A Global History from Antiquity to Today, by David Stasavage
The Decline and Rise of Democracy | Book Reviews & Excerpts
The emergence of constrained rule is a function of the ease by which a given state can solve information problems inherent in physical and human geography.
That is,
- are they free to tax and otherwise coerce at will,
-
or only by relying on local intermediaries, collective bodies of
notables, or particularist elites?
- States with more advanced bureaucracies, or those endowed with dense, easily reachable populations, could thus impose autocracy
-
while those without such means often yielded to forms of consensual or
quasi-representative institutions.
- When central state institutions (such as a tax bureaucracy) were absent—as in medieval Europe—rulers needed consent from their populace to govern.
- When central institutions were strong—as in China or the Middle East—consent was less necessary and autocracy more likely.
Under given conditions, “democratic governance…comes naturally to humans”. The puzzle is that autocratic governance was just as natural. It, too, was found in many places. In pre-modern China and the Islamic world, for example, autocracy—together with a centralised bureaucracy—was for centuries the norm.
The key was information: Early democracy tended to flourish where - rulers knew little - of what people were growing and had few ways to find out. They might underguess taxable produce (forgoing revenue) or overguess (provoking non-compliance).
- Once established, central bureaucracies were hard to dismantle. They took well to modernity and new technologies.
- Early democracy, by contrast, was notably—although not fatally—vulnerable to the rise of modern states and rapid economic development. It accordingly vanished in many places, while surviving in others.
Modernity and central states, in other words, allowed for either autocracy or democracy.
Sequencing; “If the early democratic institutions of government by consent are established first,” he writes, “then it is possible to subsequently build a bureaucracy without veering inevitably into autocracy or despotism.” It depends on what went before.
Sequencing the development of a state bureaucracy to only after those constraining institutions had already been developed could sustain non-autocratic rule, but the reverse led rather to the incredibly stable autocracies of many millennia in China or the states of the medieval and early modern Islamic world.[Pre-modern rule] again and again significant governance constraints existed in many states, primarily through variations on decentralized deliberation, consultative councils, or (socially) representative assemblies.
The ancient Greek polis sort of democratic rule were in fact quite common, encompassing perhaps upwards of fifty percent of the total number of premodern polities. Such regimes, in which a ruler governed jointly with a council or assembly composed of members of society who were themselves independent from the ruler and not subject to his or her whim existed not only in ancient Greece
About this book
Historical accounts of democracy’s rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer—
democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa.
States developed either democratic or autocratic styles of governance - early democracy tended to develop in small places with a weak state and, counterintuitively, simple technologies.
- When central state institutions (such as a tax bureaucracy) were absent—as in medieval Europe—rulers needed consent from their populace to govern.
- When central institutions were strong—as in China or the Middle East—consent was less necessary and autocracy more likely.
He then explores the transition from early to modern democracy, which first took shape in England and then the United States, illustrating that
modern democracy arose as an effort to combine popular control with a strong state over a large territory.
Democracy has been an experiment that has unfolded over time and across the world—and its transformation is ongoing.
David Stasavage is dean for the social sciences and the Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University. His books include Taxing the Rich and States of Credit (both Princeton).
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780691201955/html
Why Democracy Thrives in Some Places, Not in Others
TWO COMMON beliefs about democracy are that it began in ancient Athens and, on spreading from there, remained peculiarly Western.
David Stasavage, a professor of politics at New York University, finds both views mistaken. Without them, he thinks it will be easier to get hopes and fears for present-day democracy into better perspective and balance.
Understood as { government by consultation and consent }
democracy, he shows, can be found in many early civilisations, not just classical Greece—including ancient Mesopotamia, Buddhist India, the tribal lands of the American Great Lakes, pre-conquest Mesoamerica and pre-colonial Africa.
With that spread in mind, he writes that under given conditions, “democratic governance…comes naturally to humans”. The puzzle is that autocratic governance was just as natural. It, too, was found in many places. In pre-modern China and the Islamic world, for example, autocracy—together with a centralised bureaucracy—was for centuries the norm.
To find out why early democracy occurred where it did, the author draws on evidence from archaeology, soil science, demographics and climate studies. The key, in his account, was information.
Early democracy tended to flourish where - rulers knew little - of what people were growing and had few ways to find out. They might underguess taxable produce (forgoing revenue) or overguess (provoking non-compliance).
It was better to ask people how much they grew and, in return, listen to their demands. That pattern was typical where populations were small and a central state weak or non-existent.
With big populations, consultation was impractical. Rulers instead sent officials to see how much was grown and, before long, how many young men could be drafted into armies. Bureaucracies emerged. With their aid, autocratic rule imposed itself on local custom. In pre-modern settings, this autocratic bureaucracy was more common where soil was good, yields high and know-how advanced, especially in writing and measuring. Such systems were able to tax heavily. Song China (10th-13th centuries) and the Abbasid Caliphate (8th-13th centuries) extracted at their height respectively 10% and 7% of gross yearly product. Medieval European rulers managed barely 1%.
- Once established, central bureaucracies were hard to dismantle. They took well to modernity and new technologies.
- Early democracy, by contrast, was notably—although not fatally—vulnerable to the rise of modern states and rapid economic development. It accordingly vanished in many places, while surviving in others.
Modernity and central states, in other words, allowed for either autocracy or democracy. But was there a pattern? Mr Stasavage thinks so. He calls it “sequencing”;
“If the early democratic institutions of government by consent are established first,” he writes, “then it is possible to subsequently build a bureaucracy without veering inevitably into autocracy or despotism.” It depends on what went before.
First-mover advantage
Awkwardly for this argument, the West is the one part of the world where early democracy of the small-scale, direct kind evolved most securely into modern, representative democracy. Does that not make democracy peculiarly Western after all? In modern democracy’s three waves—in the 19th century, post-1945 and post-1989—Western democracy was first. Despite glaring collapses, it has fared best. Yet, in Mr Stasavage’s telling, there was nothing essential—a liberal outlook, say, or respect for property, or a gift for industry—that tied the West and modern democracy together, beyond the luck of the past.
Pre-modern Europe had (with exceptions) democratic customs and weak rulers without effective bureaucracies.
Where it occurs, and is not wiped out by autocracy, consensual government, the author writes, leaves “very deep traces”. Democracy and autocracy each have strong roots. There are good reasons to expect each to endure.
Why democracy thrives in some places and not in others | The Economist
Scholarly Blinders and the Diversity of Authoritarianism
- States with more advanced bureaucracies, or those endowed with dense, easily reachable populations, could thus impose autocracy, while
- those without such means often yielded to forms of consensual or quasi-representative institutions.
…Stasavage’s descriptive portrayal of premodern rule is informative, showing that
again and again significant governance constraints existed in many states, primarily through variations on decentralized deliberation,
~~ consultative councils, or (socially) representative assemblies. ~~
Holding up the ancient Greek polis as an ideal-typical example of “early democracy,” in which citizens deliberated over politics with famously extensive rights in an institutionalized format, Stasavage suggests that versions of this sort of democratic rule were in fact quite common, encompassing perhaps upwards of fifty percent of the total number of premodern polities, depending on admittedly weak quantitative measurements.
Such regimes, in which
“a ruler governed jointly with a council or assembly composed of members of society who were themselves independent from the ruler and not subject to his or her whim,”
existed not only in ancient Greece, but can also be ascribed to such far-flung locations as
- the Huron confederation of the North American northwest woodlands,
- the Tlaxcala state of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica,
- the Mesopotamian kingdom of Mari, and
- societies of precolonial central Africa
…The Decline and Rise of Democracy is
primarily a book about the diversity of “authoritarianism” in the premodern world in its manifold forms, and - a useful reminder of the perennial persistence and importance of assemblies, councils, diets, and parliaments throughout history.
Classical authors knew this reality well, as did the American Founders and the liberals and conservatives of authoritarian monarchies across Europe’s long nineteenth century. Removing the tyrannic blinders from modern scholarship would do a world of good to help us better appreciate the multitude of non-democratic forms of the past, and likely will provide greater insight into our politically uncertain future…
Scholarly Blinders and the Diversity of Authoritarianism | The Russell Kirk Center
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/scholarly-blinders-and-the-diversity-of-authoritarianism/
Reviewed by Ian Lipke
The introduction contains the idea that democracy may be less durable than we assume. It has acquired an aura of inevitability, as though it will endure while man survives. Stasavage maintains that we’re living in an age of democratic anxiety, one that has not been uncommon in the history of ages past. We enjoy a society where ordinary people govern themselves in a collective fashion, and we have done for aeons.
Long have we believed that democracy began with the Greeks. Long have we cited Cleisthenes and the reforms he instituted in Greek society as the birth pangs of democracy. Stasavage refutes the claim that democracy began among wealthy people in a particular culture or specific place. Central to the arguments in this book are the concepts of early democracy, autocracy and modern democracy (including its absence). Each of these concepts relate to the relationship between those who ruled and those who did not. This is about as succinct as one can make it.
Stasavage maintains that early democracy and early autocracy were two paths of political development. With remarkable insight, he proposes that
( early democracy ) - most likely prevailed when community leaders were uncertain or anxious about production, when people found exit from their current circumstances easy, and when rulers needed their people as much as, or more than, their people needed them. Under such circumstances rule by a council of community-minded individuals, operating as a collective was the likely outcome.
By contrast,
( autocratic rule ) - flourished where rulers were strong and focused. This is where a bureaucracy became an alternative to ruling jointly with a council, and with the invention of new technologies the operation of bureaucratic rule became increasingly efficient. The concept of bureaucracy as the spawn of technology is an engaging point of view.
A vital, and original, part of Stasavage’s argument is that democracy’s formation was sequential. From such a standpoint, he argues that there are identifiable causes why democracy developed as it did or did not, why it thrived or wilted, or what its future is likely to be. These are bold claims, but are supported in firm fashion by historical evidence.
The author takes examples from civilizations as remote in time as the Shang Dynasty, a society that accepted the bureaucratic alternative to early democracy and whose followers continued through the centuries to reject other models.
In Europe by contrast, technological backwardness provided an opportunity to practise communal governance, from which came rule by consent, not invented by Europeans but developed by them into an art form. Another brilliant twist to the whole issue of democracy’s origin and subsequent growth is information advantage (97). As Stasavage argues in Chapter Five,
the backwardness of Europe’s state bureaucracies left rulers with no alternative but to govern by negotiation and seek consent from the growing towns. Through negotiation, Europeans reshaped and fundamentally redefined Roman law.
The vastness of human knowledge that Stasavage’s pen sweeps across is staggering. He identifies early democracies such as Mesopotamia (Mari), ancient India, the Huron people, the Mesoamerican Tlaxcala, and republicanism in Central Africa. He writes with authority on early autocracies whose leaders did not have to share power with a council or assembly, places like the Third Dynasty of Ur, the Aztec Triple Alliance, and the Incas of South America. He argues the specific case of England in a chapter called ‘Why England was different’, concluding that the English people were not bound by mandates, enjoyed limited public participation in governance, and agreed that a majority decision was sufficient to resolve even local disputes.
The Decline and Rise of Democracy by David Stasavage - Queensland Reviewers Collective
Rediscovering Democracy: A Review of The Decline and Rise of Democracy:
by David Stasavage & Jack Visnjic
In an age of anxiety about the future of democracy, when new publications routinely come out bearing such titles as How Democracies Die and How Democracies End, David Stasavage’s new book offers a deeper probe into the past and a more hopeful message about the future. In contrast to the recent flurry of books and articles on the topic, which usually limit their focus to the past century or two, The Decline and Rise of Democracy claims to bring to light a global history of democracy spanning several millennia. In that respect, it continues the trend of “grand narrative” histories popularized by such writers as Jared Diamond, Ian Morris, and Walter Scheidel.
One of the book's objectives is to overturn the long-established narrative that democracy was invented at a particular time and place (viz. ancient Greece) and was later revived by modern Europeans. Stasavage argues that
democracy, rather than being a hallmark of the West, was actually common across early societies all around the globe.
However, as states became larger, democracy proved harder to scale than what he calls the “autocratic alternative.” Many early democracies thus came to be overrun by larger-scale autocracies.
Even when democratic societies prevailed against larger kingdoms and conquered them, they often became autocratic in the process because they inherited a centralized state with bureaucratic structures.
In addition to the problem of scale, early democracy was also undermined by new technologies that allowed rulers to monitor their subjects’ activities and production more closely.
This is the initial “decline of democracy” referred to in the book’s title. The subsequent “rise of democracy” refers to the appearance of a new form of representative government in the 18th century, initially along the north Atlantic seaboard, from which it has now spread to much of the world. This new system, dubbed by Stasavage “modern democracy,” is
characterized by broad suffrage and a legislature in which—this is key—representatives are not bound by mandates from their constituents (more on that below). Modern democracy, the book argues, has solved the problem of scale, while it has also incorporated certain autocratic features, such as a strong state with a centralized bureaucracy.
The book consists of twelve chapters organized into three main sections. Chapters 1–4 seek to explain the origins of democracy, to present evidence that it was widespread in premodern times, and to illustrate ways in which the progress of civilization often undermined early democracy. In chapters 5–8, Stasavage attempts to explain the political divergence between modern Europe and the rest of the world. He does so by first tracing the emergence of representation (one of the defining features of modern democracy) in medieval Europe in chapter 5. The next two chapters explore why large-scale democracies did not emerge in China and the early Islamic world, respectively. Chapter 8 works to debunk claims that economic history alone can explain the political divergence of modern Europe.
The third and final section of the book (chapters 9–12) explores the rise and spread of modern democracy. Chapters 9 and 10 illuminate just how much the character of modern democracy is indebted to the peculiarities of English and American history. Chapter 11 discusses the astonishing spread of modern democracy over the past few centuries, including recently to regions of the world that were thought to be too poor or underdeveloped to sustain democracy. The final chapter applies the lessons learned throughout the book to offer some thoughts on what the future may have in store for not just America, but also China. In the case of America, Stasavage claims that the long history of democracy should make us hopeful about its future, provided that we make continual efforts and investments to address two challenges in particular: growing executive power and citizen distrust in government.
The book’s many virtues include its pellucid prose, broad historical scope, and the decades of careful research that went into writing it. To read the book is to be taken on a roller-coaster ride across four millennia of history, from ancient Mesopotamia and India, to pre-colonial America and Africa, to medieval Arabia and Europe, and beyond. Ultimately, Stasavage isolates three factors as being key to the rise of early democracy.
