Representative democracy as we know it today evolved from two key sources. First, during the twentieth century, the expansion of the franchise transformed liberal, constitutional regimes into mass democracies. Second, when structured through constitutionalism, elec- toral representation enabled a dynamic, if of- ten fractious, balance between the rule of elites and the social and political democra- tization of society, with political parties dis- placing parliaments as the primary loci of representation. Until relatively recently, these two sources molded what we call, following D. Castiglione & M.E. Warren (unpublished manuscript), the “standard account” of repre- sentative democracy.