DEMOCRACY REVISITED: THE ANCIENTS AND THE MODERNS

This article deals with the importance of collective power and value consensus among elites for medieval polity formation by analyzing electoral monarchies. State formation theory focuses on the monopoly of legitimate armed force and has pushed notions of consensus and collective power into the background. This article questions material and coercive theories of state formation and emphasizes polity formation through theories of power as collaboration and as the ability to act in concert. Royal elections had two major functions: (1) A transfer of authority that created trust and concord among elite groups and (2) constructing ideas of an abstract ‘realm’ that political actors represented and to which they were accountable in an ideational and symbolic sense. The article focuses on the Holy Roman Empire and Sweden.

2012

Despite being the probably most common form of political rule in history, monarchies remain understudied in terms of how constitutional arrangements affect leader survival. In this paper, we examine if the principle of succession mattered for the risk that a king or queen would be deposed in Europe, 1000-1800. Specifically, we draw on the work of Gordon Tullock, who argued that hereditary succession orders increases the chances of survival for dictators. The proposed reason is that a crown prince constitutes a natural focal point for the ruling elite, which makes it easier for them to avoid costly power struggles. Furthermore, crown princes are generally much younger than other challengers, and can thus afford to wait for the current king to die or abdicate peacefully. The hypothesis is tested on a new dataset, and the results show that the risk of deposition was several times higher in European monarchies not practicing primogeniture. Moreover, the spread of primogeniture to a large extent explains why the risk of deposition became dramatically lower in Europe during the period of study.

How democracy was achieved A review of Roger Congleton, Perfecting Parliament: Constitutional Reform and the Origins of Western Democracy, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011, pp. 658, 2012

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American Political Science Review, 2020

The idea that rulers must seek consent before making policy is key to democracy. We suggest that this practice evolved independently in a large fraction of human societies where executives ruled jointly with councils. We argue that council governance was more likely to emerge when information asymmetries made it harder for rulers to extract revenue, and we illustrate this with a theoretical model. Giving the population a role in governance became one means of overcoming the information problem. We test this hypothesis by examining the correlation between localized variation in agricultural suitability and the presence of council governance in the Standard Cross Cultural Sample. As a further step, we suggest that executives facing substantial information asymmetries could also have an alternative route for resource extraction—develop a bureaucracy to measure variation in productivity. Further empirical results suggest that rule by bureaucracy could substitute for shared rule with a c...

This article states a claim about the fundamental nature of monarchy as something which in antiquity and medievality straddled the immanent and transcendent worlds but which is only half understood in a modernity where the world which is wholly immanent and so has a politics which must be theorised in wholly consistent terms. It draws on theories of antique monarchy, medieval monarchy, constitutional monarchy and popular sovereignty, and asserts three distinctive arguments: that politics is always fundamentally torn between law and power, that the philosophy of political history requires us to see that our resources for attempting to resolve the two have been narrowed in the last two hundred years, and that monarchy, theoretically considered, is best understood as something which has a transconsistent political logic.

Monarchy has two elements, autocratic government and hereditary succession to office. After surveying arguments for and against hereditary access to public office, the paper illustrates that theoretical explanations of the rise of representative government do not account for the abolition or preservation of hereditary monarchy in contemporary democratic states. The paper then distinguishes between proximate and fundamental causes of the fall of monarchy. The former are military defeat, dissolution of the state as a result of war defeat and decolonization, and revolution. Fundamental causes are those that explain how proximate causes led to the overthrow of the monarchy and focus on the failures of monarchs to preserve national unity and to withdraw from a politically active role.

In ‘Perfecting Parliament’ Roger Congleton applies the rational choice framework to explain two attributes of the democratization of the West from the medieval times to the early twentieth century, first the shift of policy making authority from the king to the parliament and second the extension of voting rights to previously disenfranchised groups of the population. This review essay sets out the themes of the book, and relates the book to the democratization of classical Athens and democratization from the last quarter of the 20th century.

British Journal of Political Science, 1980

This article is a contribution to the debate between ‘empirical’ and ‘classical’ theories of democracy. It draws attention to a hitherto neglected aspect of that debate, namely the historical process by which a word like ‘democracy’ gains its commendatory overtones. To call a state a democracy was not always to praise it; the argument here is that an understanding of how this came about can clarify some of the issues involved in considering whether or not states are properly to be called democracies. Although the methods used derive from linguistic philosophy, the purpose is to direct attention towards the values and aspirations of historical agents using the term, rather than to a purely conceptual analysis of it.

Edinburgh University Press, 2012

Democracy has never been more popular. It is successfully practiced today in a myriad of different ways by people across virtually every cultural, religious or socio-economic context. The forty-five essays collected in this companion suggest that the global popularity of democracy derives in part from its breadth and depth in the common history of human civilization. The chapters include exceptional accounts of democracy in ancient Greece and Rome, modern Europe and America, among peoples’ movements and national revolutions, and its triumph since the end of the Cold War. However, this book also includes alternative accounts of democracy’s history: its origins in prehistoric societies and early city-states, under-acknowledged contributions from China, Africa and the Islamic world, its familiarity to various Indigenous Australians and Native Americans, the various challenges it faces today in South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the latest democratic developments in light of globalization and new technologies, and potential future pathways to a more democratic world. Understanding where democracy comes from, where its greatest successes and most dismal failures lie, is central to democracy’s project of inventing ways to address the need of people everywhere to live in peace, freedom and with a say in the decisions that affect their lives.

International Political Science Review, 2000

Was democracy invented by the Greeks to replace the anarchy and imperial rule characteristic of earlier Near Eastern societies? Although what was explicitly borrowed from antiquity by modern political thinkers looks Athenian, there was democracy before the polis. Egyptian and Mesopotamian politics relied on public debate and detailed voting procedures; countless assemblies convened at the thresholds of public buildings or city gates; disputed trials were submitted to superior courts; countervailing powers reminded leaders that justice was their responsibility. This was not full democracy, but the Greek version was not perfect either. In this article, "archeopolitics" is used to contrast this efficient form of pluralistic regime ("hypodemocracy") with truly egalitarian ones ("hyperdemocracies") and group interests' polyarchies.