Democratic rule was most likely to arise in
- Small scale settings - where
- Rulers lacked accurate knowledge about what their subjects were producing. This information deficit gave rulers an incentive to share power in order to optimize their taxation system. Furthermore, democracy was more likely to arise - when
- Rulers needed their subjects more than their subjects needed them. This last factor was especially pertinent in cases where rulers needed people to fight wars and where the people had exit options (they could pack up and move to a new territory). In such cases, rulers often made concessions to the ruled in exchange for their services and loyalty.
Rediscovering Democracy: A Review of The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today by David Stasavage (Princeton University Press, 2020)
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6x84w6mm
Look to the past to see where our democracy is headed
When we think about the history of democracy we need to first recognize one thing; the Greeks gave us the word demokratia, but they did not invent the practice.
Across several millennia, a great many human societies have had collective forms of governance that gave people a voice. They did this by having councils and assemblies that placed constraints on rulers. They did it also by choosing leaders via consensus.
These practices existed in the Americas before European conquest, in Ancient Mesopotamia, in precolonial Africa, and elsewhere.
Early democracy was not the only form of government at this time—the alternative was autocracy—but it was so prevalent across regions that we can say that it came naturally to humans. Early democracy was particularly likely to exist in localized settings; larger polities more often tended toward autocracy.
If we trace the long history from these early democracies forward, we are in a better position to understand the tensions in our own democracy today and to ask where we may be headed.
Early democracy existed as a substitute way of governing in the absence of a state bureaucracy. If we recognize this point, then we can better understand why modern democracy eventually emerged in Europe and not in China or the Middle East.
Well into the second millennium of the common era, China remained ahead of European polities in terms of state development. Its rulers benefitted from an extensive state bureaucracy, and they also disposed of technologies that allowed them to use bureaucrats to map the soil and assess taxes. A similar pattern prevailed in the Middle East after the Arab conquests as a society that had previously practiced early democracy inherited a strong state bureaucracy from the Sasanian Empire. All of these developments paved the way for autocracy.
In Medieval Europe the near absence of state bureaucracies and technological backwardness combined to produce the exact opposite outcome; rulers needed to rely on their people to help them govern, and so they were forced to work with assemblies, councils, and other consultative bodies. Often it was these bodies themselves that collected the taxes, something which gave them great leverage. The irony is that it was Europe’s backwardness that would pave the way for the slow emergence of modern democracy. If early democracy had been above all a local phenomenon, as medieval European rulers began to jointly with members of their societies they succeeded in scaling up the practice of collective governance to a much larger setting
While England pioneered in developing many of the institutions that we associate with democracy today, it was in North America that the first modern democracy would take shape. Consider the historical background. Seventeenth century conditions in the British colonies in North America were much like those that had produced early democracy elsewhere; there was no state—apart from the one way back in England—to exercise coercive force, and land was abundant. These were exactly the same conditions that had previously helped lead to early democracy among the Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands before European conquest. What the Founders did with the Constitution of 1787 was shift the United States towards modern democracy by creating for the possibility of a strong central state. We are still learning whether this experiment can work.
If early democracy involved citizens governing in the absence of a state bureaucracy—and with a deep form of political participation—modern democracy is a very different affair. For most people participation is limited to casting a ballot every few years, and governance in the interim is carried out by representatives and a state bureaucracy often located in far-away places. If for several millennia democracy was above all a local phenomenon, one potential risk in modern democracy is that citizens will grow distrustful of a distant central state.
The Constitution of 1787 did not on its own solve the problem of distrust in central government. Successfully practicing democracy at scale required additional efforts. If the danger of a large republic was that citizens would lack information and feel disconnected from the federal government, then investments needed to made to overcome this problem of scale. Soon after the Constitution’s ratification, James Madison wrote of the importance of subsidizing newspaper delivery to out of the way places so that citizens could be informed. This took place with the Postal Service Act of 1792. People in the Early Republic also wrote that democracy in an extensive republic could only function effectively if citizens were educated, and so many states established plans to subsidize common schools.
The lessons from the Early Republic, and from the long history of democracy, are clear; there are times when preserving an extensive republic requires investments to better connect people with a distant state. In the United States toda—in our era of polarization and distrust—we are at another such moment. This is one way in which a look at the long history of democracy can help us know what to do in our current age of democratic anxiety.
David Stasavage is dean for the social sciences and Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University. His books include Taxing the Rich and States of Credit (both Princeton). Twitter @stasavage
Look to the past to see where our democracy is headed
https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/look-to-the-past-to-see-where-our-democracy-is-headed
The Decline and Rise of Democracy
Democracy is valuable only as an institutional constraint — that is, if it serves to build and maintain a limited state allowing a wide margin of individual liberty.
By Pierre Lemieux
Democracy is the natural way that humans have governed themselves in many different parts of the world since the beginning of history. So argues David Stasavage, a political scientist at New York University, in his book The Decline and Rise of Democracy. In doing so, he leads us on a fascinating voyage through time and place.
A wide definition of democracy sees it as a political system “in which those who rule have been obliged to seek consent from those they govern” through some sort of council or assembly. Rulers without strong state bureaucracies need assemblies because they face an insuperable information problem regarding what is produced and what can be taxed. They also face a tax collection problem. Moreover, pure coercive autocracy will not work if the subjects have an exit option to move out of reach of the rulers.
Early democracy / What Stasavage calls “early democracy” was characterized by councils or assemblies, a weak central state or sometimes no central state at all, and generally less than universal suffrage. Athens was “the most extensive example of early democracy” in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Other variants of early democracy were common in other, often primitive, societies. A sample of 186 societies studied by anthropologists — the Standard Cross‐ Cultural Sample — shows governing councils existing at the local level in more than half of the sample and at the central level (over many localities) in about a third. “By one estimate,” writes Stasavage, “two thirds of councils had broad‐ based community participation” — as opposed to elites only.
For example, early democracy existed in Mari, a kingdom that existed on what is now the border between Iraq and Syria during the first millennium BCE. The king had to negotiate with town councils over taxes.
The Huron, a native tribe confederacy in the American and Canadian Northeast, provide a more striking and recent example. At the time French explorers encountered them in the 16th and 17th centuries, a Huron village was ruled by a chief and a council of clan chiefs. Anybody in the village apparently could go and express his opinions to the council. Villages were grouped into tribes, each of which was governed by a tribal chief and a council made of all clan chiefs. Above them was the confederacy council, but its decisions did not bind individual tribes, thereby promoting consensual decision‐ making. Iroquois tribes had similar institutions.
Early democracy was also practiced by pre‐ Islamic Arabs. Sayyids (rulers) generally ruled as first among equals. The arrival of Islam in the 6th and 7th centuries CE did not immediately change that. The Koran’s governance principle of shura recommends consultation and consensus, which sometimes may have also applied to the choice of the caliph. The conquest of Iraq (and the Sasanian Empire), however, marked the beginning of the end of democracy in this part of the world as the Islamic caliphs inherited a well‐ functioning state that they could soon rule without assemblies. The same thing happened later to the Mongols, who abandoned their democratic habits after invading the Chinese Empire.
Early modern city‐ states in Europe as well as the American colonies practiced some forms of early democracy. Colonial governors, including those from London merchant companies (the Virginia Company, for example), needed to consult the colonists if only because labor was scarce and a plethora of available land offered an exit option. The rulers did not have bureaucracies to employ in their exercise of control. According to Stasavage, the promise of democratic rights attracted immigrants to America, probably (I suppose) as a symbol of individual dignity or a signal of mild governance. Governing assemblies with broad male suffrage developed with frequent elections and sometimes explicit instructions or mandates given to elected officials.
Early democratic societies were generally small‐ scale and, as suggested above, existed in an environment where residents had an exit option and there was no bureaucracy to help rulers tax production. A ruler therefore needed to negotiate to gain the consent of the people or the notables. In other words, democracy developed when political rulers were weak.
Conversely, early democracy failed when a ruler could easily tax production because agriculture was intensive and “legible” (that is, easy to monitor) or because the ruler employed a bureaucracy to help him. As illustrated above, a conqueror who inherited a state with an established bureaucratic hierarchy could avoid democracy simply by co‐ opting the bureaucrats. Hence, the decline of (early) democracy.
Early democracy is often historically associated with “the absence of many technological developments that we commonly associate with civilization” such as writing, geometry, and accounting. The advance of civilization “often acted to undermine early democracy” as these technologies were used by the state bureaucracy and “reduced the information advantage that members of society had over rulers.” Moreover, higher population densities made people “more easily monitored by bureaucrats.”
There was no state bureaucracy in Europe after the fall of the western Roman Empire in the 5th century BCE, but early democracy continued at the local level. (See “Let’s Travel That Road Again,” Spring 2020.) Kings eventually convened central assemblies composed of what Bertrand de Jouvenel in On Power (1945) called “social powers”: nobles, bishops, and later representatives of cities. The assembly or council participants had power bases independent of the state and thus “substantial blocking power.” The king needed them to govern and tax.
Modern democracy / Modern democracy gradually replaced early democracy, hence the rise of democracy after its fall. Modern democracy was a European invention. It consists of a new kind of assembly whose members are elected by extended suffrage and are not tied by mandates or instructions from those they represent. In other words, modern democracy is representative democracy with more widespread suffrage.
It developed fastest in Britain. The 11th century Norman conquerors inherited the country’s different kingdoms, which had royal councils and assemblies of local notables. At the end of the 13th century, however, the king was able to abolish the mandates in the central assembly, which eliminated much blocking power. The Tudors, who reigned from 1495 to 1603, even made progress in creating a bureaucracy.
Elsewhere in Europe, absolute monarchs (think of Louis XIV) were better able to reduce the role of councils and assemblies, but still needed them to govern. Prussia under the Hohenzollerns was an exception. Frederick William of Prussia created a permanent army that allowed him to rule without negotiating with assemblies. Except for Prussia, Stasavage tells us, European states were still “relatively weak.”
Economic historian Douglas North and political scientist Barry Weingast argue that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 created a limited state in England. But Parliament became sovereign and its executive (“the Ministry”) gained something akin to autocratic power. William Blackstone, the famous 18th century jurist, observed that Parliament has “absolute despotic power” and can “do every thing that is not naturally impossible.” Royal despotism had been replaced by parliamentary despotism. For Stasavage, though, this “state capacity” was necessary for democracy to develop, a challenging idea to which we will return.
The first fully modern democracy was born in the United States in 1787, albeit with slaves and women excluded from the suffrage. France rapidly followed, with no slavery. The formula then spread over the world and the franchise was gradually extended. Universal suffrage often came with universal conscription. Stasavage emphasizes that modern democracy recently extended to many countries in Africa, which had a pre‐ colonial tradition of early democracy.
Democracy and autocracy / China was an extreme case of autocracy, the opposite of the European tradition. If the Chinese ever knew early democracy, it was in the municipal assemblies of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, in a frontier area, around the beginning of the first millennium BCE. This early democracy did not last long. After the fall of the Zhou dynasty, the empire was eventually restored and went on to build a strong bureaucracy that could dispense with popular consultation.
At the apogee of the Han dynasty, at the beginning of the first millennium CE, there was one bureaucrat for every 440 subjects in the empire. It is, writes Stasavage, “an astonishing figure for a pre modern society.” We can add that it is a very low figure for a modern democracy: in the United States, which is at the low end of government bureaucracies in the rich world, public employees at all levels of government translate into one bureaucrat for 15 residents (about one for 37 at the federal level only).
The story told by Stasavage is fascinating and we might inquire, as he does, about the lessons to draw for today’s democracy and its future. We will have to tweak his ideas a bit. The distinction between early and modern democracy is useful but it hides other aspects of democracy that we should take into account. Etymologically, democracy means the power (kratos in Greek) of the people (demos). But this does not tell us what the scope of this power is nor who are the people.
Not a value per se / These many democracies do not have the same moral value and economic consequences. Stasavage is not only a dispassionate scholar but also, as he admits, “a supporter of democracy.” He believes in “the core principle that the people should have power.” The value judgment thus expressed seems consistent with the historical claim that “participative needs … are intrinsic to humans.” However, participation in essential governance, such as building a palisade, an irrigation system, or a flood control levee — is very different from exploiting minorities in a pure majoritarian government. Alexis de Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority” or de Jouvenel’s “totalitarian democracy” are difficult to justify morally. Socrates was condemned to death under Athenian democracy.
Stasavage identifies a “democratic anxiety” stemming from the thin participation of citizens in modern democracy and the danger of the executive power high‐ jacking democracy, including in the United States. He notes the “tremendous expansion of the ability of presidents to rule by executive order.” Presidential powers, he explains, “have sometimes been expanded by presidents who cannot be accused of having authoritarian tendencies, such as Barack Obama, only to have this expanded power then used by Donald Trump.” We could, or course, as well say that the new powers grabbed by Trump will likely be used by a future Democratic president “who cannot be accused of authoritarian tendencies,” or perhaps who might legitimately be so accused.
Stasavage remains optimistic for America, probably because of what he calls the issue of sequencing in the history of democracy and autocracy. The fact that, in America and in the typical Western country, democracy came sequentially before the construction of a powerful bureaucratic state gives more chance to democracy against would‐ be strongmen.
Yet, let us remember the many cases in which dictators were elected or plebiscited, from Napoleon III in France (with 74% of the vote) to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and even in a sense to Adolf Hitler in Germany. Recently, a troubling trend has shown would‐ be strongmen elected in the West, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Trump in the United States. A would‐ be strongwoman (there is such a thing), Marine LePen, could continue to rise in France. Democratic majorities, including in the United States, have often repressed minorities: think about the African Americans or the interned Japanese Americans during World War II. (See “You Didn’t See It Coming,” Winter 2018–2019.)
When he leaves the field of purely positive history, Stasavage seems to consider democracy as a value per se. If, as he tends to, we give a very large extension to the concept of democracy as a regime that gives some participation in government to at least some of the people, and if we define autocracy as all other regimes, it looks difficult to oppose democracy. But this definition hides the many varieties of democracy within and across Stasavage’s early democracy or modern democracy.
Unkeepable promises / Democracy as a value per se is not only morally suspicious, but its modern form certainly cannot deliver the participation it promises. The typical individual voter remains rationally ignorant of the political stakes because, if he is not totally deluded or ignorant, he knows that his own vote has an infinitesimally small probability of changing the election outcome. Why invest time and money in information if he cannot do anything to further his own interest? Consequently, most voters vote blind, a fact demonstrated by multiple opinion polls about voters’ ignorance.
