Democratic institutions
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Since the time of the ancient Greeks, both the theory and the practice of democracy have undergone profound changes, many of which have concerned the prevailing answers to questions 1 through 3 above. Thus, for thousands of years the kind of association in which democracy was practiced, the tribe or the city-state, was small enough to be suitable for some form of democracy by assembly, or “direct democracy.” Much later, beginning in the 18th century, as the typical association became the nation-state or country, direct democracy gave way to representative democracy—a transformation so sweeping that, from the perspective of a citizen of ancient Athens, the governments of gigantic associations such as France or the United States might not have appeared democratic at all. This change in turn entailed a new answer to question 3: Representative democracy would require a set of political institutions radically different from those of all earlier democracies.
Another important change has concerned the prevailing answers to question 2. Until fairly recently, most democratic associations limited the right to participate in government to a minority of the adult population—indeed, sometimes to a very small minority. Beginning in the 20th century, this right was extended to nearly all adults. Accordingly, a contemporary democrat could reasonably argue that Athens, because it excluded so many adults from the dēmos, was not really a democracy—even though the term democracy was invented and first applied in Athens.
Despite these and other important changes, it is possible to identify a considerable number of early political systems that involved some form of “rule by the people,” even if they were not fully democratic by contemporary standards.
Prehistoric forms of democracy
Although it is tempting to assume that democracy was created in one particular place and time—most often identified as Greece about the year 500 bce—evidence suggests that democratic government, in a broad sense, existed in several areas of the world well before the turn of the 5th century.
It is plausible to assume that democracy in one form or another arises naturally in any well-bounded group, such as a tribe, if the group is sufficiently independent of control by outsiders to permit members to run their own affairs and if a substantial number of members, such as tribal elders, consider themselves about equally qualified to participate in decisions about matters of concern to the group as a whole. This assumption has been supported by studies of nonliterate tribal societies, which suggest that democratic government existed among many tribal groups during the thousands of years when human beings survived by hunting and gathering. To these early humans, democracy, such as it was practiced, might well have seemed the most “natural” political system.
When the lengthy period of hunting and gathering came to an end and humans began to settle in fixed communities, primarily for agriculture and trade, the conditions that favour popular participation in government seem to have become rare. Greater inequalities in wealth and military power between communities, together with a marked increase in the typical community’s size and scale, encouraged the spread of hierarchical and authoritarian forms of social organization. As a result, popular governments among settled peoples vanished, to be replaced for thousands of years by governments based on monarchy, despotism, aristocracy, or oligarchy, each of which came to be seen—at least among the dominant members of these societies—as the most natural form of government.
Then, about 500 bce, conditions favourable to democracy reappeared in several places, and a few small groups began to create popular governments. Primitive democracy, one might say, was reinvented in more advanced forms. The most crucial developments occurred in two areas of the Mediterranean, Greece and Rome.
Classical Greece
During the Classical period (corresponding roughly to the 5th and 4th centuries bce), Greece was of course not a country in the modern sense but a collection of several hundred independent city-states, each with its surrounding countryside. In 507 bce, under the leadership of Cleisthenes, the citizens of Athens began to develop a system of popular rule that would last nearly two centuries. To question 1, then, the Greeks responded clearly: The political association most appropriate to democratic government is the polis, or city-state.
Athenian democracy foreshadowed some later democratic practices, even among peoples who knew little or nothing of the Athenian system. Thus the Athenian answer to question 2—Who should constitute the dēmos?—was similar to the answer developed in many newly democratic countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although citizenship in Athens was hereditary, extending to anyone who was born to parents who were themselves Athenian citizens, membership in the dēmos was limited to male citizens 18 years of age or older (until 403, when the minimum age was raised to 20).
Because data is scanty, estimates of the size of the Athenian dēmos must be treated with caution. One scholar has suggested that in the mid-4th century there may have been about 100,000 citizens, 10,000 resident foreigners, or metics, and as many as 150,000 slaves. Among citizens, about 30,000 were males over 18. If these numbers are roughly correct, then the dēmos comprised 10 to 15 percent of the total population.
