ABSTRACT
Historically considered, liberal representative democracy is a confluence of three quite distinct political flowing from different sources which first appeared in reverse order: the earliest was the democracy of the ancient polis; next came the representative form of government of the medieval diets or estates general or parliament; and, finally, the liberalism which developed in Calvinist states following the Reformation. During the nineteenth century politics in America took a different course to that in British or Continental countries. The negative factors that shaped the character of American representative democracy in contradistinction to the others were the absence of an extensive professional civil service bureaucracy and the lack of bureaucratically organized party-machines. Multiplism emerges out of the predicament of already existing multiple forms of representation; out of the very midst of the confusions of Pluralism, neo-corporatism, party machine electioneering, plebiscitarianism and participationism in single issue movements.
