Is the US a democracy or a republic?

Question

Sometimes we're called a democracy and other times that's disputed, saying we're a republic. Which are we? Does being one make us not the other?

Answer 1

There is an apocryphal story in which Benjamin Franklin is asked by the member of the public: what type of government have you given us? The answer that has gone down in history is: "A republic, if you can keep it."

The word "republic" comes from the Latin "respublica," which translates to "the public thing". That word, when it was conceived, referred to the Roman Republic, a government in which various posts were filled by yearly elections. To the Romans, the word "respublica" was a general one. Today, the word "republic" usually refers to any system of government like the Romans' in which representatives, elected by the people, manage day-to-day political matters on the public's behalf.

Democracy, on the other hand, comes from the Greek. Democracy in its purest form is embodied by the small Greek polis (city state) in which citizens cast votes directly on matters of government. The word democracy generally, however, is usually meant to include all systems of government in which the people are sovereign. The sovereign is the entity that holds ultimate power within a certain jurisdiction (like a nation).

These terms were never designed to be exclusive of one another. Indeed, our founding fathers drew upon both the Greek and Roman traditions when forming the Constitution. Still, if you asked a delegate to the Constitutional Convention what our form of government was, he would probably say that it was a republic. The United States – a large, continental power – presented challenges to self-governance that closely mirrored challenges in the Roman story. The founders explicitly tried to solve the problems that caused the Roman Republic to become the Roman Empire.

Now, if you want to be really precise, the form of government we have is a federal presidential system. If you want to learn more about the distinctions between forms of government, you can begin by learning the differences between government in the U.S. and countries like the U.K. or France – both of which could be said to be both democratic and republican in nature.

Answer 2

Long story short: the US is both a republic and a democracy, but it's complicated!

The United States is known as a "representative democracy," in which citizens directly elect representatives to legislate on their behalf. The United States is also a republic, a system of government in which the power lies with the people, there is a representative government, and there is an elected executive (like a president) and not a monarch/dictator.

There are many similarities between democracy and republicanism, but essentially, a republic is a form of government and a democracy is more of an ideology that inspires how we run our government. It is not a contradiction to say that the United States is a democratic republic, and asking people to choose between whether the United States is a democracy or a republic is a false dichotomy.

Answer 3

The US constitution refers to a republic

But a republic is a democracy, with constraints on the majority to protect minorities. Most would agree "mobocracy" is "democracy" beyond the pale. We need rights to protect the minorities from tyranny of the majority.