Regarding question 3—What political institutions are necessary for governing?—the Athenians adopted an answer that would appear independently elsewhere. The heart and centre of their government was the Assembly (Ecclesia), which met almost weekly—40 times a year—on the Pnyx, a hill west of the Acropolis. Decisions were taken by vote, and, as in many later assemblies, voting was by a show of hands. As would also be true in many later democratic systems, the votes of a majority of those present and voting prevailed. Although we have no way of knowing how closely the majority in the Assembly represented the much larger number of eligible citizens who did not attend, given the frequency of meetings and the accessibility of the meeting place, it is unlikely that the Assembly could have long persisted in making markedly unpopular decisions.
The powers of the Assembly were broad, but they were by no means unlimited. The agenda of the Assembly was set by the Council of Five Hundred, which, unlike the Assembly, was composed of representatives chosen by lot from each of 139 small territorial entities, known as demes, created by Cleisthenes in 507. The number of representatives from each deme was roughly proportional to its population. The Council’s use of representatives (though chosen by lot rather than by election) foreshadowed the election of representatives in later democratic systems.
Another important political institution in Athens was the popular courts (dikasteria; see dicastery), described by one scholar as “the most important organ of state, alongside the Assembly,” with “unlimited power to control the Assembly, the Council, the magistrates, and political leaders.” The popular courts were composed of jurors chosen by lot from a pool of citizens over 30 years of age; the pool itself was chosen annually and also by lot. The institution is a further illustration of the extent to which the ordinary citizens of Athens were expected to participate in the political life of the city.
In 411 bce, exploiting the unrest created by Athens’s disastrous and seemingly endless war with Sparta (see Peloponnesian War), a group known as the Four Hundred seized control of Athens and established an oligarchy. Less than a year later, the Four Hundred were overthrown and democracy was fully restored. Nine decades later, in 321, Athens was subjugated by its more powerful neighbour to the north, Macedonia, which introduced property qualifications that effectively excluded many ordinary Athenians from the dēmos. In 146 bce what remained of Athenian democracy was extinguished by the conquering Romans.
The Roman Republic
At about the same time that popular government was introduced in Greece, it also appeared on the Italian Peninsula in the city of Rome. The Romans called their system a rēspūblica, or republic, from the Latin rēs, meaning thing or affair, and pūblicus or pūblica, meaning public—thus, a republic was the thing that belonged to the Roman people, the populus romanus.
Like Athens, Rome was originally a city-state. Although it expanded rapidly by conquest and annexation far beyond its original borders to encompass all the Mediterranean world and much of western Europe, its government remained, in its basic features, that of a moderately large city-state. Indeed, throughout the republican era (until roughly the end of the first century bc), Roman assemblies were held in the very small Forum at the centre of the city.
Who constituted the Roman dēmos? Although Roman citizenship was conferred by birth, it was also granted by naturalization and by manumission of slaves. As the Roman Republic expanded, it conferred citizenship in varying degrees to many of those within its enlarged boundaries. Because Roman assemblies continued to meet in the Forum, however, most citizens who did not live in or near the city itself were unable to participate and were thus effectively excluded from the dēmos. Despite their reputation for practicality and creativity, and notwithstanding many changes in the structure of Roman government over the course of centuries, the Romans never solved this problem. Two millennia later, the solution—electing representatives to a Roman legislature—would seem obvious (see below A democratic dilemma).
As they adapted to the special features of their society, including its rapidly increasing size, the Romans created a political structure so complex and idiosyncratic that later democratic leaders chose not to emulate it. The Romans used not only an extremely powerful Senate but also four assemblies, each called comitia (“assembly”) or concilium (“council”). The Comitia Curiata was composed of 30 curiae, or local groups, drawn from three ancient tribus, or tribes; the Comitia Centuriata consisted of 193 centuries, or military units; the Concilium Plebis was drawn from the ranks of the plebes, or plebeians (common people); and the Comitia Tributa, like the Athenian Assembly, was open to all citizens. In all the assemblies, votes were counted by units (centuries or tribes) rather than by individuals; thus, insofar as a majority prevailed in voting, it would have been a majority of units, not of citizens.
Although they collectively represented all Roman citizens, the assemblies were not sovereign. Throughout the entire period of the republic, the Senate—an institution inherited from the earlier era of the Roman monarchy—continued to exercise great power. Senators were chosen indirectly by the Comitia Centuriata; during the monarchy, they were drawn exclusively from the privileged patrician class, though later, during the republic, members of certain plebeian families were also admitted.
