Topic summary
Representative Government
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Representative democracy.
Early constitutional development
In Britain, representative government grew in the late thirteenth century. The Oxford Parliament of 1258 stripped the king of unlimited authority, and Simon de Montfort's Parliament of 1265 included both noblemen and citizens from each town. Later, in the 17th century, the Parliament of England implemented some of the ideas and systems of liberal democracy, culminating in the Glorious Revolution and passage of the Bill of Rights 1689. Widening of the voting franchise took place through a series of Reform Acts in the 19th and 20th centuries.