text: what is the difference between a democracy and a republic?   a republic is a kind of democracy. democracy is a wide-reaching term referring to basically any system of government in which the people play a significant part in the running of the government. a pure democracy is one in which every citizen votes on every decision, which is fairly impratical with the size of today's nations. a republic is a representative democracy, meaning people vote for people (president, representative, senator, etc.) to go represent them while actually running the country. this allows people to not spend all of their time voting on every bill, but still gives them control over how it is run, since most elected officials want to be reelected, and also avoid being recalled.