In a recent interview and accompanying post, legal scholar Eugene Volokh pushes back against the popular claim that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. He argues that this framing sets up a false choice. Standard dictionary definitions of 'republic' describe a system where citizens vote for representatives, which fits the U.S.; standard definitions of 'democracy' include government by the people either directly or through elected representatives, which also fits. The U.S. is not a direct democracy, but it is a representative democracy, and that is a form of democracy.
Volokh draws on historical evidence to show that the founding generation did not treat the terms as mutually exclusive. He cites John Adams, Noah Webster, St. George Tucker, Thomas Jefferson, James Wilson, and John Marshall using 'democracy' to describe representative government. Even Blackstone, widely read by the Framers, used 'democracy' to include republics like Holland. The Federalist Papers sometimes distinguished the two, but that was not the only usage of the era.
He also notes that the most famous historical republic—Rome—was not representative at all. Roman laws were made by direct citizen assemblies, and the Senate was neither elected nor a legislature. So if the Framers admired the Roman Republic, they did not equate republicanism with representative government. Volokh concludes that the U.S. is both a republic and a democracy, and that claims to the contrary rest on a narrow, ahistorical definition of 'democracy.'