Democracy

• 1. Introduction

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  Democracy means, in its Greek roots, the joining of two words: demos, meaning the common people, and kratos, meaning force or might. Put together, the term meant rule of the people. It appeared in the 5th century BC in Greek city-states, most famously in Classical Athens. There it stood in contrast to aristocracy, which meant rule of an elite. From that single word a vast and contested idea has grown. Scholars studying the English language identified 2,234 separate adjectives used to describe democracy. There is still no agreed precise definition. Some hold to a minimalist view, where rulers are simply chosen through competitive elections. Others demand far more: guarantees of civil liberties, human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and protection for minorities. How did a rare and fragile form of government become the system that even authoritarian states now pretend to be? Why does a majority of the world's population still not live under one? And what makes a vote count equally when, for most of history, only an elite class was allowed to cast one at all?

• 2. Athens And The Lot

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  Cleisthenes is called the father of Athenian democracy. Under him, what is generally held as the first example of this kind of government was established in Athens in 508-507 BC. The first attested use of the word democracy comes from prose works of the 430s BC, including Herodotus' Histories. Yet the word was older by decades. Two Athenians born in the 470s were named Democrates, a new political name likely given in support of the cause during constitutional debates. The playwright Aeschylus alludes to it in The Suppliants, staged around 463 BC, with the phrase the demos's ruling hand.

  Athenian democracy was direct, and it carried two distinguishing features. Ordinary citizens were chosen at random to fill administrative and judicial offices, and a legislative assembly was open to every Athenian citizen. All eligible citizens could speak and vote in that assembly, which set the laws of the city-state. The reach of citizenship, however, was narrow. It excluded women, slaves, foreigners, and youths below the age of military service. Effectively only 1 in 4 residents of Athens qualified. Owning land was not required, but the benefit of citizenship was tied to the obligation to fight in war campaigns. Through the assembly, the boule, and the courts, a large share of citizens stayed involved in public business almost constantly. The lot system, where governmental tasks fall to citizens picked by lottery, survives today in jury selection and citizens' assemblies.

• 3. Other Cradles

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  Range voting appeared in Sparta as early as 700 BC. The Spartan ecclesia gathered once a month, open to every male citizen at least 20 years old. Spartans elected leaders by shouting, with the vote decided by how loudly the crowd roared. Aristotle called this childish compared with the stone voting ballots used in Athens. Sparta kept it for its simplicity and to prevent the vote buying and cheating it associated with early elections.

  The overthrow of the Roman Kingdom produced a system with a democratic element in many popular assemblies. Yet only a fraction of Romans were citizens with votes for magistrates, and a system of weighted voting gave the powerful more say. Most high officials, including the Senate, came from a few wealthy and noble families.

  Vaishali, capital of the Vajjika League in India, is considered one of the first examples of a republic, around the 6th century BC. Far across the world, the Iroquois in the Americas developed a democratic society between 1450 and 1660, and possibly as early as 1142. That system continues to the present day and is the world's oldest standing representative democracy.

• 4. Assemblies Of The Middle Ages

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  In Scandinavia, deliberative bodies known as things were made up of freemen and presided over by a lawspeaker. Their variants included the Althing in Iceland and the Logting in the Faroe Islands. The veche of Eastern Europe served a similar role. Within the Roman Catholic Church, the pope has been elected by a papal conclave of cardinals since 1059.

  The Cortes of Leon, established by Alfonso IX in 1188, was the first documented parliamentary body in Europe, with authority over taxation, foreign affairs, and legislation. The Republic of Ragusa, founded in 1358 around Dubrovnik, gave voting rights to its male aristocracy alone. In the Republic of Florence, established in 1115, the Signoria was chosen by sortition. The Kouroukan Fouga divided the Mali Empire into ruling clans represented at a great assembly called the Gbara, though the charter made Mali closer to a constitutional monarchy than a republic.

  Magna Carta in 1215 wrote restrictions on the power of kings, protecting certain rights and implicitly supporting the English writ of habeas corpus. Simon de Montfort's Parliament of 1265 was England's first representative national assembly. Political scientist David Stasavage links Europe's later democratization to how the Roman Empire collapsed. Germanic tribes conquered Roman territory in small fragmented groups, leaving weak rulers who needed the consent of the governed to ward off foreign threats.

• 5. Hobbes And Locke

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  Thomas Hobbes was the first philosopher to set out a detailed social contract theory. Writing in Leviathan in 1651, he argued that people in the state of nature led lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, locked in a war of all against all. To escape this, Hobbes reasoned, individuals ceded their rights to a strong authoritarian power. He advocated for an absolute monarchy as the best form of government.

