the passage of bills by both houses of Parliament and the formal approval of the monarch.

Other important features had yet to be established, however. England’s political life was dominated by the monarchy for centuries after the Middle Ages. During the English Civil Wars, led on one side by radical Puritans, the monarchy was abolished and a republic—the Commonwealth —was established (1649), though the monarchy was restored in 1660. By about 1800, significant powers, notably including powers related to the appointment and tenure of the prime minister, had shifted to Parliament. This development was strongly influenced by the emergence of political factions in Parliament during the early years of the 18th century. These factions, known as Whigs and Tories, later became full-fledged parties. To king and Parliament alike it became increasingly apparent that laws could not be passed nor taxes raised without the support of a Whig or Tory leader who could muster a majority of votes in the House of Commons. To gain that support, the monarch was forced to select as prime minister the leader of the majority party in the Commons and to accept the leader’s suggestions for the composition of the cabinet. That the monarch should have to yield to Parliament in this area became manifest during a constitutional crisis in 1782, when King George III (reigned 1760–1820) was compelled, much against his will, to accept a Whig prime minister and cabinet—a situation he regarded, according to one scholar, as “a violation of the Constitution, a defeat for his policy, and a personal humiliation.” By 1830 the constitutional principle that the choice of prime minister, and thus the cabinet, reposed with the House of Commons had become firmly entrenched in the (unwritten) British Constitution.

Parliamentary government in Britain was not yet a democratic system, however. Mainly because of property requirements, the franchise was held by only about 5 percent of the British population over 20 years of age. The Reform Act of 1832, which is generally viewed as a historic threshold in the development of parliamentary democracy in Britain, extended the suffrage to about 7 percent of the adult population (see Reform Bill). It would require further acts of Parliament in 1867, 1884, and 1918 to achieve universal male suffrage and one more law, enacted in 1928, to secure the right to vote for all women.

The United States

Whereas the feasibility of representative government was demonstrated by the development of Parliament, the possibility of joining representation with democracy first became fully evident in the governments of the British colonies of North America and later in the founding of the United States of America.

Conditions in colonial America favoured the limited development of a system of representation more broadly based than the one in use in Great Britain. These conditions included the vast distance from London, which forced the British government to grant significant autonomy to the colonies; the existence of colonial legislatures in which representatives in at least one house were elected by voters; the expansion of the suffrage, which in some colonies came to include most adult white males; the spread of property ownership, particularly in land; and the strengthening of beliefs in fundamental rights and popular sovereignty, including the belief that the colonists, as British citizens, should not have to pay taxes to a government in which they were not represented (“no taxation without representation”).

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Until about 1760, most colonists were loyal to the mother country and did not think of themselves as constituting a separate nation of “Americans.” After Britain imposed direct taxation on the colonies through the Stamp Act (1765), however, there were public (and sometimes violent) displays of opposition to the new law. In colonial newspapers there was also a sharp increase in the use of the term Americans to refer to the colonial population. Other factors that helped to create a distinct American identity were the outbreak of war with Britain in 1775 and the shared hardships and suffering of the people during many years of fighting, the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the flight of many loyalists to Canada and England, and the rapid increase in travel and communication between the newly independent states. The colonists’ sense of themselves as a single people, fragile as it may have been, made possible the creation of a loose confederacy of states under the Articles of Confederation in 1781–89 and an even more unified federal government under the Constitution in 1789.

Because of the new country’s large population and enormous size, it was obvious to the delegates to the Constitutional Convention (1787) that “the People of the United States,” as the opening words of the Constitution referred to them, could govern themselves at the federal level only by electing representatives—a practice with which the delegates were already familiar, given their experience of state government and, more remotely, their dealings with the government in Britain. The new representative government was barely in place, however, when it became evident that the task of organizing members of Congress and the electorate required the existence of political parties, even though such parties had been regarded as pernicious and destructive—“the bane of republics”—by political thinkers and by many delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Eventually, political parties in the United States would provide nominees for local, state, and national offices and compete openly and vigorously in elections (see below Factions and parties).

It was also obvious that a country as large as the United States would require representative government at lower levels—e.g., territories, states, and municipalities—with correspondingly limited powers. Although the governments of territories and states were necessarily representative, in smaller associations a direct assembly of citizens was both feasible and desirable. In many New England towns, for example, citizens assembled in meetings, Athenian style, to discuss and vote on local matters.

Thus, the citizens of the United States helped to provide new answers to question 1—What is the appropriate unit or association within which a democratic government should be established?—and question 3—How are citizens to govern? Yet, the American answer to question 2—Who should constitute the dēmos?—though radical in its time, was by later standards highly unsatisfactory. Even as the suffrage was broadly extended among adult white males, it continued to exclude large segments of the adult population, such as women, slaves, many freed Blacks, and Native Americans. In time, these exclusions, like those of earlier democracies and republics, would be widely regarded as undemocratic.