Another reason why modern democracy cannot deliver meaningful participation is the nonexistence of what economists call a “social welfare function.” Nobel economics prizewinner Kenneth Arrow has shown that, if every individual is given an equal weight, it is impossible to aggregate all individual preferences or values and obtain coherent choices. A manifestation of this impossibility theorem is the phenomenon of cycles or voting incoherence: even if no individual changes his mind, the majority could prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. Not to mention that, as Hayek noted, “different but equally justifiable procedures for arriving at a democratic decision may produce very different results.”
A related (but different) argument on the illusion of democracy as participation is the observation that in any nontribal society made of individuals with different preferences, virtually any collective choice must violate the preferences of some individuals and is therefore discriminatory, as Anthony de Jasay noted in his 1985 book The State. The “virtually” keeps the door open to unanimously desired choices, which are necessarily abstract rules instead of specific decisions. (See James Buchanan’s 1975 book The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan.) Thus, in any nontribal society, the state has to be distant and distrusted.
These limitations of democracy are ignored in The Decline and Rise of Democracy.
Democracy and liberty / If democracy is not a value per se, it may be an instrumental value serving to achieve some other value. In the classical‐ liberal tradition, this ultimate value is individual liberty, or individual consent, or a social order in which individual liberty is possible. As Nobel economics prizewinner Friedrich Hayek argued, democracy is not a means of reaching collective decisions on everything, including deep philosophical issues, but merely a procedure for electing and removing governments. (See his 1979 book Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. III: The Political Order of a Free People.) Democracy may also have the symbolic advantage of affirming the formal equality of all individuals.
In this perspective, there is a distinction more important than early and modern democracy. It is the distinction between, on the one hand, democracy as participatory power and, on the other hand, democracy as a means to individual liberty. This distinction parallels the one made by Benjamin Constant between ancient and modern liberty — that is, between collective and individual liberty. (See Constant’s 1819 lecture “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns.”) Democracy as power corresponds to ancient or collective liberty; democracy as individual liberty corresponds to modern or individual liberty. This distinction cuts across the early and modern categories proposed by Stasavage. The French Revolution, which oscillated between liberation and tyranny, was representative of these two faces of the democratic Janus: individual and collective.
The conception of democracy as a protection for individual liberty distinguishes democracies from autocracies much better than does the conception of democracy as participation in power. Autocrats often call themselves “democratic,” like in the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” Similarly, Chinese communist leaders have often used the word “democracy” (minzhu) to describe their system. But autocrats obviously take democracy as meaning the power of the people (whom they incarnate, of course), not the liberty of the people viewed as individuals. As Stasavage himself suggests, an autocratic government — say, a Chinese emperor — ultimately needs the support of a majority or a large proportion of its subjects even if it is not expressed through formal elections. Such governments still do not qualify as democracies in the sense of individual liberty.
When Stasavage observes that “strong central state power is a core feature of modern democracy,” he is taking democracy more in the sense of the power of the people than as the liberty of the people. It is far from clear that a strong central state with much “state capacity” is beneficial to individual liberty.
One argument for a strong modern democratic state is that early democratic assemblies could block economic development by restricting entry into markets instead of encouraging experimentation and innovation. The Dutch Republic’s weak early democratic state was apparently prisoner to special mercantile interests. By contrast, Stasavage argues that the strong state being built in Great Britain in early modern times contributed to the Industrial Revolution Yet, he also seems to agree that it was mainly by creating the space for innovation that the British state was useful, not by its direct interventions. There is much theory and evidence to support the idea that economic freedom favors economic development and growth.
Democracy, autocracy, and growth / If a strong democratic state is necessary to promote development, why can’t an autocratic state do it too? Such an argument for autocracy seems to be bolstered by the case of China. If economic historians’ estimates are correct, China had a greater gross domestic product than Europe until about 1600. It is only later that the West overcame China in growth and prosperity. Why can’t innovation persist within a Chinese‐ style autocratic bureaucracy?
Stasavage suggests that the political instability of autocracy and “the risk of policy reversal” may be the answer. Note that the current wave of populism suggests that strong‐ state democracy may not be immune to these problems.
Large autocratic empires often benefit from a large internal market with transportation and communication infrastructures and relatively unimpeded trade. This advantage, however, does not require autocracy. Modern democratic countries have it too.
As Stasavage notes, considerations about economic development are very relevant to China’s place in today’s world. The millennia‐ old autocratic tradition of this country suggests a less optimistic future than the hopes generated by the liberalization of the economy after Mao’s death. Many analysts thought that political democratization would follow, but it does not seem to be happening now (and American trade policy does not help). Contrary to what Stasavage seems to assume, the Chinese economy will not be able to continue growing without further economic and political liberalization. (See “Getting Rich Is Glorious,” Winter 2012–2013.) One can argue that such a fate happened before, when the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) pursued policies undermining markets.
One question Stasavage does not ask is, whom is growth for? If the goods and services of which GDP is made are produced mainly for the political or bureaucratic class and aggregated with nonmarket prices as weights, growth is meaningless as an even imperfect indicator of general welfare. A strong autocratic (or collective‐ democratic) state may seem to promote prosperity, but it will be the sort of prosperity that the rulers and their supporting classes prefer. Only if the state is strictly limited can economic growth satisfy individual preferences as expressed on free and impersonal markets.
Limited democracy / In the end, history illustrates why the state must be distrusted, even when it pretends to be “us.” As we have seen, political rulers will try to rule as autocrats. The state will charge in taxes what the market will bear. Only institutional constraints (sometimes helped historically by exit options offered by nature) will stop it.
Democracy is valuable only as an institutional constraint — that is, if it serves to build and maintain a limited state allowing a wide margin of individual liberty. Early democracy was tyrannical against unpopular individuals and ideas, but modern democracy leaves individuals powerless before the overwhelming power of a state claiming to represent all and everybody. “Democracy,” wrote de Jouvenel, “in the centralizing, pattern‐ making, absolutist shape that we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny’s incubation.” “Modern democracy,” Stasavage admits, “has a somewhat autocratic feel compared to early democracy.”
The Anti‐ Federalists, notes Stasavage, “argued that giving the federal government the power to levy taxes risks resulting in tyranny.” He adds: “This is not what happened in the end.” But history has not ended and the federal government’s power is not decreasing. Contra Stasavage, a strong central state may be no less dangerous at the end of democracy than at the beginning. It is a sobering thought that the American republic is now roughly the age at which the Athenian democracy died.
If it is to survive its totalitarian temptations or the takeover ambitions of autocrats, the democratic state needs a weight‐ loss diet and humility. That is not Stasavage’s own conclusion. The Decline and Rise of Democracy is a good and instructive book, but it needs to be completed with an interrogation on why democracy is useful and how it can be relieved from its unrealistic promises.
The Decline and Rise of Democracy | Cato Institute
https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2020/decline-rise-democracy
Democracy’s Shapeshifting Past—and Its Uncertain Future
David Stasavage, author of the newly released The Decline and Rise of Democracy, discusses democracy's past--and future.
Did the Greeks actually “invent” democracy?
The Greeks gave us the word demokratia, which in its literal sense means that the people have power. But they were not the only ones to come up with the idea. A great many human societies over time have ruled themselves with this basic notion in mind. From the woodlands of Northeastern America prior to European conquest to Ancient Mesopotamia to Precolonial Africa, many societies operated under the basic principle that those who ruled should seek consent from their people before making decisions. Even if these societies did not have elections or written constitutions, they still adhered to the principle that the people ought to hold some sort of power.
I call this pattern early democracy, and it involved a very deep form of political participation for those who had the right to it.
How does the form of government we have in the United States compare to those earlier versions of democracy?
The United States was the first modern democracy. Modern democracy differs from early democracy in two important ways. The first involves the emphasis on election of leaders. Rather than oblige leaders to continually seek popular input, as was the case in early democracy, we elect them for a period of several years, then allow them to go about the business of governing, and finally decide whether to reelect them. The second difference is that with a broad suffrage, modern democracy extends the right of political participation to more people than was the case in most early democracies. Over time, as previously marginalized groups—including African Americans, women, and those without property—asserted their rights, modern democracy has come to mean the possibility of political participation for all adults. The potential downside of modern democracy, in the US and elsewhere, is that it offers a form of political participation that is broad but which risks not being very deep. Simply having the right to vote every few years may not be sufficient to satisfy people’s need for participation.
You write that the nation’s founders, despite their foresight in many areas, “did not solve the problem of distrust” of government. What would they make of the current moment, when we find trust in government at a near-historic low?
One common fear expressed by the Antifederalists, who opposed ratifying the Constitution, was that in a republic covering such a vast territory, the great mass of the population would be too distant from the seat of power. They might be able to participate in elections every few years, but between those moments, they would lack any connection with government. The feared consequence of this problem of scale was that the people would begin to distrust government, while also being susceptible to 18th-century versions of fake news.
In Federalist 10, James Madison tried to downplay such fears, but a few short years after the ratification of the Constitution he would change his tune. He didn’t shift to saying that small republics were actually better, but he did say that in a republic on the scale of the United States, constant investments needed to be made to keep the people informed of and connected with government. To achieve this Madison argued that there should be subsidies for newspaper delivery, and this was something that happened with the Postal Service Act of 1792.
When we consider the problem of low trust in government today, we should recognize this past lesson. Today we have technologies that couldn’t be imagined back in 1792— most people could drown themselves in information if they sought to—but even so, the problem of scale has never been fully solved. Even today, and in fact especially today, we need to consider what new investments can be made so that people feel more connected with, and therefore less distrustful of government. It’s interesting to note here that Americans today continue to be much more trusting of state and local government—the forms that feel closer to them—when compared with a more distant federal government located “in Washington.”
You discuss the “disappearance of democracy” in certain parts of the world. What are the factors that have endangered it?
The fate of democracy has always depended on the balance of power between those who rule and those who are ruled. Throughout much of history the development of a bureaucratic state posed the greatest challenge to democracy because it gave those who ruled the ability to dispense with the need for popular participation in government. Rulers who lacked a bureaucratic state had to rely on their people to assist with basic tasks of government, such as assessing and collecting taxes. In other words, they had to adopt early democracy. Once rulers succeeded in creating a bureaucratic state—as would happen in China from a very early date, and as would eventually happen in the Middle East—they could then carry out these functions of government on their own, without popular participation. One of the great ironies here is that in many cases, things we usually associate with the advance of civilization—writing, techniques for measurement, a better understanding of the soil—helped make this autocratic alternative more feasible.
Conversely, what are the forces that have spurred changes toward democracy—such as in England or Europe?
There were two important factors here. The first is that European countries for a very long time lacked the sort of strong bureaucratic states with advanced technologies (for the time) that emerged in China and the Middle East. In the medieval and early modern periods Europe’s backwardness in this area meant that its rulers were continually obliged to seek the assistance and support of their people when governing; they formed councils, assemblies, and parliaments. European countries did eventually develop strong bureaucratic states, but this did not happen until after the parliamentary tradition became very firmly anchored. The second factor was that over time, as a result of military competition and changes in military technology, European rulers came to need the great mass of their people more than ever to fight, and so, based on the principle that some called “one man, one gun, one vote,” rulers extended the right to vote to all adult males in exchange for popular acceptance of universal conscription. This helped lead to the advent of modern democracy in Europe.
You write that your book gives us reasons to be hopeful about the future of democracy. Why is that?
The most basic reason for hope is that democracy is not something that was invented in one place at one time by one society. Rather, it is a basic way that many human societies have governed themselves. That’s one reason why we should not be so surprised today to see vibrant democracies in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, where 30 years ago some observers forecast that this would not happen. But just because democracy will survive somewhere does not mean that American democracy as we know it is also certain to endure. That is something that will depend on finding new ways to help people feel more connected to and less distrustful of government.
Democracy’s Shapeshifting Past—and Its Uncertain Future
Varghese K. George reviews The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today, by David Stasavage - The Hindu
David Stasavage – The Decline and Rise of Democracy
Democracy is “a natural occurring condition in humanity societies.” This single idea sets Stasavage apart from so many theorists who look to the past. His first chapter, “The Origins of Democratic Rule,” is as breathtaking as it is ambitious. He reshapes the narrative of the democratic origins through a broad examination of different peoples throughout antiquity such as the prehistoric Germans, the Huron of North America and small pockets he discovers throughout historical memory. Far from a Western innovation, Stasavage believes “democracy itself occurs naturally among humans, even if it is far from inevitable.”
Stasavage differentiates between early and modern democracy. Early democracy is based on consent. The assemblies of Athens may have facilitated an early form of direct democracy, but representative democracy was also fundamentally distinct. Representatives were bound to the instructions of their constituents. There was little room to negotiate or compromise. The English Monarchy found this an obstacle in its dealings with Parliament. They began to require deputies to be sent without mandates from their constituencies. Consequently, “modern democracy incorporates an element of autocracy” because “it was monarchical power that helped drive the shift away from early democracy.”
Modern democracy is built from a combination of different institutions that includes the general population in the process of governance. Autocracy is also assembled from a combination of institutions, but it is designed to exclude people from participation in governance. For too long elections were used as the determinant of democratic governance. Elections are just one institution developed to allow for popular participation in governance. Free speech is another tool liberal democracy has used to facilitate popular participation into governance.
A true autocracy centralizes all public decisions into a single authoritative figure. The reality is no government has been able to avoid some form of decentralization of authority. Stasavage recognizes these elements of democracy within authoritarian or autocratic governments. The People’s Republic of China has multiple channels of authority that require consensus among different power brokers. Yet this is not the same as democratic governance because the channels of inclusion are tightly restricted with the intention to avoid popular governance.
The development of a bureaucratic state, according to Stasavage, was an important element in the establishment of autocratic government. The Chinese are often the quintessential example of how bureaucratic governance leads to political centralization of an autocratic ruler. But Stasavage breaks with scholars like Fukuyama who date the emergence of the Qin at the conclusion of the Warring States Period as the origin of the Chinese centralized state. Instead, he notes how an effective bureaucracy was already established in the Zhou and likely earlier.
Consensual governance for Stasavage emerges in the absence of an effective bureaucracy.
Without a bureaucratic state, leaders become reliant on the consent of others for revenue in the form of taxation.
