THAT definition does preclude "pure democracies", because there is no such thing and there has NEVER been such a thing. What HAS existed are individual votes in which democracy is exercised directly by the people. But even have a government that is elected by the people. The PUREST democracy that ever existed was the Athenian democracy. BUT 1- Not everybody voted, 2- Even THAT one included representatives of the people to excercise crtain funcitons 3- the only reason it kinda worked was because the population was very smal. About 30 thousand if I remember correctly and 4-... For goodness sake, that was 2600 years ago! What RELEVANCE would that have in a debate TODAY? And that's very true. Only problem is that they don't EXIST. Not in the way YOU described them, You said "In direct democracies, there are no representatives. It's government directly by the people." There are places that USE direct vote for some things. They are NOT "pure democracies" in the sense that you appear to believe. They just USE it for very punctual things, and don't use it for others. Let's take a look again at what YOU said: "In direct democracies, there are no representatives. It's government directly by the people." So you heard it here first, folks. In New England the people don't have representatives in Government. That's going to be news for Senators and House Representatives in the New England area that believe they had been elected by the people of New England to represent them in government. Look... you wrote a very interesting OP, with just ONE mistake. Not a huge mistake, but one you already had to walk away from. But it's all been downhill for you since then. Each time you post, you dig yourself into a deeper and deeper hole. You might want to stop digging, at this point.
Bold by me. Okay Golem. So you are trying to tell us that there is no such thing as a pure democracy in all the world. I'm not buying it. Man has been traveling over the oceans for at least the last 5,000 years. You are saying that never in history has there been three men in a boat where two of them democratically decided to give the other one a sea toss. I'm just not buying it, I been on boats before. I won't ask you to prove your claim either.
Those two sentences don't agree with each other. In the first sentence, you write that pure democracies don't exist. In the second sentence, you write that is has existed. They are pure democracies in some contexts and republics in other contexts. Is your argument that because they are republics in some contexts, then that somehow nullifies the direct democracy in other contexts? In New England, especially in certain localities, such as townships, they have direct democracies in which there are no representatives. You even admit that there is direct democracy in certain contexts, but, laughably, your claim is that because they don't practice direct democracy in all contexts of government, then that nullifies the contexts in which direct democracy is practiced. That's a silly argument.
It is such a mind-numbingly stupid argument by Golem to declare that direct democracies don't exist. It's a claim easily disproven with a quick Google search, not to mention, as you've pointed out in your post, that small groups engage in direct democracies all the time. Who wants to have pizza tonight? 10 hands raise. Who wants Chinese food tonight? 7 hands raise. Pizza it is!
@Golem has no real leg to stand on. Your OP said that that the US is not a democracy but it was a republic. Nobody can argue against that.
Republic means your head of state is not a Monarch. Representative Democracy is when each person can vote for someone to represent them in government.
This has already been brought up by your friend Golem ad nauseam. A republic being "a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president" is only one sense of the word republic, and the subsense of that sense is "a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of government." But that is not the only definition of republic. Republic also has another separate sense, which is "a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law." In other words, a representative democracy. Thus "representative democracy" is a wordy way of writing republic.
Most Western style democracies function as some type of representative democracy. So for example, the UK is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy with representative democracy, the US is a federal presidential republic with representative democracy. France is a semi-presidential democracy with representative democracy.
For scores of years, there has been a heated back-and-forth on whether the nation of America is a republic or a democracy. In this thread, I argue that that is a false argument, for we are a republic, which is a subset of democracy. But what does Joe Biden think? How would he define America? Can we be defined in one word, as a republic or democracy? Apparently, he was asked this question, and this was his response:
You don't have to buy it or not buy it. All you have to do is name ONE that conforms to the definition the poster gave. THAT what you were able to come up with? Three men in a boat? Wonderful! My case is made...
I'll make it simple. You said ... pure democracies are democracies "in which the power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives." That doesn't exist. i.e., there is no country in the world in which that is the form of government. In any case, the whole thing is irrelevant to the argument I DID want to make. We are now clear that "Republic" is NOT a subset of "Democracy".
So now it has to be a county, way to move the goal posts Golem. There does not seem to be a consensus that your case was "made".