  National democracy is typically institutionalized as a representative system that involves competitive elections and a publicly determined rule of law. Although there are many different national voting systems (majority rule, proportional representation, etc.), the basic idea is that each enfranchised citizen of the state has one vote at the ballot box and can thus freely choose their preferred representative, leader, or party. Through the American and French Revolutions, and the ‘Third Wave of Democratization’ (where representative democracy spread to Latin America, the Asia-Pacific, and the Eastern bloc), the notion that the nation-state is the natural container for democracy became dominant (Huntington 1991). Over time, then, ‘the people’ in democracy has been assumed to correspond neatly with the citizenry of each particular nation-state.