Ask the experts or browse previous answers including:

Limited voting rights for electoral officials? --- Creation, composition and mandate of Working Group for Electoral Reform --- Paramount chieftaincy as a system of local government ---

Your are currently reading the archived ACE Encyclopaedia Version 1.0 The new, significantly extended and updated ACE Encyclopaedia is Version 2.0. Access Legislative Framework in ACE 2.0

Democracy implies the utilisation of electoral processes to decide which citizens will be entrusted with the basic tasks of government. Its representative nature implies:

• In a positive light, demanding that all citizens will have been able to intervene in the political decisions by means of representatives elected by universal, free, equal, direct and secret suffrage. In short, the establishment of the principle 'one person, one vote'.
• In a negative light, the predominance of decisions made this way over other forms of direct or assembly-type government, that would not be feasible in unusually large and complex societies (see Basic Alternatives).

Regardless of whether the political system is presidential or parliamentary, the elected representatives exercise the legislative and executive powers (the judicial power as well in some systems following the common law tradition), subject to controls established by the constitution, observing fundamental rights and public freedom and with the limits that determine the separation between the powers and the constitutional form of each one of them.