I was trying to find a term that wouldn't be inflammatory (like "exclusionary") but which accurately described the stance. A republic is contrasted with a direct democracy inasmuch as people vote for representatives, and that's what I was getting at. I'd love a better term, since that one has like twenty meanings and is immediately confusing. Suggestions?
Ah, so it was a semantic quirk. The mainstream term for a democracy that functions through representatives would be, well, "representative democracy", though I'm not sure if the term has enough oumpf. "Exclusive democracy" means something else entirely (think Apartheid South Africa, which was perfectly democratic... if you were White.)
As Miestră has pointed out, election thresholds are par for the course in any representative democracy out there. Even Switzerland, which would be the closest thing to what an American would call a democracy I guess, has these thresholds on the cantonal level. In a 20-seat Real Cosă, you would need 5% of the non-PRESENT vote to get one guaranteed seat. This equals 5.34 votes based on the average voter turnout of 106.9 non-PRESENT votes since the 45th Cosă election. Thanks to rounding though, you would only need roughly 2.5% of the vote (2.67 votes) to get in in most scenarios.
Now, whether a de facto 2.5% treshold is too high or too low is a different topic entirely (and is only tangentially related to the Fleecing Act). Just wanted to put that out there.