  John Locke, the philosopher and physician, offered a sharply different reading in his Two Treatises of Government in 1689. Locke held that all individuals possessed inalienable rights to life, liberty, and estate, and that people form a state to defend those rights. Property rights mattered most to him, and he deemed their protection a government's primary purpose. A government was legitimate only if it held the consent of the governed, and citizens had the right to revolt against one that became tyrannical. Though little read in his lifetime, Locke's works are considered the founding documents of liberal thought. They profoundly influenced the leaders of the American Revolution and later the French Revolution.

• 6. Widening The Vote

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  Property qualifications kept the vote narrow on both sides of the Atlantic. The first Parliament of Great Britain was established in 1707, yet in 1780 only male property owners could vote, amounting to 3% of the population. Ignatius Sancho, the first known British person of African heritage to vote in a general election, cast ballots in 1774 and 1780. The Corsican Republic of 1755 wrote a democratic constitution that let all men and women above 25 vote, the first based on Enlightenment principles and including female suffrage.

  The United States Constitution of 1787 is the oldest surviving, still active, codified governmental constitution. It left suffrage to the states, which generally limited it to white male property owners. At the first Presidential election in 1789, about 6% of the population was eligible to vote. The 1828 presidential election was the first in which non-property-holding white males could vote in most states, and turnout reached about 80% of adult white males by 1840. North Carolina was the last state to abolish property qualification, in 1856.

  In 1860, the United States census counted four million enslaved people. Three constitutional amendments followed the Civil War: the 13th in 1865 ended slavery, the 14th in 1869 gave black people citizenship, and the 15th in 1870 gave black males a nominal right to vote. Full enfranchisement was not secured until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1893, the self-governing colony of New Zealand became the first country in the world to establish active universal suffrage by recognizing women's right to vote.

• 7. Waves And Reversals

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  Transitions to liberal democracy have arrived in successive waves, driven by wars, revolutions, decolonisation, and economic and religious circumstances. World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires created new nation-states across Europe, most nominally democratic. The Great Depression then brought disenchantment, and most of Europe, Latin America, and Asia turned to strong-man rule. Fascism rose in Nazi Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

  World War II reversed the trend in Western Europe, while Eastern Europe fell into the Soviet-dominated bloc. India emerged as the world's largest democracy and continues to be so. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mandated that the will of the people be the basis of government authority, expressed in periodic and genuine elections by universal and equal suffrage. A third wave followed: Portugal, Spain, and South American military dictatorships returned to civilian rule in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1986, after the toppling of a prominent dictatorship, a democratic state emerged in the Philippines with the rise of Corazon Aquino, later known as the mother of Asian democracy.

  According to Freedom House, electoral democracies grew from 40 in 1972 to 123 in 2007. In that same year the United Nations declared the 15th of September the International Day of Democracy. The direction has since turned. Starting in 2005, declines in political rights and civil liberties outnumbered improvements for 17 consecutive years. In Poland the President appointed 27 new Supreme Court judges over objections from the European Commission, and in Turkey thousands of judges were removed after a failed coup attempt.

• 8. Many Shapes Of Rule

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  Robert A. Dahl argued that the fundamental democratic principle is that each person in a political community is entitled to equal consideration of their interests in binding collective decisions. He used the term polyarchy, rule by many, for societies with the institutions that lead toward such democracy. Deliberative democracy takes a different view: a decision is legitimate only if preceded by authentic deliberation, free from the distortions of unequal political power. A recent OECD report identified citizens assemblies as an increasingly popular way to involve people in government decisions.

  Direct democracy still operates today in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell Innerrhoden and Glarus, the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities, and the Kurdish cantons of Rojava. The Swiss confederation is a semi-direct democracy. Between January 1995 and June 2005, Swiss citizens voted 31 times to answer 103 questions, while French citizens took part in only two referendums over the same period. In New England, Vermont towns hold annual March meetings to elect officers and vote on budgets, blending local direct democracy with a representative state.

  As Benjamin Franklin left the hall after writing the US Constitution, Elizabeth Willing Powel asked him whether they had got a republic or a monarchy. He replied, A republic, if you can keep it. A 2019 study by Daron Acemoglu and others estimated that countries switching from authoritarian to democratic rule had on average a 20% higher GDP after 25 years, drawn from 122 transitions to democracy occurring between 1960 and 2010.