those nominated by major political parties can be elected, and most parlia-
mentary systems with tight party discipline controlling how ‘representatives’
vote. Thus the voters are in fact choosing among rival party-teams, and the
character of the person they elect is largely irrelevant, except perhaps in
parochial matters. Exactly who is being represented, and exactly how demo-
cratic representative democracy actually is, can therefore be placed in sub-
stantial doubt. There has also emerged, in the last decades of the 20th century,
an argument that bodies with authority, whether parliaments, courts or any
e ́lite, should be representative of the people they rule in the sense of having
approximately the same gender, ethnic and socio-economic make-up. Politi-
cally this has been most obvious in the demand that positive discrimination (or
‘affirmative action’ steps should be taken to ensure that women are equally
represented in parliaments. The demand is hard to satisfy without clashing with
other values such as the right for anyone to stand for election, and the absolute
freedom of choice guaranteed to the electorate. Thus the French Conseil
d’E ́tat struck down part of a bill passed through the National Assembly in 1984
which would have required parties to have quotas amongst their candidates for
women. This was regarded as unconstitutional; similar quota systems proposed
for the British Labour Party were held to be illegal.
Republic
Republic is unusual among political terms in being one that is actually very
easy to give an ostensive definition to, but of which it is rather hard to explain
the history. A republic is, very simply, a system of government that does not
entailmonarchy, nor, at least officially, aristocratic or oligarchical rule. But
this does not necessarily mean that republican government must be demo-
cratic, because there is a large gap between abolishingoligarchyand insisting
on universal suffrage. The Roman Republic was, for example, the original
precedent for republicanism, but had a clear class structure where only the
higher orders of the society had any rights to participate in government.
Despite this the ordinary working definition of a republic nowadays is any
society that is both democratic and non-monarchial, and a huge number of the
states in the world have ‘Republic’ somewhere in their official title. The fight
over monarchy is long dead—the title means little, and the political questions it
used to raise are now pointless.
Republican Party
The US Republican Party was founded in 1854 as a coalition of anti-slavery
groups. (An earlier Republican Party, founded in 1791, eventually evolved into
theDemocratic Party.) In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected as the first
Republican Party