The Chinese were able to bypass the consent of other powerbrokers because bureaucrats were able to properly assess and enforce efforts to raise revenue. Stasavage effectively breaks with Fukuyama and Huntington who believe liberal democracy relies on the presence of a strong state capable of protecting individual rights and providing security for its citizens.
Fukuyama and Huntington both recognized how the modern bureaucratic state emerged in Germany. Stasavage is right when he recognizes how bureaucracy predates the innovations of the Prussian state by a few millennia, but he completely overlooks the importance of an independent, professional bureaucracy as a part of modernization. And while the Prussian bureaucracy did emerge in an autocratic state, it did not pose an obstacle to its eventual democratization.
Stasavage largely interprets a bureaucracy as an appendage of the ruler. It gives the ruler an independence from representative assemblies but can also make them dependent on a professional institution like the military for political power.
Leaders throughout history have found the institutions of the state had a mind of their own with the potential to revolt and install their own leaders. Roman Emperors found their rule depended on the support of the Praetorian Guard and its different military generals. Modern regimes have found their governance was subject to the support of the military who have taken power into their own hands on more than a few occasions.
Sheri Berman offers a more complete description of the rise of modern democracy in Europe. She explains how democracy faced many false starts and setbacks in its development. Berman wrote her historical account in part to show how the failure of many new democracies often lay the foundations for the permanence of democratic governance in the future. Indeed, it is ironic how some critics believe a failed effort at democratic governance reflects a premature attempt at democratization as though a longer and more sustained authoritarian legacy was a preparation for the emergence of a democracy. Stasavage takes such a broad historical view he sees democracy as inevitable in Europe. He believes the presence of representative assemblies paved the way for democratization even though the assemblies were not very representative and often abandoned during the early periods of political modernization.
Bureaucracies and assemblies are simply institutions people develop to organize society. They evolve based on the needs of different eras and the machinations of important powerbrokers. Jennifer Gandhi and Adam Przeworski wrote an important paper called “Authoritarian Institutions and the Survival of Autocrats” where they explain how representative assemblies had become coopted into authoritarian political systems. They were not simply Potemkin organizations but became a key element that provided legitimacy for the regime. It is not enough to recognize institutions which typically symbolize consensual governance. It is important to understand how a political system works to include the participation of some and exclude others. A democracy leans towards political inclusion, while authoritarian governance works towards exclusion. The American South of the Jim Crowe era is an example where governance can straddle elements of democracy and authoritarianism at the same time. African Americans faced a hostile authoritarian state, while whites believed their government was representative. In hindsight, it is impossible to equate the segregationist policies of the American South during this era with democratic governance despite the presence of elections, representative assemblies and a constitution with a Bill of Rights.
The Decline and Rise of Democracy is researched well. Stasavage uses a wide range of historical sources to recognize elements of democracy in multiple cultures from antiquity as it evolves into the modern age. The first few chapters on early democratic cultures were stronger than his account of the development of modern democracy. However, his account of the development of democracy in England was remarkable. My mind gravitated toward Huntington’s account in Political Order in Changing Societies as I began the chapter. Stasavage caught me off guard as he not only recognized the analysis of Huntington but continued to refute it with ease.
A new subfield of democratic studies has begun to emerge where political scientists have begun to reflect upon history to better understand democracy today. Democratic theorists have long looked to Athens for inspiration. However, Stasavage and Berman have greatly expanded the sources of inspiration for democratic governance. Their research will offer greater clarity as others begin to reflect upon not just the process of democratization but the elements of democratic governance itself. Hopefully many more brilliant scholars will follow in their footsteps and offer additional analysis of the history of democracy and popular governance.
jmk, carmel, indiana, democracyparadoxblog@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter @DemParadox
David Stasavage - The Decline and Rise of Democracy
https://democracyparadox.com/2020/04/04/david-stasavage-the-decline-and-rise-of-democracy/
Scholarly Blinders and the Diversity of Authoritarianism
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/scholarly-blinders-and-the-diversity-of-authoritarianism/
Is Populism Really a Problem for Democracy?
Author:
Source: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/populism-really-problem-for-democracy
Saved on: 8/5/21, 12:57 PM
The Autocratic Challenge to Democracy – - James R. Rogers
The argument in David Stasavage’s book, The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today, is both more provocative and less sanguine regarding democracy than the title suggests. Despite the title, Stasavage does not present a variant of Whig history where the world inevitably moves toward ever greater realizations of equality and liberal democracy. Democracy, in Stasavage’s telling, is only “a” possibility in human political evolution, and not a necessary one at that. This despite Stasavage making clear, de rigueur, that he of course prefers democracy and, at times, putting his scholarly thumb on the democratic side of the empirical evidence he presents.
Stasavage’s political world offers pretty much only two options, democracy and autocracy. (Unlike Aristotle who treats “oligarchies” as a constitutional form separate from democracy and autocracy, “oligarchies” in Stasavage’s book generally get wrapped into one category or the other, depending on the number of oligarchs relative to the population.)
Stasavage emphasizes early in the book that democracy—defined as systems of government in which rulers “seek consent from those they govern”—“occurs naturally among humans, even if this is far from inevitable.” By democracy being “natural” Stasavage seems to mean that humans have often (but not always) spontaneously formed themselves into democratic communities throughout history. Democracies in human history do not arise merely by “reflection and choice,” to quote Alexander Hamilton in a different context, but also arise naturally, that is “by accident and force.”
But democracies are not the only form of political organization that arise naturally among humans. While Stasavage avoids using parallel language regarding the naturalness of autocracy, he is nonetheless clear from start to finish that autocracy is as natural a human political form as democracy is. For instance: “The story of early democracy and early autocracy points away from a single evolutionary path: it instead shows two very different trajectories of political development . . .”
The signal aspect of Stasavage’s story of human political development is that there is not one trajectory. There are, as it were, multiple equilibria, autocracy as well as democracy. It is this dual focus in the substance of his argument that saves Stasavage’s book from presenting just another kind of Whiggery.
Yet he downplays the edgier implications of this dual result. Seeming to run away from the positivistic results of his analysis, his express research question circles around democracy only. “Where does democracy come from, how is it sustained, and what is its future?” Yet in Stasavage’s analysis, provocatively, democracy does not evolve necessarily out of autocracy, neither in the ancient world nor in modern times. Yet Stasavage underplays the challenge his analysis presents to modern democratic sensibilities. Despite his analysis sketching multiple “different trajectories of political development,” when Stasavage summarizes his analysis he spins it toward democracy, presenting a somewhat more robust case for democracy’s development and sustenance than I take his evidence actually to suggest.
Despite sketching autocracy as a persistent and robust alternative to democracy, Stasavage tends to sketch democracy as having all the attractors relative to autocracy. He explains what these are:
If we agree that early democracy and early autocracy were two alternative paths of political development, then the next question is what led a society down one path as opposed to the other…. early democracy was more likely to prevail when rulers were uncertain about [agricultural] production, when people found it easy to exit, and finally when rulers needed their people more than their people needed them.
My own rephrasing of these conditions is that “early democracies” more likely prevailed when: [1] local residents hold superior information (“asymmetric information”) relative to rulers regarding what their land can produce, [2] people can easily vote with their feet by moving (a “Tiebout“-like condition), and [3] when rulers have goals (for example, fighting the King next door) and cannot simply expropriate resources needed to pursue those goals without provoking an unwanted domestic response.
Stasavage’s first condition associated with the rise of democracy relative to autocracy is that democratic assemblies or councils can provide a comparative informational advantage to rulers relative to bureaucratic/autocratic administration when land conditions within a region were heterogenous. When that condition held, he argues, it induced rulers (at the margin) to institute councils and assemblies as a means to acquire needed information for taxation, thereby promoting the rise of democratic or near-democratic institutions.
Similar arguments are not unknown. James Madison, for example, argues for an informational need of a sufficient number of House members in Federalist 56 for Congress to craft taxes and commercial regulations to local circumstances. Yet, for Stasavage’s developmental argument, it is not entirely clear what set of incentives he posits for representatives relative to bureaucrats that results in the comparative advantage of assemblies to bureaucracies. In particular, why would representatives sincerely report higher-quality land to an assembly when that report would result in higher taxes for that land.
The asserted association between democracy and voting with one’s feet is also curious. As is the norm for political scientists, Stasavage seems to assume that most people want robustly to participate in their own governance. While I have no doubt that many people value participation in self-governance, there are nonetheless decision costs that affect the willingness of people to participate in self-governance. Consider that even in modern democracies, where participation is a minimally-burdensome stop at the polling booth every six months or so, scarcely over half of Americans vote in presidential elections, and even fewer usually vote in state and local elections. Political systems that require even greater levels of political participation necessarily increase the cost to self-government. It may be heresy in the academy, but not everyone so values political participation as to be willing to pay the cost.
So, too, scholars regularly conflate the results of being able to “vote with one’s feet” with actual voting. Yet while the Tiebout dynamic stems from freedom of movement, it does not map onto internal political organization. This ties together freedom of movement with Stasavage’s third condition, the capability of a ruler to expropriate the people for the ruler’s own goals. Ease of exit and entry limit the possibility of even autocratic rent extraction, thereby actually making autocracy more attractive to the populace rather than less.
Jim Crow, for example, arose in the South because of majoritarian political preferences, not in spite of them. Stasavage sidesteps the breadth of the problem of majority faction by focusing attention on today’s excoriated minority of the wealthy.
The upshot is this: with Stasavage putting his thumb on the scales in favor of democracy misses the possible virtues of autocracy in his comparative theory. For him, humans flee autocracy if they have the chance. Yet that seems more to reflect today’s democratic sensibilities more than historical reality. Think, for example, of the very earnest autocratic fevers of the 1920s and 1930s, and not simply within Italy and Germany, among British and American elites as well. Or consider the often fawning treatment of the Chinese model of state-capitalism in the pre-Trump era. And, today, hundreds of thousands of expats from the democratic West quite happily choose to live and work in autocratic political systems across the world.
This raises an uncomfortable challenge for modern democrats, uncomfortable because today is a time in which “democracy” is a godterm. Yet, at times in the past and present, people have been attracted to autocracy over democracy because autocracies can provide efficient decision-making and energetic government relative to democracy. To be sure, these benefits need to be weighed against the level of extraction an autocrat might impose on the population. And yet that, in turn, would be related to ease of exit and entry on the part of the population, among other things. Yet surely positive political science requires that we recognize the possibility that people under some circumstances might prefer to live in a well-run autocracy.
And then Stasavage minimizes other costs to democracy. In particular, he ignores the full breadth of the threat of majority tyranny. He does recognize, and dismisses, the classic concern with democracy that popular majorities would use their power to expropriate the wealthy, and so destroy their economies. Yet he all but ignores other forms of factionalism, not least temptations majorities have to oppress racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Jim Crow, for example, arose in the South because of majoritarian political preferences, not in spite of them. Stasavage sidesteps the breadth of the problem of majority faction by focusing attention on today’s excoriated minority of the wealthy.
Finally, then there is Stasavage’s simple dualism itself: democracy or autocracy. Oligarchy does not exist in Stasavage’s political world except in passing. While he occasionally nods to the oligarchic possibility, Stasavage generally defines any political system with a council or assembly as democratic. At least he resolves any doubt in favor of the democratic label. This despite the possibility that the council or assembly with which a ruler interacts, and whose consent the ruler needs, could very well be an oligarchic institution rather than a democratic one. This results in Stasavage seemingly sweeping a host of governments into the democratic category when they might more properly be designated as non-democratic oligarchies instead.
Stasavage’s analysis would have been helpfully complicated by adopting Aristotle’s set of three basic types of rule: rule by the one, by the few, and by the many. He could have deepened his argument further still by recognizing that all three forms have both a proper form and deviant form. The classic organization would avoid Stasavage’s oversimplified set of political possibilities, and would have conceded the possibility of “proper” or attractive forms of autocracy as well as of democracy.
Yet despite these weaknesses, Stasavage has written a fascinating book. His encyclopedic treatment of ancient and non-Western political forms is impressive, and the evidence he adduces that bureaucracy is the handmaiden of autocracy in early democracies (well, except when it isn’t) deserves additional attention in light of the rise of bureaucratic government in modern democracies. Most of all, however, while Stasavage summarily weights the evidence in support of democracy, he is a good enough scholar that the evidence he accumulates in the book actually speaks to the big question of democracy in this age: Whether democracy truly merits the unquestioned, and unquestionable, faith with which modern Westerners have invested it.
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-autocratic-challenge-to-democracy/
Democracy is common and robust historically and across the globe | Aeon Essays
Today, many people see democracy as under threat in a way that only a decade ago seemed unimaginable. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed like democracy was the way of the future. But nowadays, the state of democracy looks very different; we hear about ‘backsliding’ and ‘decay’ and other descriptions of a sort of creeping authoritarianism. Some long-established democracies, such as the United States, are witnessing a violation of governmental norms once thought secure, and this has culminated in the recent insurrection at the US Capitol. If democracy is a torch that shines for a time before then burning out – think of Classical Athens and Renaissance city republics – it all feels as if we might be heading toward a new period of darkness. What can we do to reverse this apparent trend and support democracy?
First, we must dispense with the idea that democracy is like a torch that gets passed from one leading society to another. The core feature of democracy – that those who rule can do so only with the consent of the people – wasn’t invented in one place at one time: it evolved independently in a great many human societies.
Over several millennia and across multiple continents, early democracy was an institution in which rulers governed jointly with councils and assemblies of the people. From the Huron (who called themselves the Wendats) and the Iroquois (who called themselves the Haudenosaunee) in the Northeastern Woodlands of North America, to the republics of Ancient India, to examples of city governance in ancient Mesopotamia, these councils and assemblies were common. Classical Greece provided particularly important instances of this democratic practice, and it’s true that the Greeks gave us a language for thinking about democracy, including the word demokratia itself. But they didn’t invent the practice. If we want to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our modern democracies, then early democratic societies from around the world provide important lessons.
The core feature of early democracy was that the people had power, even if multiparty elections (today, often thought to be a definitive feature of democracy) didn’t happen. The people, or at least some significant fraction of them, exercised this power in many different ways. In some cases, a ruler was chosen by a council or assembly, and was limited to being first among equals. In other instances, a ruler inherited their position, but faced constraints to seek consent from the people before taking actions both large and small. The alternative to early democracy was autocracy, a system where one person ruled on their own via bureaucratic subordinates whom they had recruited and remunerated. The word ‘autocracy’ is a bit of a misnomer here in that no one in this position ever truly ruled on their own, but it does signify a different way of organising political power.
