Origins and evolution of Democracy

Politics & Elections
1

Ruminating on a similar thread about erosion of democracy. That thread seems to tacitly assume that in the past there was a more ‘pure’ or ideal form of democracy (forgive me if I am misrepresenting or oversimplifying somewhat).

From a historical perspective though, one has to wonder how any kind of universal suffrage Democracy arose in the first place? As far as I know, in ancient Greece and Rome, voting privilages were restricted to a relatively small subset of the population; basically the wealthy.

And the same can be said for Europe from the Middle ages until… when? 18th century, at least, I guess?

So what forces prompted a relatively small privileged class to open up any form of political power to a wider range of people? From a realistic (or cynical?) view of human nature, one would think that this was not in their best interests?

2

Iceland started with direct democracy circa 900 ad.

Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Politics_of_Iceland
](Politics of Iceland - Wikipedia)

Iceland is arguably the world’s oldest assembly democracy, and has been rated as a “full democracy” in 2021.
Iceland’s democratic history is unique, marked by the early establishment of the [Althingi], a form of parliament, in 930 AD, which is considered one of the oldest in the world. While Iceland was under foreign rule for centuries, the Althingi was revived in 1845 and gradually gained more power. Iceland achieved home rule in 1904, and full self-government in 1918, before declaring independence as a republic in 1944

Neat to stand there and think of the early citizens trekking in from the various parts of the island to make democratic decisions.
It’s a lovely island to visit - even in winter but has been stresseed with over tourism. We went twice.

3

Politicians expanded the vote to gain support or avoid unrest. Enlightenment thinking and liberal philosophy emphasized individual rights and the idea that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed. The French Revolution and later uprisings across Europe made British elites wary. Expanding democracy to the commons wasn’t just about fairness—it was about survival. Adapting to the demands of a changing society was better than resisting them.

4

In Athens, every citizen who attended the assembly received the misthos, payment, precisely to ensure it wasn’t only the wealthy who participated. Of course to vote in Athens you had to be both a citizen and a man, but it wasn’t only the wealthy who had a say in things or even be elected to office.

5

That’s a bit of a circular argument though, isn’t it? If you are already a member of the small privileged and enfranchised class, you shouldn’t need to ‘drum up’ support from outside? You would spend your efforts cultivating existing voters to build up your faction.

6

The idea that restricting political participation to those people most likely to value the system as a whole isn’t really a hard one to grasp. Juvenal was griping about how the common people were easily distracted with bread and circuses as early as the late 1st century BCE with the idea that both were ways for the politically powerful to bribe the common people.

That, and it really took until about 1789 for the idea of the common man to be able to vote to take hold, and even then it was via a violent revolution. The UK, for example didn’t allow non landowners to vote fully until 1918.

7

In a way though this just pushes the original question further back in time.

How did the Athenian democratic system arise?

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I’ve been there. Seems like you are on the moon. And yeah, same thoughts. Very cool. And calling it the Althing (all thing to my ears) is just great. (And in the pic below that is also where two continental tectonic plates meet…Europe and America).

9

Well, that’s exactly my point.
I am genuinely puzzled about how (more or less) universal suffrage democracies came to exist at all.

Today there is a hopeful (or one might say naive) assumption that this is in some way a ‘natural’ state of affairs. But historically it’s unusual, and I’m trying to understand the social forces (probably economic?) which caused it to arise.

Of course personally I’m very to happy to live in a modern western democracy! But I suspect it is a fragile system.

10

Discussions always have to deal with the definitions of “universal” and “democracy.”

No culture I’m aware of has every had true universal voting rights for the simple reason that children are not allowed to vote. Reasonable as this seems, the age cutoff has been controversial throughout time. The UK is currently looking to lower the requirement to 16 amidst a backlash, e.g. Non-citizens do not have voting rights in most countries. Even in Iceland, residency enables voting in municipal elections but not federal ones. In the U.S. voting was gradually increased from white male owners of property over a certain value to all white male property owners to all white male citizens to all male citizens to all citizens to all citizens 18 and over who aren’t convicted felons. At what point did it become “universal”? Is is now?

“Democracy” is far harder to pin down. Indigenous populations of small groups often had full participation by adults and required complete consensus before taking serious actions. They did not, however, vote in any formal sense and were the complete opposite of a secret ballot as all discussions were presented openly to the group.

The Greeks are often given as originators of direct democracy as all eligible voters decided legislation. In fact, the day-to-day running of the government was more nuanced than that, with sub-groups organizing the open discussions.

