Let me strongly disagree here. Modern republics like France/USA were explicitly built against democratic ideals which were seen as dangerous "rule of the mob". Also, the executive branch has so much power that it is in fact a monarchic republic where the people at the top are entirely unaccountable both to the people and to the rest of the State apparatus (neither Sarkozy nor Bush spent a single day in prison despite their many well-known crimes against the people).
Finally, since they exist these "democratic republic" have strongly fought off any popular movement. These same republic were endorsing slavery and fought off slaves rebelling, just like they were endorsing women being properties of men and fought off women rebelling, etc... When you dare to protest established power structures, you're faced with an army of robocop psychopaths (recruited for their fascist tendencies) who are grinning about hurting people like us.
A proper democracy requires a few properties: no political parties or elections because every body gets to decide on EVERYTHING (delegating power to a parliament is the INVERSE of democracy), the lower scale can always override decisions from the top because higher-up structures are only there to coordinate not to impose, and people are not bound to a single nation-wide identity (a principle imposed by the nazis in France, which the proto-fascist government of De Gaulle was happy to retain), or to quote from 1981:
`If we look back at the history of the past 40 years, police has hunted in the name of Republican or National order freemasons, communists, jews, resistant fighters, collaborators, Indochine's independance partisans, Algeria's independance partisans, members of the OAS, leftists, terrorists. Just imagine: if that police had done their job right every time, what would be left today in France? Democracy mandates this irreducible minimum that one can forge fake identity papers.`