Early democratic governance is clearly apparent in some ancient societies in Mesopotamia as well as in India. It flourished in a number of places in the Americas before European conquest, such as among the Huron and the Iroquois in the Northeastern Woodlands and in the ‘Republic of Tlaxcala’ that abutted the Triple Alliance, more commonly known as the Aztec Empire. It was also common in precolonial Africa. In all of these societies there were several defining features that tended to reinforce early democracy: small scale, a need for rulers to depend on the people for knowledge, and finally the ability of members of society to exit to other locales if they were unhappy with a ruler. These three features were not always present in the same measure, but collectively they helped to underpin early democracy.
A map of the Iroquois Confederacy from 1730, copied by James Burt, London, in 1882. Courtesy the Darlington Collection, University of Pittsburgh
To see how autocracy – the alternative to early democracy – functioned, we can find no better example than that of Imperial China. China’s earliest historical dynasties, the Shang and the Zhou (from the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE), had kings who ruled through an army and a bureaucracy, and there is no evidence of councils or assemblies of the people. Autocracy has been a near-constant feature of rule in China, suggesting that it wasn’t some aberration but instead simply a different path of political development from Western European societies. The culmination of the Chinese model, achieved during the Tang and Song dynasties (7th to 13th centuries CE), involved the incorporation of the political elite into the state via a system of meritocratic recruitment based on a civil service exam. The Chinese civil service exam – which Europeans with their weak states later marvelled at – served a purpose not so different from a parliament but in a fundamentally different way because it was not local people who chose the representatives.
Of course, a simple return to early democracy is neither possible nor desirable. But early democracy does help us better understand the frailties of the modern democratic experience. A closer look at early democracy can in turn help us to understand what we might do to see that democracy today fulfils the underlying idea of demokratia: bringing power to the people.
The first difference between early democracy and our democracies today is that this earlier form of rule was a small-scale phenomenon. In some cases, governance took place only at the level of a small community, as was the case with the Hidatsa, an Indigenous American group living on the banks of the upper Missouri River. When governance was local like this, councils tended to meet very frequently. In other instances, such as with the Mesopotamian Kingdom of Mari, a larger polity existed, but early democracy remained a local phenomenon practised through the assemblies of individual towns. These might meet to consider how taxes should be allotted. It was rarer to see an early democracy that had a larger-scale assembly that drew members from multiple locations as did the Huron confederacy. Even in that case, though the Huron moved over a large area, the territory of concentrated settlement remained compact, something like 56 km east to west, and 30 km north to south. Populations were similarly small compared with modern democracies, with the Huron confederacy composed of, roughly, only 20,000 individuals.
Small scale had a critical implication for the nature of politics; in Classical Athens, among the Hidatsa and in the Kingdom of Mari, those who had the right to participate in politics tended to do so in a very direct and intensive way, particularly in local assemblies. In modern democracy, participation is very broad – often broader than in early democracy – but it’s also not deep; for most of us, it’s limited to voting in elections every few years, and in between these moments others make the decisions. The potential risk of this arrangement, as has been noted by astute observers since the birth of modern republics, is that citizens might grow distrustful of the people who are actually running government on a daily basis and of the special influences to which they might be subject. It’s worth noting that, among long-established democracies today, there’s a robust correlation whereby countries with larger populations tend to have lower trust in government.
We need new investments that better connect citizens with government
One way to address the problem of scale is to delegate much more power to states, provinces and localities. There are some today, such as the American political analyst Yuval Levin, who here invoke the principle of subsidiarity: devolve power to the lowest level that’s practical. In some Western democracies, such as Canada, Germany or the US, the presence of a federal system ensures that this is already the case for many policies, but this strategy can go only so far. On crucial issues of foreign trade, diplomacy or pressing constitutional questions, for example, it’s impractical for individual states, regions or provinces to set their own policy.
If we can’t return to ‘all politics is local’, then one alternative is to see what could be done to better connect citizens with a distant state. Historically, one way this has happened is through investments in the diffusion of information.
The early republic in the US provides an important example of government investment to overcome the problem of scale. In ‘Federalist Number 10’ (1787), James Madison had written that a large republic would naturally suffer less turbulence than would a small one, but a few years after the ratification of the Constitution, he began to sing a very different tune. In an essay entitled ‘Public Opinion’, Madison wrote about the difficulty in a vast republic that people would have in informing themselves about government. So he advocated the subsidised distribution of newspapers, and this helped result in the passage of the Postal Service Act of 1792.
The world today is much different than it was in 1792; citizens, if they want to, can drown themselves in information and disinformation. This suggests that we need to think of new investments that might better connect citizens with government by giving them information sources that are in touch with reality and that, in the case of the US, would avoid fanning the flames of longstanding racism. In some countries, most notably the US and the United Kingdom, the local press, though known to be both more trusted and less partisan than national outlets, faces economic conditions that are leading to its disappearance. A subsidy for local news outlets could be money well spent, just as the subsidy that the US Congress voted in 1792 was appropriate.
If large scale has the potential to lead to distrust and disengagement in a democracy, then a closely related problem is that of polarisation. Polarisation can take many forms, such as that involving tensions between different classes of people in the same location, or a difference of opinions between people living in different locations. In a broad set of democracies today, polarisation has increasingly taken this latter form, with those in large, cosmopolitan urban centres acquiring an entirely different worldview from those elsewhere, whether they involve rural districts as in the US, or distant urban centres in the UK, or the contrast between more urban and western areas in Turkey and those areas further to the east. In many of these cases, political scientists have shown that polarisation is asymmetric, as those on the political Right have been the principal ones to move to the extremes. The problem of geographic polarisation was not unknown to people in early democracies, and they found creative ways of addressing it. While we can’t simply copy the solutions they found, we can still certainly learn from them.
Consider the example of the reforms implemented by Cleisthenes in Athens beginning in the year 508 BCE. In the decades prior to this date, the Athenians had developed a collective form of governance with a Council of Four Hundred, which had been established by Solon earlier in the 6th century BCE. It was composed of 100 members from each of four historical tribes, which might have been primarily kin-based or occupation-based, depending on which source one considers. While this system provided equal representation for each tribe, to the extent that there was animosity between these groups – one might even say polarisation – the system of representation might have reinforced this tension. Seeking to change matters, upon assuming power in 508 BCE, Cleisthenes revamped Athenian society by doing away with the four traditional tribes and creating 10 new ones to replace them. Aristotle later recounted a crucial element of Cleisthenes’ reform: he assigned individual local groups of people called demes by lot into each of the 10 new tribes, therefore ‘intermixing the members’ of the prior four tribes. Aristotle states further that Cleisthenes made sure that the new tribes weren’t geographically concentrated; instead, each had deme membership from the city, the coast and the interior of the Attic Peninsula.
People in polarised societies today could learn something from the Iroquois clan system
Importantly, the principle of Cleisthenes’ reform is far from unique; we have eloquent examples of people in other early democracies across multiple continents doing more or less the same thing. To see this, we can return to examples of the Huron and the Iroquois societies, each of which was divided – much like the Athenians – into separate tribes, and clearly geographically demarcated. This might seem like a system that would be ripe for intertribal conflict. But the Huron and the Iroquois had an ingenious system to fight against localism and polarisation. They divided their society not only into tribes, composed of villages, but also into clans that cross-cut tribal divisions. So, if you were a member of the wolf clan in an individual village among the Cayuga tribe in the Iroquois confederacy, to take one example, then you had a natural affiliation with Cayuga members of that clan from other villages, and you also had a link to members of the wolf clan in other Iroquois tribes. The clear intent of this system was to better bind society together by mitigating polarisation along tribal lines.
People in polarised societies today could learn something from the Iroquois clan system and the 10 Athenian tribes. As we become ever more tribal in nature in countries such as the US, perhaps we could learn more from societies that actually had tribes. The lesson wouldn’t be to establish new tribes or clans of our own: it would be, instead, to examine how different political and social institutions can aid in creating links for people living in different places, from different backgrounds and holding very different beliefs. The idea here would be to help strengthen and unify society by creating new links across the lines of polarisation.
The absence of a state bureaucracy was a chief reason why early democracy proved to be such a stable form of rule for so many societies. With little autonomous power – apart from the ability to persuade – those who would have liked to rule as autocrats found themselves without the means to do so. The flipside of this was that, in many early democracies, those who were unhappy with a central decision could simply refuse to participate or even decamp to a new locality. It was much like many online communities today where those at the centre, sometimes called ‘benevolent dictators for life’, have no option to rule as autocrats because they depend upon input and services provided by individuals who could simply refuse to participate or move elsewhere.
Modern democracy lacks the same protections from central power that early democracies enjoyed. At the same time, having a powerful central state can allow a society to achieve goals such as universal education and prosperity, to name but a few. The question then is how to live with a state while preserving democracy. Doing so involves remaining vigilant about the encroachment of central state power rather than hoping that a country’s constitution alone might provide adequate protection, most notably in the case of the US where the document was laid out at a now-distant founding moment.
Those who debated the US Constitution of 1787 recognised the danger posed by an encroaching central state. The compromise they achieved resulted in an extensive series of checks and balances designed to enable state power while also restraining it. The administration of the former US president Donald Trump demonstrated just how much executive power could run rampant in spite of all the intended safeguards. In some eastern European countries, a similar pattern has taken place and even gone much further. In the 1990s, it was believed that the checks and balances safeguarding democracy would involve membership in the European Union and adhesion to its extensive set of supranational rules, yet in this decade the Fidesz party in Hungary and their Law and Justice counterparts in Poland have demonstrated that it’s possible to break a great many democratic norms – and in fact rewrite the formal rules – without having EU membership serve as an effective backstop. The lesson from all of these cases would seem to be that, while designing a constitution well is an important thing, after that point maintaining a healthy democracy in the face of executive power requires constant vigilance, and perhaps more vigilance than we had been used to paying until late.
Recent decades have seen a substantial expansion of presidential power that poses a risk to US democracy
The most extreme way to constrain executive power – again by returning to early democracy – would be to drastically limit it by allowing for neither a standing army nor a tax bureaucracy. We can think here of the US senator Ted Cruz, who as a presidential candidate in 2015 proposed abolishing the Internal Revenue Service. With the example of how Prussian despotism took hold after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) very much in mind, 18th-century thinkers saw a standing army in particular as something that invited tyranny. But in the places where people expressed the deepest worries about this possibility – the UK and its settler colonies – the eventual rise in power of the central state to extract resources and to use coercive force didn’t result in the demise of democracy. The reason for this is that, when there is a deep tradition of consultative rule established first, it’s possible for an executive and representatives of the people to build and control a state together. The key question is one of sequencing: does a strong state emerge prior to some form of collective rule or is it the reverse?
When collective governance precedes state construction, this can help secure democracy, but this sequence alone doesn’t ensure it. It’s ultimately up to individual legislators – as well as the people who elect them – to oppose attempts by executives to accrue ever more power. In a country like Hungary, which lacks a long tradition of democratic rule, it might not seem so surprising that this mechanism has failed but, in a country like the US, it’s been far more surprising to see the illiberal actions taken by the Trump administration, most often as a result of executive order.
In the case of the US, there’s an argument to be made that the reason why the Trump administration was able to go so far is that recent decades have seen a substantial, creeping expansion of presidential power that, in the end, poses a risk to our democracy. In a book published a decade ago, Bruce Ackerman, a prominent legal scholar, wrote that this trend – something that occurred under both Democratic and Republican administrations – carried the risk that the White House could become a ‘platform for charismatic extremism and bureaucratic lawlessness’. We should be more vigilant about warnings such as this.
The lessons are clear: we will be best positioned to preserve our own democracies if we recognise that the history of democracy is much broader and deeper than is often presumed. People around the world, throughout history, have devised democratic institutions and practised democracy. We can learn from their experience to see how democracy today might be strengthened.
https://aeon.co/essays/democracy-is-common-and-robust-historically-and-across-the-globe
Representation and Consent: Why They Arose in Europe and Not Elsewhere
Abstract
Medieval Western Europeans developed two practices that are the bedrock of modern democracy: representative government and the consent of the governed. Why did this happen in Europe and not elsewhere? I ask what the literature has to say about this question, focusing on the role of political ideas, on economic development, and on warfare. I consider Europe in comparison with the Byzantine Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, and Song Dynasty China. I argue that ultimately Europe's different path may have been an accident. It was produced by Western Europe's experience of outside invasion that replaced the Western Roman Empire with a set of small, fragmented polities in which rulers were relatively weak. Small size meant low transaction costs for maintaining assemblies. The relatively weak position of rulers meant that consent of the governed was necessary. I also suggest how these conclusions should influence our understanding of democracy today.
Keywords
democracy, assemblies, state formation, war
INTRODUCTION
Medieval Western Europe was witness to two important and long-lasting political innovations, the practice of political representation and the tradition that rulers should obtain consent from these representatives when governing. Societies in other regions sometimes developed practices similar to these, but there is little doubt that they reached their fullest extent on the European continent. Important scholarly work in political science has acknowledged and emphasized the European origins of consent and representation (Pitkin 1967, Pocock 1975, Finer 1997, Manin 1997, Skinner 2002, Urbinati & Warren 2008, Schwartzberg 2014). Further work has analyzed when and where representative institutions developed in medieval Europe, and what the consequences were (North & Thomas 1973; Bates & Lien 1985; Levi 1988; North & Weingast 1989; Kiser & Barzel 1991; Downing 1992; Ertman 1997; Acemoglu et al. 2005; Stasavage 2010, 2011; Abramson & Boix 2014; Boucoyannis 2015a,b). But why did all of this happen in Europe at this time and not elsewhere? This is a fundamental question about which both of these strands of scholarship have little to say.
In this review, I use recent scholarship to consider three answers to the “Why Europe?” question. These involve the causal role of political ideas, the influence of economic development, and the constraints of warfare.1 Each of these explanations turns out to have something to offer, and from them we can draw lessons for democratization in other places at other times. In the end, though, the best answer to the question may lie elsewhere. A historical accident may have helped pave the way for representation and consent to develop. This accident involved the political collapse and fragmentation that Western Europe faced as a result of Germanic invasions and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In a curious way, then, we might say, “No barbarian invasions, no democracy.”