The Italian republics from the 12th century to the Renaissance
“Constitutional oligarchies”
After the western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, the Italian Peninsula broke up into a congeries of smaller political entities. About six centuries later, in northern Italy, some of these entities developed into more or less independent city-states and inaugurated systems of government based on wider—though not fully popular—participation and on the election of leaders for limited periods of time. In this respect, their governments may be viewed as small-scale precursors of later representative systems. Such governments flourished for two centuries or more in a number of cities, including Venice, Florence, Siena, and Pisa.
Drawing on Latin rather than Greek, the Italians called their city-states republics, not democracies. Although membership in the dēmos was at first restricted mainly to the nobility and large landowners, in some republics in the first half of the 13th century groups from lower social and economic classes—such as the newly rich, small merchants and bankers, skilled craftsmen organized in guilds, and foot soldiers commanded by knights—began to demand the right to participate in government at some level. Because they were more numerous than the upper classes and because they threatened (and sometimes carried out) violent uprisings, some of these groups were successful. Even with these additions, however, the dēmos in the republics remained only a tiny fraction of the total population, ranging from 12 percent in 14th-century Bologna to 2 percent or less in 15th- and 16th-century Venice, where admission to the ruling nobility had been permanently closed during the 14th century. Thus, whether judged by the standards of Classical Greece or those of Europe and the United States in the 18th century and later, the Italian republics were not democracies. A more accurate characterization, proposed by the historian Lauro Martines, is “constitutional oligarchies.”
After about the mid-14th century, the conditions that had favoured the existence of independent city-states and wider participation in government—particularly their economic growth and the civic loyalty of their populations—gradually disappeared. Economic decline, corruption, factional disputes, civil wars, and wars with other states led to the weakening of some republican governments and their eventual replacement by authoritarian rulers, whether monarchs, princes, or soldiers.
A democratic dilemma
The Greeks, the Romans, and the leaders of the Italian republics were pioneers in creating popular governments, and their philosophers and commentators exercised enormous influence on later political thought. Yet their political institutions were not emulated by the later founders of democratic governments in the nation-states of northern Europe and North America. As the expansion of Rome had already demonstrated, these institutions were simply not suited to political associations significantly larger than the city-state.
The enormous difference in size between a city-state and a nation-state points to a fundamental dilemma. By limiting the size of a city-state, citizens can in principle, if not always in practice, directly influence the conduct of their government—e.g., by participating in an assembly. But limiting size comes at a cost: important problems—notably defense against larger and more powerful states and the regulation of trade and finance—will remain beyond the capacity of the government to deal with effectively. Alternatively, by increasing the size of the city-state—i.e., by enlarging its geographic area and population—citizens can increase the capacity of the government to deal with important problems, but only at the cost of reducing their opportunities to influence the government directly through assemblies or other means.
Many city-states responded to this dilemma by forming alliances or confederations with other city-states and with larger political associations. But the problem would not finally be solved until the development of representative government, which first appeared in northern Europe in the 18th century.
Toward representative democracy: Europe and North America to the 19th century
Until the 17th century, democratic theorists and political leaders largely ignored the possibility that a legislature might consist neither of the entire body of citizens, as in Greece and Rome, nor of representatives chosen by and from a tiny oligarchy or hereditary aristocracy, as in the Italian republics. An important break in the prevailing orthodoxy occurred during and after the English Civil Wars (1642–51), when the Levelers and other radical followers of Puritanism demanded broader representation in Parliament, expanded powers for Parliament’s lower house, the House of Commons, and universal manhood suffrage (see below England). As with many political innovations, representative government resulted less from philosophical speculation than from a search for practical solutions to a fairly self-evident problem. Nevertheless, the complete assimilation of representation into the theory and practice of democracy was still more than a century away.
Regional developments
Continental Europe
About 800 ce, freemen and nobles in various parts of northern continental Europe began to participate directly in local assemblies, to which were later added regional and national assemblies consisting of representatives, some or all of whom came to be elected. In the mountain valleys of the Alps, such assemblies developed into self-governing cantons, leading eventually to the founding of the Swiss Confederation in the 13th century. By 900, local assemblies of Vikings were meeting in many areas of Scandinavia. Eventually the Vikings realized that to deal with certain larger problems they needed more-inclusive associations, and in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark regional assemblies developed. In 930 Viking descendants in Iceland created the first example of what today would be called a national assembly, legislature, or parliament—the Althing (see thing). In later centuries, representative institutions also were established in the emerging nation-states of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
