Mommy, Where Do Democracies Come From?
Why Think About the Question?
In school we learned about the Growth of Democracy. The ancient Greek city-states invented it, but most societies were too primitive to be governed in this way. It was not until after printing developed in Europe in the 1400s that broad participation in democracy was practical. The writings of philosophers like John Locke outlined modern ideas of democracy which were first implemented in a real government by the American Revolutionaries, followed by a slow wave of democratization elsewhere as other countries became advanced enough to support popular rule: Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. In the 1990s, democracy spread to Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it was just a matter of time before the last hold-outs joined the wave of progress.
Since the 1990s, the universal triumph of democracy has begun to seem less inevitable. Russia and China have become less democratic in the last decade, and the Middle East/North Africa has seen a wave of democratization which has mostly failed. Even in the United States, where democratic government is practically a national religion, a majority of Republican voters have shown contempt for the substance of democracy. Their willingness to accept virtually any lie from a demagogue, combined with undemocratic elements of our system such as the electoral college, gerrymanders, and the Senate, put our own democracy at risk in ways that were virtually unimaginable even four years ago.
Maybe it’s time to think again about whether we really understand where democracy comes from.
Since school I’ve noticed a few inconsistencies in my understanding. Before the Revolution, New England towns had been run by direct democracy since the 1600s. Why didn’t the British simply send a lord to rule each colony? The ancient Romans had a Senate – was that a democratic institution? In Venice in the middle ages, the Doge was elected by the city’s nobles. Venice was one of several territories in Italy that called itself a Republic rather than a kingdom. The Catholic Church has had its cardinals elect a pope for centuries. And isn’t there something about the Swiss having democracy in the middle ages?
A Theory of Democratic Development
The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today, by NYU political scientist David Stasavage, takes a wider historical view of the development of democracy and tries to explain why it grew in some areas and not others. Though ultimately unsatisfying as both history and political science, it is an interesting and thought-provoking attempt to go beyond the history we learned in high school.
As Stasavage points out, academics have long recognized that varieties of democratic governance pre-dated autocracy in societies where governing units were small (for example, a village). The book describes some of these, such as the Wendat people of the Great Lakes region of North America, whom the French called the Hurons. Stasavage gives examples of such democracies both with and without agriculture. He also mentions democratic governance in pre-Islamic Arabia and pre-British India.
The central theses of Decline and Rise are:
- Democracy is a natural state of civilization when there is not a strong central power.
- Compact, well-organized states with effective bureaucracies could run without democracy.
- In states with limited power due to an undeveloped bureaucracy, a widely distributed population, or few barriers to exit for citizens, the ruler will share power with others in order to get cooperation in collecting taxes or raising an army.
- Sequence matters: its hard to convert a state with a history of strong central control to a democracy, but if a state with weak central control becomes democratic and then strengthens the state, it can stay democratic.
An example of #2 is Egypt: a land where a narrow strip of highly fertile land made harvests predictable and easily taxed, and where surrounding deserts made it hard to leave. Thus, for thousands of years, Egypt had a strong central government ruled by a king treated as a god. An example of #3 is British North America, which was hard to control by force and where homesteading made it easy for a farmer to leave if treated as a serf.
Stasavage explains the long authoritarian history of China in a similar way. He traces it to the existence of the “Loess Plateau” in north central China, where deep soil from wind-blown dust made for a large fertile region analogous to the Nile valley where a centralized state could grow and develop an effective bureaucracy. He contrasts this with western Europe, where scattered patches of good farmland were a barrier to centralized rule and forced kings to rely on cooperation from local power centers. As a sign of the difference, he compares estimates of medieval taxation rates, with China taking around 10% of GDP and European kingdoms taking more like 1%.
Stasavage lumps together several different systems under the heading of “democracy”. No person can govern by himself, but when all the people in government ultimately report to the ruler, who can have them replaced, we consider this single person rule. Many people would consider a parliament composed of unelected nobility to be undemocratic, but Stasavage includes this as an example of democracy because it demands compromise and agreement among independent power centers. Today, a parliament’s decisions are binding on all the communities represented in the parliament, but Stasavage also gives examples where individual communities can opt out of a decision. I would call that more of confederation or alliance of governments, but Stasavage includes it as an example of democracy.
Of course, in England and to some extent other western European countries, what started out as unrepresentative assemblies of noblemen evolved into true parliamentary democracies representing growing fractions of the population. For instance, in the 17th century Britain required members of parliament to own a certain value of land. When the same rule was transferred to the internal administration of American colonies, it was a weaker limit to participation because land was more plentiful. Both America and Europe eventually extended political rights to non-land-owners, non-whites, and non-men.
Stasavage’s theories imply that economic development is not a good indicator of which countries are likely to become democratic. France’s estimated level of GDP in the late 1800s would be considered quite low in today’s economy, and yet it became a democracy then. Some quite poor countries in Africa have recently become democracies, and even within Africa there is little correlation between economic development and democratization.
Similarly, Stasavage does not see China’s economic growth as a predictor of future democratization.
What about the future of democracy in the United States? Decline and Rise gives reasons for both optimism and pessimism. It could be that democracy still remains so central to Americans’ worldview that it will weather any storm. On the other hand, since the book talks about the difficulty of a central government keeping control over a geographically large territory, it raises the question about whether the regional political differences in the US are showing a deeper weakness in the cohesion of such a large country.
Shortcomings of Stasavage’s Book
While The Decline and Rise of Democracy has copious notes and quantitative information (even graphs!) to support its theories, it is not very closely argued. Take the comparison of Chinese and European taxation. Even setting aside the question of how accurately anyone can measure the GDP of medieval European kingdoms, it’s a pretty big jump from “Chinese emperors could extract a bigger share of the economy than European kings” to “Europe developed democracy because their governments weren’t as efficient as China’s”. Similar logical gaps sit in the book’s argument for why democracy did not develop in the former Islamic empire.
The book includes many interesting tidbits that could have been greatly expanded. It extensively discusses the importance of medieval cities developing representative councils, but never gives a very clear picture of how these worked. Who was allowed on the councils? If they were representatives, who voted for them? What things did they have authority over? It refers to a database of governance describing many pre-industrial societies but the reader doesn’t get a good picture – or really any picture – of what any of these governments were like.
Maybe the next book should be more in the style of James George Frazer, whose The Golden Bough promoted dubious theories of the evolution of religion but is a wonderful compendium of myth and religious practice around the world. It would be enlightening to see more examples of how exactly different examples of democratic practices evolved in different places and different times. Decline and Rise never even gets to Venice or Switzerland!
It can be revealing to look at the economic or even geographical causes, but since democracy is fundamentally an idea, it is relevant to look at the evolution of ideas.
John Locke wrote Toleration around 1689, arguing the importance of freedom of religion – a value closely associated with democracy – because “What power could the magistrate have to suppress an idolatrous church that couldn’t somewhere somewhen be used to ruin an orthodox [correct] one?” But the Sicut Judaeis of Pope Callixtus II affirmed protection for Jews and their religious practices in the 1120s, and the Cyrus Cylinder of the 6th century BCE is taken by some as a proclamation of religious tolerance. This makes me wonder what other documents promulgating democratic values have I not heard of? A Russian document from the 16th century? An essay from Han dynasty China? If democratic practice has been more widespread than we learned in school, how about democratic ideas?
[Cover image, 1768 Sejm of Poland, https://www.dziejesejmu.pl/en/ordinary-sejm-in-warsaw-november-7th-1768,p1632497217]