How should we think about testing the different explanations? Practices of representation and consent began to develop in Europe relatively soon after the first millennium. We can compare Europe then with, for example, China under the Song Dynasty, the eastern Mediterranean under the Byzantine Empire, or the Middle East under the Abbasid Caliphate. When we do so, however, we face very large inferential problems. There are a multitude of factors that differed between these four regions at this time, and isolating a single one as the explanation for democratization seems a hopeless task. This is, no doubt, why relatively few recent scholars have ventured in this direction. Three of the best efforts are Hui's (2005) comparison of China and early modern Europe, Kuran's (2011) comparison of Europe and the Islamic world, and work by Blaydes & Chaney (2013) that also compares the latter two regions. This scholarship has provided important inferences about comparative political development across regions, and I refer to them below.
Perhaps because cross-regional comparisons are so difficult, most recent scholars who work on early democratization have restricted their attention to Europe itself. There is a long tradition of work of this style in the social sciences and humanities. In recent years, political scientists and economic historians have amassed new systematic evidence to approach the problem (Abramson & Boix 2014; Boucoyannis 2015a,b; Stasavage 2010, 2011, 2014; van Zanden et al. 2012). This adds to the earlier important work of other scholars (Bates & Lien 1985, Downing 1992, Ertman 1997, Levi 1988). The advantage of this new scholarship is that by comparing numerous European polities over time, we can have a better hope of isolating the individual causal factor or factors that explain why representation and consent emerged. The disadvantage of this focus is that we are in a sense looking under the lamppost. Looking only at Europe may cause us to fail to realize why it differed from other regions.
Ultimately, a convincing explanation for why representation and consent first emerged in Europe ought to have two properties. It must first be consistent with cross-regional evidence. Second, because cross-regional comparisons have their pitfalls, the explanation must hold up when we make within-Europe comparisons. In other words, those areas of Europe that are best typified by the explanation should be those where practices of representation and consent were strongest.
In what follows, I first present a very brief survey of what is to be explained—the early development of practices of representation and consent in Europe and their failure to develop in other regions. This is followed by an examination of the causal role of ideas, economic development, and warfare. Finally, I consider the possibility that European governance outcomes derived from a historical accident. Even if China, Byzantium, and the Middle East also suffered “barbarian” invasions, Western Europe was unique in experiencing invasions that not only toppled the existing unified political order but also replaced it with a set of fragmented polities in which the balance of power between rulers and ruled favored the subsequent development of representation and consent.
WESTERN EUROPE IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
Before evaluating potential answers to the “Why Europe?” question, we need to clarify what needs to be explained. During the two centuries after the first millennium, Europeans developed practices of representation and consent that would spread to varying degrees throughout the continent. These practices were unique in comparison with developments in Song China, the Byzantine Empire, or the Abbasid Caliphate. In Western Europe the idea developed that whether one was in an autonomous city republic or a territorial monarchy, those who governed ought to somehow obtain the consent of citizens or subjects. The Latin phrase most frequently used to express this was quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus tractari et approbari debet, or “What touches all should be considered and approved by all.” We can find variants of this expression in an early city constitution of Florence from the late 13th century (Najemy 1979), just as we can find it in Edward I's convocation of the Model Parliament in England in 1295. The origins of quod omnes tangit, which first appeared in medieval usage in the 12th century, are discussed in the next section. Several recent political theorists have emphasized the importance of this concept for the development of democratic theory (Pitkin 1967, Manin 1997, Schwartzberg 2014).
Along with the principle of consent, medieval Western Europeans also developed the closely related idea of political representation, and this too was present to varying degrees in both urban republics and territorial monarchies. The chief means of seeking consent came to be the summoning of an assembly at which representatives from different parts of a society would be able to express themselves. Practices of representation and consent were most highly evolved in the many autonomous cities of Europe, but they also were frequently found in larger territorial states.
Professed adherence to the practices of representation and consent was widespread across the European continent throughout the medieval and early modern eras. In some cases this resulted in very real constraints on rulers. In other instances rulers may have paid lip service to quod omnes tangit without doing much to implement it. In these cases “consent” would have amounted to being called to an assembly to agree to something that had already been decided. One, admittedly imperfect, way to judge how widespread the practice of consent became is to consider the frequency with which representative assemblies met. A second way is to ask what prerogatives they enjoyed in practice. Several recent studies present quantitative evidence to consider this question (Stasavage 2010, 2011; van Zanden et al. 2012; Abramson & Boix 2014).
There was no equivalent to the European pattern of representation and consent in the other three world regions to which I have referred. This does not imply any judgment about European superiority or about which region's citizens tended to have the highest levels of welfare. It is a simple observation that nothing looking like European representative institutions developed elsewhere.
In China under the Song Dynasty, as argued in the recent survey by Kuhn (2009), rulers professed to uphold the ideal of a Confucian state, where they would be guided by certain principles of righteousness. To aid in this objective, and more simply in maintaining their rule, the emperors had an elaborate system for locally based officials to transmit information to the center. Chinese thinkers also subscribed to the idea of a mandate of heaven that implied certain obligations for a ruler. The following excerpt was written by the Song councilor Lü Gongzhu in the year 1085, just about the same time that the idea of quod omnes tangit was first being applied to government in medieval Europe.
Although Heaven is high and far away, Heaven inspects the empire daily. Heaven responds to the deeds of the ruler. If he continuously cultivates himself and treats his people justly, then Heaven sends prosperity, and the Son of Heaven receives the realm for all times. There will be no misfortune and nobody will create trouble. If he, however, neglects the deities, ill-treats the people, and does not fear the Mandate of Heaven, there will be misfortune (quoted in Kuhn 2009, p. 10).
This statement clearly reflects a theory of government in which those who rule have obligations to those they govern. The principle of the Mandate of Heaven had been invoked by emperors of prior dynasties and would continue to be invoked subsequently. However, the concept of a Mandate of Heaven never extended to obtaining consent, nor did it involve assembling representatives to achieve this goal.
A priori, the institutions of rule in the Byzantine Empire might have presented a greater opportunity than did those in China for the development of consent. From the fourth century, the empire actually had a senate based in Constantinople composed of a hereditary class of individuals who had originally been enticed to migrate from Rome. The senate was an advisory body that had no formal role of consent over imperial policy, nor were senators specified as representing anyone among the diverse constituencies across the empire. The senate did, however, have some role in consenting to new emperors and when succession to the throne was uncertain or contested. In the centuries to follow, rather than evolving into a true representative body, the Byzantine senate did just the opposite. Emperors found it expedient to grant royal officials and others senatorial privileges, and the size of the body quickly swelled to more than 2,000. The senate lost any real influence, and although it continued to survive and have some formal prerogatives, even these were revoked by Emperor Leo VI. This happened about a century before quod omnes tangit would first be used as a principle of government in the western part of the European continent. In the words of the renowned Byzantine historian George Ostrogorsky (1969, p. 245), “The Legislation of Leo VI marks the culmination of an important historical process which had united the total power of the state in the hands of the ruler and placed all affairs of state in the care of the imperial bureaucracy.” This was obviously not a fertile ground for the development of representation and consent.
While ideas about consent were developing in Western Europe, the Abbasid Caliphate ruled most of the lands around the Mediterranean from its capital of Baghdad. This was a high point of cultural and economic development. One feature distinguishing the caliphate was that, many centuries before any Western European state would have a professional bureaucracy or a professional military, the caliphate had both (Kennedy 2006). The Abbasids therefore often thought of their operations as divided between “the people of the pen” and the “people of the sword” (van Berkel 2013). What the caliphate did not develop, however, was any systematic idea that consent should be obtained from those who were ruled, even though there was in practice something of a split between temporal and spiritual authority in the caliphate that might have opened up this possibility.
From the above survey, it seems clear that medieval Western Europeans developed a new and unique form of governance. All four societies I have considered had institutions and principles for the relationship between rulers and ruled, some of which involved the idea that rulers should somehow be constrained. Yet medieval Western Europeans were unique in having institutions that provided such extensive requirements for rulers to obtain direct consent from those they governed. The next question to ask is why this was the case.
THE CAUSAL ROLE OF IDEAS ABOUT GOVERNMENT
The most direct answer may simply be that Europeans had different ideas about government. Someone had to invent the practices of representation and consent to begin with, and if we look at this process of invention, then we may better understand why it happened in Europe and not elsewhere. Individuals who invent ideas are often rediscovering things that were suggested previously, and scholars have proposed two ways in which this may have happened in medieval Europe. The first possibility involves the rediscovery of the theory of the classical Greek polis, and in particular the works of Aristotle. The second involves the influence of Roman law. (As it turns out, the second claim is more plausible than the first.) However, rather than suggesting how old ideas place constraints on societies, this story instead shows how people can be very inventive in adapting old ideas to pursue new goals.
There is a long tradition suggesting that medieval innovations in government depended on the rediscovery of classical Greek texts and those of Aristotle in particular. Aristotle's Politics did not describe a system of political representation because the Greek polis was based on direct participation, but it certainly did offer much food for thought to those who sought to establish an independent city republic. The most prominent modern advocate of this idea is J.G.A. Pocock, who in his tremendously influential work, The Machiavellian Moment (1975, pp. 74–75), made the following statement.
The theory of the polis—which is, in a certain sense, political theory in its purest original form—was cardinal to the constitutional theory of Italian cities and Italian humanists. It offered a paradigm of how a body politic might be held together when it was conceived, as an Italian commune must be, as a city composed of interacting persons rather than of universal norms and traditional institutions; and its value in this capacity did not end when it had depicted the polity as a moral community, since a city like Florence, whose normal institutional structure was that of a complex of interlocking assemblies, boards, and committees, could learn much about the theory of such a structure from Aristotelian analysis and Athenian history.
Pocock's claim may well apply to the development of Renaissance humanism in Florence and elsewhere. However, it cannot be used to explain the initial development of city republics in Italy. Aristotle's works did not appear in Western Europe in Latin translation until around 1260, long after ideas about consent were developed and long after independent city republics had emerged. [This point is also emphasized by Monahan (1987) and Skinner (2002).] To consider this issue, I drew on data from Stasavage (2014) to consider the date at which European cities became autonomous (if they ever did) in relation to the date when Aristotle's Politics first appeared in Latin translation (Figure 1). In this dataset, half of the autonomous cities that emerged across Europe did so more than a century before the initial translation of Aristotle into Latin. Within Italy itself, fully 80% of the cities that became autonomous achieved this status more than a century before Aristotle appeared in Latin.
Figure 1 Rediscovering Aristotle did not lead to city republics. The figure shows the number of European cities becoming politically autonomous in each time period (data are from Stasavage 2014). The vertical line marks the approximate date (1260) at which Aristotle's Politics first appeared in translation to Latin.
The within-Europe evidence fails to support the idea that the rediscovery of the classical Greek polis led to the development of consent and representation. Again, this is not to say that Aristotelian ideas had no influence on subsequent thinkers. It simply means that they did not precede the development of representation and consent. What about cross-regional evidence? This doesn't work very well either because Aristotle's works were known in Byzantium and the Islamic world long before they reappeared in Western Europe. In fact, during the period when Western Europeans rediscovered Aristotle, in many cases the first translations they produced were from Arabic. People in Byzantium or the Abbasid Caliphate could have drawn upon Aristotle's work to develop ideas about governance, but they did not.
The influence of Roman law presents a much more plausible explanation for the emergence of representation and consent than does reference to Aristotle. What is fascinating about this story, however, is that rather than simply rediscovering and applying Roman ideas, medieval Europeans used Roman legal concepts in a fundamentally new way to suit new purposes. We can see this with respect to both consent and representation.
Consider first the case of quod omnes tangit. This phrase had been part of Roman law and was incorporated in the law code compiled by advisors to the Byzantine Emperor Justinian around 530 AD. The curiosity is that in the Justinian code, quod omnes tangit referred strictly to private affairs between individuals and not to affairs of state. As described by Post (1964, p. 169), the Justinian code stated that if several people had common stewardship (tutores) over something, then that stewardship could not be ended, altered, or otherwise exercised without the consent of all. To take an example, if several people had common rights over a stream, then the principle of quod omnes tangit must apply to the exercise of those rights. To re-emphasize, there was nothing in Roman law or Roman practice to suggest that this same principle could or should apply to affairs of state or to rulers obtaining consent from those they governed.
Beginning some time in the 12th century, medieval Europeans applied the concept of quod omnes tangit in an entirely new way. The exact date for the concept's reappearance is unclear, but it is certain that scholars associated with the newly founded University of Bologna were responsible for the development. The principle of quod omnes tangit in its new formulation was referred to by Gratian in his Decretum (ca. 1140), and it soon would be applied in both ecclesiastical and secular assemblies (Monahan 1987, Manin 1997). It was used by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) for ecclesiastical assemblies (Congar 1958). It was used by Emperor Frederick II when summoning representatives from Italian cities to an assembly on two separate occasions in 1231 (Monahan 1987). We also know that Edward I invoked the quod omnes tangit when convening the Model Parliament in 1295, and some 19th-century English scholars, in particular William Stubbs, erroneously took this to be the origin of its use in affairs of state. The more accurate view is to say that quod omnes tangit did indeed take root in England, but in its medieval version it was first developed in Bologna and then subsequently spread throughout Europe.
As they did with the development of theories of political consent, when developing ideas about political representation, medieval Europeans adapted Roman terminology and Roman law to a new purpose. A first step was the development of the concept that one person could act for another, or for a group of individuals. The European political landscape circa 1200 was one where numerous autonomous towns, church groups, and other corporate entities all had some claim of self-governance. Both ecclesiastical and secular rulers faced the thorny question of how to interact with these entities. The solution adopted was to have one individual act for the corporate group, and once again it was scholars trained at Bologna who were critical in spreading this idea (Post 1964). In the Spanish kingdoms of León and Aragón, individual towns sent procuradores to royal assemblies. In ecclesiastical assemblies, corporate groups sent procurators. This was a Latin term that had been used by the Romans in a totally different sense; for them, a procurator was a person charged with governing a province, not an individual acting for or expressing the views of the inhabitants of that province. (For example, Pontius Pilate was the procurator of Judea.) Such individuals also existed in Song China, where the closest analogue was a prefect or cishi. In China, however, there was no shift toward these individuals acting on behalf of the population they administered or obtaining their consent.
