Representative democracy
This is the type of democracy that you would be most familiar with. Virtually all democracies across the world are representative.
What this means is that the people vote for candidates (or sometimes political parties directly) that represent their views at free and fair elections.
The winners of elections make decisions on behalf of the people.
For an overview of the Australian political system, we recommend:
NewVote and Representative democracy
NewVote believes there are too many decisions to be made for representative democracy to be replaced. Even in the case of the best modern example of direct democracy on a national level, Switzerland, only 5% of laws are subject to direct democratic involvement.
To be clear we do not propose an end to representative democracy - far from it - we wish to enhance representative democracy by increasing direct and deliberative democracy.
By increasing the use of direct and deliberative democracy, we can make representative democracy more representative (as it provides a way for representatives to know how the public are thinking and allows the public to direct their representatives).