Scott Huddleston, San Antonio Express-News, 17 June 2021 States or territories have repeatedly pushed for independence-Vermont formally joined the Union in 1791, after spending fourteen years as an independent republic. Sean Wilentz, The New York Review of Books, 19 June 2021 Texas legalized slavery as an independent republic in 1836, and Texans later voted 46,153 to 14,747 in favor of secession in 1861. 2021 Both take up the array of political and social transformations that shaped the nation’s growth from an aspiring republic hugging the eastern seaboard to a boisterous, even bellicose capitalist democracy that spanned the North American continent. 2021 After Texas seceded from Mexico in 1836, Mirabeau Lamar, who presided over the independent republic in 1838, reversed an appeasement policy toward Native Americans enacted by his predecessor, Sam Houston. 2022 In contrast, Barbados, another Caribbean island, became an independent republic last month, officially severing ties with the British monarchy - and renewing calls for reparations from Britain.
Recent Examples on the Web The father of the republic that replaced it was Sun Yat-sen, a Christian who had spent many years exiled in the United States, Europe, and Japan. So if someone asks you if the United States is a democracy or a republic, you may safely answer the question with either “both” or “it depends.”
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However, both democracy and republic have more than a single meaning, and one of the definitions we provide for democracy closely resembles the definition of republic given above: "a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections." People who follow this line of reasoning hold that the United States is more properly described as a republic, using the following definition of that word: "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." Some people assert that a country calling itself a democracy must be engaged in direct (or pure) democracy, in which the people of a state or region vote directly for policies, rather than elect representatives who make choices on their behalf.
That question is “is the United States a democracy or a republic?” The answer to this, as with so many other questions about meaning, may be phrased as some form of “it depends.” One of the most commonly encountered questions about the word democracy has nothing to do with its spelling or pronunciation, and isn’t even directly related to the meaning of the word itself. Is the United States a democracy or a republic?