The experience of medieval procurators or procuradores shows how once again medieval Europeans had adapted Roman law to suit a new objective. The causal sequence seems to have been that cities and towns became autonomous first, creating a need to readapt Roman legal concepts. Post (1964, p. 69), one of the foremost historians who worked on this question, describes the process:
It is as if the lawyers and judges had suddenly realized that there were numerous communes with their institutions and officers, and numerous merchant and craft guilds, and that they must at once apply the newly discovered principles of Roman law to them. Once more the rise of Bologna and the new Roman law are of the utmost importance in the civilization of the twelfth century.
The final step was to develop an explicit idea of political representation. As observed by Pitkin (1967) in her classic study on the subject, the Romans made use of the word repraesentare, from which our word representation derives. However, like quod omnes tangit, the term repraesentare had nothing to do with politics. The Romans used it strictly in the sense of making something that was absent present, or depicting something through a work of art. They never used it in the sense of one human being acting for others. Medieval Europeans took the Roman concept of representation and adapted it to a new circumstance. Georges de Lagarde (1937) suggests that the new use of “representation” spread widely during the first decades of the 14th century as part of an attempt to justify the rights of assemblies across Europe, assemblies that were taken as representing the social groups from which they were drawn.
So why didn't regions other than Western Europe adopt principles similar to quod omnes tangit, or representation in the sense of one individual acting for others? Likewise, why didn't they independently invent a system of political representation? Consider the example of the Abbasid Caliphate. For the Abbasids, if we followed what Kuran (2011) calls the “essentialist thesis,” we might suggest that something in Islamic tradition made it fundamentally incompatible with the principle of consent. However, in his work on the parallel question of why corporations developed in Western Europe but not under Islam, Kuran (2011, 2005) presents numerous reasons to reject the essentialist thesis. Islamic tradition could in fact have been used in creative ways to support the development of corporations. It is possible that one might say the same thing about the practice of consent. After all, Roman tradition was not necessarily favorable to the full development of consent in Western Europe either, yet medieval Europeans were able to draw on Roman tradition in creative ways to greatly expand the idea.
The example of Roman law shows that ideas did play some role in the development of representation and consent. However, rather than seeing ideas only as constraints, or as the weight of the past, we see in this story that old ideas can be adapted to suit new purposes. This provides an important lesson when we think about obstacles to democratization today. When people assume that a society's traditions are incompatible with democracy, they ignore the fact that local traditions and concepts can be reshaped to suit new goals.
THE INFLUENCE OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Economic development is a second possible explanation for why Western Europe developed practices of representation and consent while other societies did not. Scholars who work on the contemporary period are divided over the claim lodged by Lipset (1959) that political regime type depends on a country's level of economic development. My goal here is not to adjudicate on this question, to which Boix & Stokes (2003) and Boix (2011) respond in the affirmative, Acemoglu et al. (2008) respond negatively, and Przeworski et al. (2000) respond somewhere in between. Although these studies examine democracy and development over recent time periods, the same underlying logic can also be applied to the initial emergence of the practices that would one day become characteristic of modern democracy. Just as many people today suggest that economic development favors democracy, the same may have been true for practices of representation and consent in earlier times. There is a venerable tradition suggesting that urban growth, and with it the development of an urban bourgeoisie, was important for the spread of representative government in Europe. In his General History of Civilization of Europe, Guizot (1838) described a process whereby the emergence of commerce and towns led to towns seeking self-government and then establishing relations with princes. Abramson & Boix (2014) and Boix (2015) find empirical support for precisely this idea. It also fits closely with Tilly's (1992) ideas about the role of capital and coercion in European history, as well as Rokkan's (1973, 1975) observations about European state formation.
If we try to assess the role of economic development by looking within Europe itself, then there is a decent case to be made that the practices of representation and consent developed earlier and to a greater extent in richer regions. This will not come as a surprise to those familiar with the city republics of northern Italy, nor those who know the history of representative government in the Low Countries. The real questions are whether we can say something more systematic about the role of economic development and just how important it was. One approach is to consider recent work in which scholars chart the development of representative assemblies across the European continent. Stasavage (2010) offers a dataset covering 24 European polities between 1250 and 1750 recording whether there was an assembly, how frequently it met, and what its prerogatives were. Van Zanden et al. (2012) independently provided a dataset covering a broad swath of European states over roughly the same time period, recording whether there was an assembly and how frequently it met. Finally, Abramson & Boix (2014) also consider systematic data, drawn principally from these earlier studies on European representative institutions. Each of these three sets of authors combine their data on representative institutions with data on urbanization from Bairoch et al. (1988). Urbanization is used as a reasonable, though certainly not perfect, proxy for economic growth at this time.
It turns out that drawing precise conclusions about the effect of urbanization on representation is bedeviled by a problem of reverse causality—representation may also cause urbanization. Van Zanden et al. (2012) show that the level of assembly activity in the preceding century is positively correlated with urbanization in the current century, suggesting a causal effect of the former on the latter. Abramson & Boix (2014) report the opposite finding. They show that lagged representation does not cause urbanization but lagged urbanization causes representation. They take this as supporting the economic development hypothesis. Finally, while Stasavage (2010) investigates urbanization only as a control variable, we can nonetheless use his dataset to examine these same questions. When doing so, we see evidence that lagged urbanization may have caused representation and that lagged representation also may have caused urbanization. The former result is robust to the inclusion of both polity fixed effects and time-period fixed effects in the estimation. The implied magnitude of the effect is also relatively large. Based on this estimation, a one-standard-deviation increase in urbanization would result in an increase in assembly activity by one half of a standard deviation.
If the within-Europe evidence suggests that more urbanized areas had more intensive representation, the next question is what the cross-regional evidence says. Here we face a thorny measurement problem. It is difficult enough to compare levels of economic development within medieval Europe. It is even more challenging to make cross-regional comparisons for such early times. Even so, there seems little doubt that if economic development alone were driving things, we would not expect representation and consent to have first developed in Europe.
The best-known source for very early gross domestic product (GDP) data is that compiled by Maddison (2007), which gives us no reason to believe Western Europe had a higher level of development than many other regions around the turn of the first millennium. However, Maddison's figures for this early period were by his own admission essentially guesses. Subsequent data reported by Bolt & van Zanden (2014) and Broadberry et al. (2014) have given us (relatively) more precise estimates for real GDP per capita at this time in each of the four regions I have considered. In Western Europe, England just after the Norman Conquest is the one country for which we have a decent per capita GDP estimate, and so I have used that for purposes of comparison in Figure 2. The clear picture that emerges is that England was not in the lead, and based on level of development alone, one would expect representation and consent to have developed first in China.
Figure 2 Estimates of real per capita GDP around 1000 AD for four regions. Data are from Bolt & van Zanden (2014) and Broadberry et al. (2014).
In any investigation of economic development, we might also want to look to other measures that are often correlated with it. Literacy provides one possibility to the extent one thinks that more literate populations are more likely to demand that rulers seek their consent when governing. Buringh & van Zanden's (2013) data on manuscript and book production in Western Europe from the 6th through 18th centuries show that although book production was initially driven by the monastic order, over time the growth of the urban population was more responsible for its development. This provides a further reason to believe there was a link between European urbanization and the spread of representative institutions, even though Buringh & van Zanden do not themselves speculate about this possibility. The problem is that once again, cross-regional evidence poses a problem for the development hypothesis. In China, woodblock printing became widespread around the turn of the millennium, and moveable type was also invented around this time, although it was less frequently used because of the greater complexity of the Chinese script (Angeles 2014). Unlike in Europe, where books circulated widely and arguably strengthened civil society, in China the Song Dynasty succeeded in actively controlling book production to promote stability of the regime (Wei Ze 1995, Kuhn 2009). It was as if Facebook or Twitter were under direct state control. The fundamental causal factor, then, seems not to have been technology for printing books but rather absence of central state control.
To sum up, there is strong suggestive evidence that, within Europe, more economically developed areas were more likely to have active representative assemblies. Yet when we remember that Europe at the turn of the millennium was not one of the most advanced areas of the globe, it seems unlikely that economic development was the main reason for Europe's political divergence from other areas. Something else must have been afoot.
THE CONSTRAINTS OF WARFARE
Warfare is a third factor that could have favored the development of representation and consent. We have plausible examples from recent times where social groups have demanded rights in exchange for war participation (Levi 1997, Klinkner & Smith 1999). The same has been suggested for the past. It is said that medieval European rulers sought to fight wars, and in order to obtain the funds necessary to do this, they felt compelled to establish representative institutions that gave taxpayers certain privileges (Bates & Lien 1985, Levi 1988, Blockmans 1998, Stasavage 2011). This same story has been applied to Europe in later centuries (Dincecco 2009, 2011) and more contemporary times (Besley & Persson 2013). Much of the literature focuses on the idea that assemblies were important because if rulers obtained consent, then they could raise more taxes. This is very plausible. However, there was another critical component to the story. In an era when Western European states lacked effective tax bureaucracies, members of representative assemblies and the groups that they represented also played a direct role in tax administration (Herb 2003).
There is much truth to these arguments, and the within-Europe evidence is supportive. In the medieval era, the demands of war in Western Europe were intimately linked with the development of representative institutions. However, the cross-regional evidence suggests that there must be something else to the story. Byzantine rulers, Abbasid caliphs, and Chinese emperors all fought frequent wars, but they did so while adopting a completely different governance strategy from medieval Western European leaders. Instead of establishing representative assemblies, they taxed without obtaining consent, and they used centralized bureaucracies to achieve this goal. The lesson then is that if we think of representative assemblies as important state institutions, then war did indeed make the state, as Tilly (1992, 1975) and everyone who cites his famous line believes. However, war only had this effect because a more complete state involving a centralized bureaucracy along the Chinese, Byzantine, or Abbasid model did not already exist.
We can use the data compiled by Stasavage (2010) to investigate the within-Europe evidence on warfare and representation. This dataset considers polities in 50-year time periods. In cases where a polity was at war less than half the time, a representative assembly tended to meet about once every four years. In instances where a polity was at war more than half the time, assemblies on average met once every two years. This is a large difference, and it is statistically significant in a regression that includes both polity fixed effects and time-period fixed effects. In this same dataset, we can also see that polities at war were more likely to have representative assemblies that enjoyed prerogatives to review and to oppose new tax measures.
So far, the evidence suggests some causal link between warfare and representative institutions, although of course we do not know in which direction causality runs. War might lead to institutional development, but institutional development would also make it easier to wage war. Ideally we could also establish whether any effect of warfare was temporary or permanent. If the effect of warfare were temporary, its correlation with representation might have reflected the fact that rulers called assemblies when they needed them and dispensed with them afterward. (France during the Hundred Years War provides a good example of this phenomenon. French monarchs during this period called the Estates-General more frequently than they had in the past, but after the war ended they reverted to prior form.) If the effect were instead permanent, then warfare would have led to a lock-in effect. The arrival of peace would not lead to the withering of a representative institution. Perhaps once the fixed cost of maintaining an assembly is spent, the ongoing costs of maintaining it in the future are relatively easy. The statistical evidence drawn from Stasavage (2010) provides no definitive answer. Simple descriptive statistics show that past war incidence is indeed associated with more intensive current political representation. However, the econometric evidence is less robust. The relationship is not statistically significant when controlling for country and time-period fixed effects.
It seems likely that warfare in Western Europe favored the rise of representative institutions, whether this effect was temporary or permanent. Some might suggest that Western Europe was more war prone than other regions, in which case the warfare hypothesis also passes the cross-regional test. The problem is that this simply was not true. Between 1500 and 1799, China was at war 56% of the time, France 52%, England 53%, Spain 81%, and the Austrian dominions 24% (Hoffman 2015). Clearly we cannot simplify and think of a peaceful China and a warlike Europe. Nor would a comparison with the Abbasid Caliphate or Byzantium produce a different result. These two states also were constantly at war, and often with each other.
If we think of war in general, then the within-Europe evidence suggests that it mattered whereas the cross-regional evidence suggests that it did not. These seemingly discordant facts might be reconciled if we recognize that what mattered was not only whether war was present, but also what types of wars states fought and how states financed them. When addressing the effect of war on political and economic outcomes, recent scholarship has emphasized this point. Hoffman (2015) argues that if we want to understand why it was Europeans who conquered the rest of the world, then we need to examine the specific war technologies present in Western Europe as well as Europe's tendency to have wars resembling a winner-take-all tournament. Likewise, for Scheve & Stasavage (2016, 2012, 2010), when considering the effect of war on taxation it is important to distinguish between wars of mass mobilization and more limited engagements. In work with Massimilano Onorato, they argue further that the scale of mobilization is itself determined by military technology (Onorato et al. 2014). Boix (2015) also emphasizes the importance of war technology for state formation.
It is possible to build on recent work to see how not just the presence but the style of warfare favored the development of representation and consent in Western Europe and not elsewhere. Blaydes & Chaney (2013) apply this approach in their comparison of political evolution in Europe and the Islamic world. If we think of war technology as involving not only how states fight but also how they raise the money to fight, then we immediately see a prime reason why warfare would have led to representation and consent in Western Europe but not elsewhere. Unlike states in some other areas, medieval European states lacked centralized bureaucracies for tax collection. A representative assembly could help. I expand on this idea in the next section.
WAS IT ALL JUST AN ACCIDENT?
So far, I have argued that political ideas, economic growth, and warfare all had something to do with the development of practices of consent and representation in Europe. Yet none of these explanations suffices as an answer to the “Why Europe?” question. In this section, I propose a different approach. We know that the development of state institutions for representation and taxation in Europe depended on the relative bargaining position of different actors and on the transaction costs these actors faced in meeting their goals (Levi 1988). I suggest that the manner in which the Western Roman Empire collapsed created a setting that favored the development of consent and representation. The (relatively) weak bargaining position of rulers made these practices necessary. Low transaction costs also made them feasible to implement. Alone among the four world regions considered in this article, Western Europe suffered not only outside invasion but also a complete takeover whereby a set of fragmented Germanic kingdoms replaced an existing state. Historians of this period, such as Wickham (1984, p. 18), have described this takeover as an “almost contingent” event. More recent evidence provides a hint, though only a hint, that the contingency to which Wickham refers may have been driven by climate change. During the fourth century, one of the worst droughts in the last 2,000 years hit Central Asia. It drove the people who would become known as the Huns westward, pushing other groups in the direction of the Roman Empire. Climatic conditions were also unfavorable in the western half of the Empire itself, but less so in the eastern half (McCormick et al. 2012). This would have aided attempts by the eastern half to defend itself against outside incursions.
