Modern Democracy

Modern democracy is a mixture of the germanic ierarchical tribal "government" (surely an exaggeration) and the Roman Republic - and the product of a few centuries of evolution. It's name is that of the Athenian Democracy, but in reality there is extremely very little in the current representative oligarchies that reminds the wholesale democracy of the Ancient Greeks. 

That's rather innacurate, Sparta was never popular among clacissists, irregardles of the timeframe: Sparta has no literature, no philosophy, no drama, no historians, no nothing. How could clacisstists love the unsophisticated Spartans and hold them higher to the refined, well-versed, extremely sophisticated Athenians who invented philosophy, excelled in the fine arts, layed the foundations for the evolution of science, not to mention that they invented democracy - the actual democracy, not the travesty that bears its name nowadays.

So, no, the scholars throughout the ages, at least after the 15th century when they got freed from the boundaries of the medieval ignorance, looked back to the Athenians for inspiration.

But since they belonged exclusively to the elites of their times, that made them to overlook the most fundamental prerequisite for an actual democracy: the representation and active participation of all the free citizen in the common affairs. Their compromise - and that only after centuries of struggle by the "lower classes" - was to allow them a vote. And the active citizen of the 5th century Athens, became the sheepish voter of the 20th century western world.

And they call that democracy...

This is still highly innacurate. The social system of Sparta was a tad bit above tribal organization, it was extremely primitive compared to the Athenian one, they had a horrendous economic model, in humanitarian terms they were one of the most cruel societies ever (wasting the unwanted infants, hunting down helots for sport, analogy one free citizen for 10 or 12 helots, the whole town a great military camp etc. etc.) so nobody, save some avid militarists and military leaders (and maybe the KKK and Adolf H. later on) could or would seek inspiration in the ways of the Spartans.