There was in Athens (and also Elis, Tegea, and Thasos) a smaller body, the boulē, which decided or prioritised the topics which were discussed in the assembly. In addition, in times of crisis and war, this body could also take decisions without the assembly meeting. The boulē or council was composed of 500 citizens who were chosen by lot and who served for one year with the limitation that they could serve no more than two non-consecutive years. The boulē represented the 139 districts of Attica and acted as a kind of executive committee of the assembly. It was this body which supervised any administrative committees and officials on behalf of the assembly.

Then there was also an executive committee of the boulē which consisted of one tribe of the ten which participated in the boulē (i.e., 50 citizens, known as prytaneis) elected on a rotation basis, so each tribe composed the executive once each year. This executive of the executive had a chairman (epistates) who was chosen by lot each day. The 50-man prytany met in the building known as the Bouleuterion in the Athenian agora and safe-guarded the sacred treasuries.

Athens was at least on the borderline between direct and representative democracy, and the Roman republic took that farther and became the inspiration for most future western assemblies, including the U.S. That’s why a segment today insists on denying the word “democracy” to America and prefers “republic,” as if the terms have not become synonymous in virtually all modern usage.

Clamping down on a single definition is hopeless; countless books have wrangled with the words leading only to countless more objecting with the conclusions. We’re not going to do it here. Posters should try to give some form to these meaning clouds if they advocate one place or another.

I’ll try to come back and give a vary concise 10,000 words on the evolution of social forces.

11

No that’s not the case. Both Greece and Rome large electorates. They didn’t have universal suffrage (slaves and women were excluded) but most of the male free population were eligible to vote in the peoples assemblies in both Greece and Rome. In the Roman Republic that was complicated by the fact the peoples assemblies were only part of the Republican government (the other being the Senate which absolutely was restricted to only ultra rich aristocrats).

The Roman peoples assemblies did have actual power (including the ability to propose and veto legislation). Rome was never a representative democracy in the modern sense, but at their height in the late Republic the people assemblies represented a massive, genuinely Democratic (small ‘d’) institution that was unmatched for many centuries after the fall of the Republic. I’m guessing for sheer size they are unmatched until the early modern English parliament?

12

Well, like most evolution, I expect it involved a lot of deaths.

But seriously, there are so many factors involved, you could spend years investigating this. Major upheavals like the Black Death were a factor. When a huge number of the peasants have died, those that remain are more valuable, and sometimes start thinking they should have more of a say in how their lives are arranged. And technology. When you have to spend your whole day working your ass off to grow crops, you don’t have time for much more. But create a few labor-saving devices, and suddenly, more people have more time to start taking an interest in things.

And also scales. We didn’t start with national-level democracies with millions of voters, we started with a few towns. According to Wikipedia on ancient Athens, the population in 5th century BC was ~250,000, with men with civil rights being about ~30,000. It’s a lot easier to have democracy on that scale.

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Iceland
Google Photos

You can walk the rift and some parts jump continent to continent

click on it
Google Photos

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The fundamental principle of a democratic system is that the government derives its legitimacy from the people. This can start out in actuality as the “people” being a small minority of the population. But the electorate expands as new segments of the population are recognized as people and the fundamental principle is retroactively applied to them.

15

I wasn’t really trying to go into the origins of Athenian democracy. In the interest of fighting ignorance, I just wanted to point out that participation in democracy wasn’t limited to the wealthy of Athens. But it was limited to free male citizens, so about 1/3rd of the population.

As far as origins go, it’s a bit easy with Athens because we can start with Solon’s reforms in the 5th century BC. Greece had been ruled by archons, like Solon, with a council of magistrates made up of former archons. Solon did a few things like divide citizens into groups based on how much money they had and expanding the number of people who could participate in government. He didn’t do this out of the kindness of his heart, it was a response to growing internal tension and either something had to change or Athens would eventually tear itself apart.

16

Which is why the Roman Republic was special IMO. Not the Senate which was not remotely unique, either before or after

But at its height in the late Republic the Roman Popular Assemblies represented, in theory at least, most of Italy (after the social war). That was a “national-level” (albeit nations didn’t exist yet in the modern sense) democratic system (again unlike a modern representative democracy, but a genuine representative system with widespread suffrage and actual power).

