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, electoral representation enabled a dynamic, if often fractious, balance between the rule of elites and the social and political democratization of society, with political parties displacing 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 Until relatively recently, these two sources molded what we call, following D. Castiglione & M.E.Warren (unpublished manuscript), the “standard account” of representative democracy.