Editorial

摘要

Direct democracy is a form of democracy that was practiced in ancient times in Polis (or City-States) in Greece known as “Pure Democracy”. It differs from the “Representative Democracy”, the major form of modern society democracies. The main difference between the two is that the former has no “representatives”, while the latter has them elected by citizens. As electing representatives has been astronomically expensive and burdensome to national budgets, people have been hoping to eliminate representatives in systems as appropriate. More than anything else, people have been hoping to participate in deliberating political issues directly by themselves, should the conditions are met, such as time and the relevant systems are available. If possible, they can catch the two birds at one stone by participating in the political issues directly as well as minimizing the election costs.