According to a 2025 article by Mark Carthwright, he states that Athenian democracy was the earliest form of democracy that started in Athens in 500 BCE and was used until 400 BCE. Athenian democracy wasn't perfect as they had nothing to go off of, being the first democracy the world had seen. In this form of government,  men who were citizens had the same rights, but women and enslaved people were excluded from these same rights as they were not considered citizens (Cartwright, 2025). It allowed for the citizens to control every aspect of the political system and government. The people were able to vote on who they wanted to lead and could change it if they wanted to (Cartwright, 2025). A similar form of government is direct democracy. According to a 2026 article by Theo Schiller states that in direct democracy the citizens get to vote directly on what they want to happen in the political system. This system was commonly used a long time ago; however, it was much less effective due to countries being underdeveloped and unable to effectively count votes (Schiller, 2026). Direct democracy was used to vote in some of the first amendments in the United States Constitution. This same article states that direct democracy was one of the earliest forms of democracy (Schiller, 2026).

In a representative democracy, the citizens vote officials into office to represent their beliefs and views. Some Representative democracies are also referred to as republics like the Roman Republic (Raikar, 2026). The earliest form of representative democracy was in the Roman Empire in 509 BCE, which is where the name Republic came from as the Roman Empire is often called the Roman Republic. Almost all democracies we see today use a representative democracy format in their government (Raikar, 2026). A similar form of democracy follows a parliamentary system, Where the executive and legislative branches work very closely together. They elect the leader to represent them (EBSCO, n.d.). That leader of the government is referred to as the Prime Minister. The main countries who use this system of government are the United Kingdom, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Canada, India, and Germany. Each of these countries have similar governments and all use the parliamentary system (EBSCO, n.d.).