I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of British media recently. I’ve heard/read several times from reliable-seeming sources (e.g. Janan Ganesh, Chris Skidmore, Shami Chakrabarti) that Britain is the oldest continuous democracy in the world. But in an Intelligence Squared debate, Chris Bryant corrects Chakrabarti and says the oldest continuous democracy is actually Iceland.
Which is it then?
The first thing you’d need to do in this debate is to define democracy. Not as easy as it sounds. And whichever definition you use you’ll probably have a different winning candidate for the oldest.
Iceland is often cited as having the oldest parliament, but I’m not so sure about the “continuous” part. Of course, these things are a matter of definition. At what point, precisely, did Britain become a democracy? You could make a case for dates as late as 1928 (when the voting age for women was made the same as that of men).
Yeah, definition will be the hardest thing to really get past here.
Iceland has had a legislative body for ages, since like 1000 AD. However for much of the period 1000-1874 Iceland was under the thumb of the Danish Crown. The Danish monarchs until probably the last 200 years were not constitutional in any sense, and essentially ruled based on whim. Denmark had the right to overrule any legislation Iceland passed, so in essence it was a Democracy in a manner similar to the Roman Empire (in that it maintained a legislative body that lacked real power.)
I don’t really know how I would define democracy. To me, if it’s a representative style democracy, if an unelected monarch has the ability to freely stop legislation and essentially control that legislature I don’t view it as a true democracy.
The English had a legislature in the age of Henry VIII, and if they did not pass laws exactly as he requested, then the representatives would find themselves being executed on trumped up charges. It wasn’t until after the English Civil War I’d say England had a democracy, of course if you’re hung up on the franchise, then you probably have to wait til the latter 18th century or even 19th century to consider the United Kingdom a democracy. (I’m not using England/United Kingdom imprecisely here. Under Henry VIII it was just England, Wales was not given much regard as an entity at the time and Scotland was a different country with a different monarch. In 1604 the crowns unified, but not until 1707 were the two countries unified and the Scottish Parliament and legal system merged.)
A matter of scale is probably important to discuss as well. Several towns have historically been ran more or less democratically and even under authoritarian monarchs the town was ran democratically, albeit not the entire country/state/nation that the town was part of (this gets muddled because modern States didn’t exist that long ago, and in many places cities and towns were deemed “Free Cities” and essentially were only subject to paltry overview from a monarch sometimes many weeks ride removed.)
If you exclude countries with what we’d now consider ‘limited democratic practice’ then most ‘democratic’ countries really weren’t until relatively recently, having denied full participation to females, minority groups, or both. In particular, if you demand that any country you consider democratic must allow women to vote, then New Zealand is the oldest and it only dates to 1893.
You also need to look at theory versus practice. North Korea, for example, is not democratic even though it claims to be a republic, and parts of the American South under Jim Crow were only democratic if you happened to have the right skin color. Countries with slavery are only questionably democratic, which may well exclude a number of potential democracies prior to the 19th century. Finally, there are countries where it’s honestly just plain debatable: Single-party states are generally not democratic, but what about Mexico under the dominion of the PRI prior to the 1990s? It isn’t always easy to tell how democratic a country actually is.
The Most Serene Republic of San Marino (its full name), a 24 square mile enclave in the Italian Alps is said to be the oldest republic, dating from 3 September, 301 a.d. Officially a parliamentary representative democratic republic. It’s present constitution dates from 1600, also making it the oldest still in effect. San Marino is not part of the EU, and is one of the European micro-states, along with The Vatican, Luxemburg, Lichtenstien, Andorra, Monaco and Malta.
SS
Only the parliament, not the legal system.
Addressing the continuity aspect: I would suggest that a requirement for the democracy to be considered continuous is that the government reliably changes in response to the people’s decision. If the previous government hangs on in defiance of the election result, if the election result is overruled (e.g. by a court, or a monarch) or if the parliament is suspended, this would be a break in continuity.
So what country had the earliest universal suffrage? According to wikipedia, New Zealand was the first country to have universal womans sufferage, and they also allowed Maori to vote at the time so I don’t think there were any racial barriers to voting.
So if we define democracy as universal suffrage, then I’ll go with New Zealand as the earliest still extant proponent, in 1893
San Marino was a fascist single-party state for 20 years in the 20th century.
Caution in applying your criteria here is needed, however, or you end up with results like “Canada has been a democracy for about sixteen months now.” 
Iceland’s Althing is the oldest parliament in the world, dating from 930 AD, but it was suspended from 1799-1845. The Isle of Man’s Tynwald is the oldest continuous such assembly, having met every year since 979 AD.
I think you have to include women’s suffrage and civil rights.
New Zealand wins.
Ignoring nitpicks about terminology like the ones Polycarp alluded to, what do you think about civil wars where there were elections but the side in rebellion didn’t get to participate in them? For example, Lincoln was re-elected in a free and fair election in 1864 but, obviously, the states then in a state of rebellion against the government didn’t have a say in that. Is that a break in legitimacy if the states that weren’t rebelling still held fair elections?
The Tynwald has a similar problem to the Althing, though. In that at some points in its history it didn’t wield any actual legislative power over its little island, despite actually meeting continuously.
San Marino looks like it could be a good bet. Prior to the late mid-1200s it appears it was (despite its status as an official Republic) ran by a council of powerful families–the Arengo (thus an oligarchy, not a democracy.) However since 1243 the “Grand and General Council” which was elected by the people appears to have run the country.
However San Marino suffers from the theory versus practice debate. During the early 20th century powerful land owners made the Grand and General Council more and more oligarchical, and this culminated in the San Marino Fascist Party running the country for twenty years, so it becomes questionable if it was a true democratic state during that time.
I would not immediately discount a state just because of franchise issues, I think you can have a functioning democracy without a totally inclusive franchise. To me it’s about decision making, where is the primary decision making power, in the hands of unelected powers or in the hands of powers beholden to the people? At some point if the franchise is super small, like 1% of the population, or just a small cabal of potentates, that is an oligarchy and at that point the franchise issue would disqualify the country from being a democracy.
However I think that as long as the primary decision making power of a country is beholden to the people, even if just say, 25% of them, that’s enough of a benchmark to call that country a democracy.
Yeah but that wikipedia page says:
So it wasn’t a parliament for 400 years before 1799
What about the Vatican/Papal States then? They’ve been electing their head of state for many centuries too, how long have they been a state? Of course, they have a very restrictive electorate.
Not remotely a democracy.
No “they” haven’t, if by “they” you mean the citizens of the state. The pope is elected by the college of cardinals, the vast majority of which aren’t citizens, nor even resident in the Vatican.
Since 1929 for the Vatican City in its current political form.
There’s no contradiction there as one does not imply the other. There are now and have historically been plenty of non-democratic republics, and also plenty of democratic non-republics.
The definition of Republic is pretty muddy in any case. In some cases it just refers to a state that isn’t a monarchy, and even then “monarchy” is not that easy to define (like de facto “hereditary”/“god-given” heads of states like North Korea or classical Rome). In other definitions, it’s the primacy of law that’s most important, in which case many “technical” current monarchies with either explicit or de facto limited crown powers apply, like the Netherlands and the UK.
The same is probably true of “democracy” too, though democracy has more of a direct implication IMHO of political power by the “citizens”.