Admittedly the fact it was so large and unwieldy for the communication systems of the day (and strongly opposed by the optimates who wanted to keep the Senate, and the aristocrat elites, in charge of everything) led directly to the collapse of the Republic shortly afterwards. But while it last it was a unique institution.

After the collapse of the Republic the popular assemblies didn’t even continue in name only AFAIK (unlike the Senate which continued as a gentlemen’s club for rich aristocrats with no real power)

17

Agree.

Continuing from there …

Often the motivating factor for the current elite to widen the definition of “voter” to include more people was that same much larger group of not-yet voters saying “Include us or we’ll simply kill all you elite people who’re in our way. We will have power; we can do that either with you or after you. Your choice.”

18

Ha Ha, but sadly true.

Further back even, we presumably existed in tribes, perhaps like chimpanzees. We don’t have any historical records from those times, but it does rather seem that there was usually a ‘Boss guy’ of some sort. Other animals like elephants perhaps have a ‘Boss Matriarch’, but for better or worse we are a kind of ape.

As groups got bigger, the ‘boss guy’ became the King or Khan; and it seems that some kind of hierarchical power structure has been the norm for most of recorded history.

But that has only been accepted in a few places and times. Usually the King ruled by force, with perhaps a nod to being The God’s representative on Earth as an excuse?

As I’ve said, I am still trying to understand how (at least so-called) representative democracies arose at all, since they would seem to run counter to the interests of an established elite ruling class.

I will guess that the forces must have been basically economic, perhaps related to the rise of a mercantile and industrial middle class?

19

In as few words as possible: The elites feared the mob.

Others have touched on aspects above, but I’ll try to fill in some connections to today.

The Roman Republic fits my needs as a starting place. Rome was a uniquely large city in the western world BCE and had unique problems. Especially with food. Most of the population of what we now call Italy were farmers (or fishers). They grew the food, transported the food, distributed the food to households, cooked the food. Any disruption of this cycle brought starvation. Farming was a prestigious occupation. Most Senators were rich from large farms. Soldiers were rewarded with farms of their own in conquered provinces. They had power and knew it.

Multiply this by every other task necessary to keep a large city functioning. Elites might have supervised but the city was run literally by hand, and those hands belonged to the people who outnumbered the elites at least 100-1. Politicians who could get organized backing from them got elected as Tribune of the Plebs and had enormous power, up to vetoing Senate resolutions.

Such power depended both on elections and freemen owning their own land and businesses. History didn’t continue that way. Rome’s demise left Europe with a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of little fiefs, lands owned by a hierarchy of lords who controlled the peasants and their food and movement. They owned their own goons, um, knights, also looking back to Rome, which did not have a modern-style police force, although the elites had their private forces. Organizing peasants was extremely difficult and the many revolts were brutally put down.

The mob is now associated with the French Revolution, but all these earlier examples are evidence that the vastly outnumbered elites used brutality and lack of alternatives as control measures.

Enter America. In the eyes of white Europeans America was unowned, free for the taking, providing unlimited farmland that hadn’t been cut into tinier and tinier pieces. True, the colonies were given patents by the Kings that gave the governors ownership, but these were first ignored by people willing to go into the backwoods and then swept away by the Revolution. (Soldiers were promised land if they won and some revolted because the promises weren’t kept.)

The Founders were terrified of the mob. The Constitution shows that they really wanted the elites - educated, wealthy, and washed - to control the masses. They assumed that because the colonies had mostly worked that way the country would continue to have the best and brightest run things.

Enforcing that proved impossible. Elites owned land - Washington put all his money into distant land ownership and Jefferson was constantly in deep debt - but even plantations were a tiny fraction of a million square miles. The common people kept multiplying and owning land and other properties and businesses and had means to organize through political parties, the anathema of the Founders. Every small town had elected officials and town halls and public participation and that quickly spread into state government. Federal government fell to the mob. The backlash was that the wealthy found ways to took over governments, but they did so at least quasi-legally to produce the oligarchy we still call democracy today.

European countries have many histories but some variation of the common people becoming sufficiently wealthy and organized to overthrow the nobility can be found all over.

Sorry. 600 words. Couldn’t help myself.

20

So in the long run, it is probably basically economics. Subsistence farmers who spend every waking hour working to try not to starve are not going to have any time to revolt against a few rich buggers with swords and bullyboys who come by from time to time and steal stuff from them.

There has to be at least a surplus to give time for thought. Still, even then the farmers are probably not going to spontaneously band together and revolt… it probably needs the development of a middle class.