To consider the accidental interpretation for the development of representation and consent, we need to include both cross-regional and within-region evidence. The first thing to consider is what actually happened during the Western Roman Empire's collapse and how this differed from events in other world regions. China, the Islamic world, Western Europe, and Byzantium all were subject to what one might call “barbarian” invasions of one sort or another at different times. But in the other three regions the barbarians were less successful, and when they did succeed, they sought to control the existing state apparatus rather than to replace it completely. For example, in China in the 13th century Kublai Khan proclaimed himself emperor and ruled through much of the existing state apparatus. At the time of the fall of the last Roman emperor in the West in 476 AD, this was not an option. The Germanic invasions that spelled the end of the empire were led by a set of disparate groups under no central control. Also, under the weight of these invasions, the Roman tax system had collapsed (Wickham 1984).
The Germanic kingdoms that replaced the Roman Empire in the West had two key characteristics that would matter for consent and representation: small size and relatively weak rulers. I consider each in turn.
The first characteristic was that these kingdoms were smaller and more fragmented than either the empire that preceded them or the empires that existed in Byzantium, the Abbasid Caliphate, or China. Those who seek to explain Western Europe's development often refer to the fact that it was politically fragmented. This fragmentation is generally thought to have promoted interstate competition and freedom with important developmental effects (Jones 1981, Mokyr 1990, Diamond 1997, Hoffman 2015). The mechanism I have in mind is different. Small size and fragmentation of polities in Western Europe meant that there were lower transaction costs for establishing and maintaining a representative assembly. This would be most true of the autonomous cities in Europe. The medieval historian Wim Blockmans (1998, 1978) has argued that small geographic scale was critical to the development of European representative assemblies because, in an era of difficult transport and communications, the costs of sending representatives to an assembly and of subsequently maintaining contact with them were daunting considerations. It is not hard to see the link between Blockmans and the work of Greif (2006), with his emphasis on the type of institutional adaptations that are feasible in small-scale, community-based settings.
Both the cross-regional and within-Europe evidence support the Blockmans hypothesis. Representation and consent emerged in Western Europe, which had become fragmented, rather than in Byzantium, the Abbasid Caliphate, or China, which were more unified. The within-Europe evidence also supports the hypothesis. Within Europe, smaller polities tended to have representative assemblies that were more active and that had more extensive prerogatives (Stasavage 2010). This relationship is supported by robust statistical estimates, and they point to one important reason why the Germanic invasions helped lead ultimately to the development of consent and representation. Differential polity size also helps explain why Pocock's (1975) “Machiavellian Moment” took place in Florence and not Paris. Finally, we might also refer to small polity size when examining prior episodes of consent-based governance, and in particular that which arose in Classical Greece (Ober 2015). In fact, the Greek parallel may go even further to the extent that the emergence of small polities was itself preceded by the collapse of a prior centralized political order (Ober 2015, ch. 6).
The second key characteristic of Western European kingdoms after the fall of Rome was that their rulers were in a weak bargaining position (explained by Wickham 1984, 2005, 2009). They lacked a centralized tax bureaucracy that might have allowed them to raise money without obtaining consent and assistance from representatives. This distinguished Western European rulers from those of Byzantium or the Abbasid Caliphate, which retained a centralized system of tax collection that had originated under Roman rule (Haldon 2015, Kennedy 2015). As Wickham (1984) has observed, the Germanic pattern of funding an army by giving land in exchange for military service, which was in place even before what we now think of as the feudal era, posed a fundamental problem for rulers. Once land was granted, it often proved very difficult to get back, even if one was unhappy with one's vassal. The de facto one-way aspect of this transaction placed rulers in a weaker position than if they had alternative means of raising an army. Lacking a centralized tax system or full control over their vassals, medieval European rulers might have had a greater need for a representative assembly to obtain consent. The cross-regional evidence on this point seems clear. Further research should demonstrate whether within-Europe evidence supports it as well.
Before we assume that there is a straight route from weak rulers to political representation, we need to acknowledge an important twist to the story. Rulers in a weak position might indeed have more need to establish a practice of consent than would rulers who could simply extract what they desired. However, a ruler in too weak a position might fail to get subjects to attend an assembly meeting. Barring times of great external threat to life and property, it might be preferable for a noble in the countryside or for people in a provincial town to simply sit out the party. Boucoyannis (2015a,b) has recently confronted this problem and proposes to stand much of the existing literature on its head. According to her account, European representative assemblies depended on the ability of rulers to compel their subjects to attend, not the weakness of rulers who needed to obtain consent from their subjects. This fits well with a remark in Pitkin's (1967) foundational work on representation: in the early days of the English Parliament, attendance was a responsibility rather than a right. The contrast between the English Parliament (where initial crown power was high) and the French Estates-General (where initial crown power was weak) provides the strongest evidence in favor of the argument made by Boucoyannis. It is also noteworthy that England had a centralized fiscal system much earlier than many other European territorial states. If Boucoyannis is correct, and her argument applies more generally, then we may need to think of a more sophisticated model. In order for representation to develop, a ruler's authority must be sufficiently weak that he cannot simply extract what he wants without consent. However, some degree of ruler authority is necessary in order to get people to show up at all.
In summary, the emergence of the practices of obtaining consent and political representation in Western Europe and not elsewhere may simply reflect the fact that among the four world regions I have considered, Western Europe suffered the most complete collapse of central political and bureaucratic authority. I have not considered here the reasons why this pattern of representation in Europe but not elsewhere persisted for numerous centuries. I see two possible answers that would merit further exploration. The first is efficiency. For society as a whole, establishing consent and representation may not have been much better than the alternative system of the sort characterized by the Mandate of Heaven. An efficiency perspective could help explain why consent and representation did not evolve independently in multiple places or why they did not diffuse more widely and more rapidly from Europe. The second possibility is that both systems with and without consent each had their own “self-reinforcing” logic, to use the term proposed by Greif & Laitin (2004). This could have been the case if they each provided those who governed with the optimal means of securing their rule given the other factors determining their influence over societal actors.
CONCLUSION
When we think about why representation and consent first emerged Europe, there is no doubt we should pay attention to ideas about governance, to economic modernization, and to the demands of warfare. Each of these three factors holds lessons for how we think about democratization today. However, we also need to think about how underlying conditions alter the balance of forces between rulers and the governed. We must also consider how historical accidents can alter this relationship.
The example of Roman law shows that past ideas provide an important repository for people shaping new political regimes. It also shows how, rather than simply acting as a constraint, past ideas can be reshaped and reformed to suit new desires. Transport this idea to today's world and it suggests that we should be skeptical of the notion that the underdevelopment of practices of consent in China, for example, is somehow determined by the absence of a long tradition pointing in this direction. I suspect that if such practices do become more firmly anchored in China, then it it will result from the adaptation of existing Chinese legal or political concepts to suit new purposes and new desires, just as medieval Europeans did with Roman law.
The example of economic modernization suggests that a developed economy is not a necessary condition for democracy, but it certainly doesn't hurt. Europe became an economic leader far too late in the game for this to explain its unique role in developing practices of representation and consent. All the same, within Europe, and in an era of political fragmentation, the most economically developed regions led the way. One could say then that there is conditional support for the modernization hypothesis—modernization mattered as long as the other enabling conditions were also in place.
As a third factor, the experience of warfare certainly contributed to the development of representation and consent in medieval Europe. A representative assembly turned out to be a useful means of raising money. However, war had this effect only because of underlying conditions. The small size of European states made it possible to actually maintain an active assembly. The absence of a centralized bureaucracy for tax collection meant that European rulers had all the more reason to rely on assemblies for finance and therefore to pay heed to principles such as quod omnes tangit.
In the end, the underlying European conditions favorable to the development of consent and representation can best be described as a historical accident. The barbarian invasions that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West produced a set of small and fragmented polities where it was feasible to organize representation and also desirable for rulers to do so. Simultaneously, the alternative route to state development, involving a strong centralized bureaucracy without institutions of consent, was not a possibility. The lesson for democracy in more recent times is that we need to consider how underlying conditions involving geography, technology, or other factors make it both feasible and desirable for both rulers and ruled to maintain a system in which political consent matters.
disclosure statement
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
Representation and Consent: Why They Arose in Europe and Not Elsewhere
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-polisci-043014-105648
So you want to be an autocrat? Here's the 10-point checklist
Democracy is in trouble, despite popular uprisings and dynamic social movements in Lebanon, Hong Kong and across Europe and Latin America.
Scholars say countries across the globe are experiencing a rise in autocratic rule, with declines in democratic ideals and practice. Autocratic rule – also known as authoritarianism – is when one leader or political party exercises complete power to govern a country and its people.
The year 2008 was when democracy peaked, according to a prominent democracy advocacy group, Freedom House. That’s when the world had the highest percentage ever of fully “free countries,” at 46.1%.
That declined to 44.1% in 2018, though full or partial democracy is still the most common form of governance.
Definitions of democracy vary. All citizens in a democracy have the ability to vote in elections, which should be free and fair. Independent media, freedom of speech and assembly and the rule of law feature in most contemporary perceptions of democracy.
Democratic declines are most notable in the regions with the world’s largest concentration of democracies. That includes Europe, North America and Latin America.
One example: The United States in 2018 was rated a “flawed democracy,” dropping from 21st to 25th place among 167 countries and territories.
In the old days, autocrats often came to or retained power through military coups and violent crackdowns. Now the shift from democracy to autocracy is slower and less obvious.
While control over security forces remains essential in the autocratic playbook, overt strong-arm tactics aren’t.
Pro-democracy protests, like this one in Hong Kong on Nov. 13, 2019, have erupted across the globe during a rise in authoritarian rule. AP/Kin Cheung
Top 10 list
I spent more than 15 years with the United Nations, where I advised governments and democracy advocates on how to strengthen the rule of law, human rights and democratic governance. I’m now a scholar of international law.
I’ve learned that today’s leaders with authoritarian tendencies aren’t just interested in using brute force to rise to power.
They are smarter, more resilient and can adjust their methods to take account of new developments, like modern technologies and a globalized economy.
Here are some of the newest tactics used by would-be authoritarians:
1. Extend executive power
The mainstay of today’s authoritarianism is strengthening your power while simultaneously weakening government institutions, such as parliaments and judiciaries, that provide checks and balances.
The key is to use legal means that ultimately give democratic legitimacy to the power grab. Extreme forms of this include abolishing presidential term limits, which was done in China; and regressive constitutional reforms to expand presidential power, like in Turkey.
2. Repress dissent and citizen efforts to hold government accountable
Restrictions on funding and other bureaucratic limitations silence the ability of the people to hold accountable those in power. More than 50 countries have passed laws that stifle citizen groups. Democracies have also jumped on this bandwagon. Limitations on permits for public protest, detention of protesters and excessive use of force to break up demonstrations are frequently used tools.
3. Capture elite support and, when needed, demonize them too
Economic growth and prosperity are critical to retaining elite or oligarchical support for autocratic leaders. Whether through state-owned businesses, media conglomerates or more sophisticated connections between governments and free-market corporations, money and politics, translated into government favors for the rich, can be a toxic mix for democracy.
Ironically, popular distaste with elite corruption is so high that modern autocratic populists, such as President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, have even risen to power on anti-corruption promises.
4. Appeal to populism and nationalism
Most would-be autocratic leaders today exploit existing tensions within complex societies in order to solidify their support.
In many places, fears of migrants and refugees have fueled resurgent nationalism, driving policies like U.K.‘s Brexit. In India, religiously based nationalism has maintained the power of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Blaming external forces for a country’s problems, such as Hungarian leader Viktor Orban’s demonization of George Soros, a Hungarian-born philanthropist who supports democracy-building, is also common.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has maintained power in part based on religious nationalism. AP file photo
5. Control information at home; misinform abroad
While propaganda and state-owned media is not new, control of modern technology and information has become a key battleground.
China has developed sophisticated technologies to censor and prevent the circulation of unwanted information and to track individuals in society.
Russia is at the vanguard of state media control at home while generating misinformation abroad. Many smaller countries have used internet blackouts to block organizing and communicating by social movements.
6. Cripple the opposition
Damaging the opposition parties, while not completely destroying them, is now essential. Infiltrating parties, co-opting members and using pure scare tactics are some possible actions in the autocrat’s playbook. This serves the purpose of retaining a target for pseudo-political competition while also stymieing the potential for new, more democratic forces to gain traction.
7. Covert election manipulation
Mostly gone are the days of vote-rigging and vote-buying as a path to power. Would-be autocrats have found cleverer ways to tilt the playing field in their favor. These new tactics include hampering media access, gerrymandering, changing election and voter eligibility rules and placing allies on electoral commissions.
8. Play the emergency card
Some autocratic leaders continue to use traditional strong-arm tactics, like declaring states of emergency, to enable further repression.
Since 2001, using the threat of terrorism or organized crime has played well for furthering autocratic rule. President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, which seems to have resulted in thousands dead in the Philippines, is one illustration.
Since an attempted coup in 2016 up until 2018, for example, Turkey was under a state of emergency which enabled President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to jail and persecute academics, government officials, media and human rights advocates.
9. Extend your model and influence
Today’s autocratic rulers are not keeping to themselves.
Using the international stage and their growing economic prowess, countries like China are spreading their influence through funding initiatives such as the Belt and Road to build infrastructure across Asia to Europe. They’re hiring professional consultants to advise and lobby foreign capitals for policies that reinforce their power.
10. Learn and share
Characterized as “autocratic learning” by scholars, national authorities from Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Belarus, Syria and other places are developing and exchanging models for containing threats of social movements and the so-called “color revolutions.”
International meetings and intergovernmental clubs can provide a platform for exchange. For example, Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has successfully rallied neighbor governments to help oppress opposition to his rule using the regional organization ASEAN. Government officials in Malaysia recently blocked Cambodian opposition members from returning to their country via Malaysia.
Direction unknown
Some experts claim the world is at a “tipping point” where decreasing faith in democracy will drive the dominance of autocracy globally.
The social movements of today inspire some hope that civil society – a key ingredient for democracy – though under pressure, is fighting the trend.
Nonetheless, strengthening democracy across the globe will prove impossible if even the most established democracies today fall prey to the tactics of would-be autocrats.
https://theconversation.com/so-you-want-to-be-an-autocrat-heres-the-10-point-checklist-125908
