The word 'democracy' retains a special aura — it remains an aspiration for activists around the world. But how democratic is our own democracy? Have we hollowed out the essence of citizenship with a parliamentary system that is remote and unaccountable? Is our representative democracy in fact unrepresentative?
After the Brexit vote, there has been a backlash against plebiscites, a model developed in the ancient Greek city states, notably Athens. To learn more about the competing models, openDemocracy spoke with Cambridge University professor Paul Cartledge, author of Democracy: A Life.
