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The Evolution of Democracy: A Historical Analysis

1. Introduction to Democracy and its Origins

Democracy is ultimately a system of self-rule that depends on the broadest possible participation of those who live under it. Different modern interpretations of democracy can be abstractions that are too far removed from the concrete actions that citizens of a democratic society must take in order to remain democratic. Alexis de Tocqueville makes the important point: Democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. Any full understanding of democracy requires a close look at its evolution. The Greeks, in the first instance, invented the institutions of direct democracy, for instance using popular assemblies to make decisions or drawing lots to determine jurors. The Romans were the first to practice representative democracy, with courts, officials, and Senators serving as representatives of themselves.

Democracy has become the natural component of modern society. A state is considered to be completely transformed into a modern state only after the adoption of a democratic form of government. The change from an authoritarian to a democratic state not only alters the mechanism of government, but it also changes the whole character of the state. The transformation of the state can be properly termed as ‘democratization’. What then is democracy? The answer to this question is complex and moreover, it has changed profoundly throughout history. The concepts and practices of democracy that originated in ancient Athens differ greatly from those of Colonial America, the French Revolution, or the Arab Spring. The history of democracy has been described as a series of unfailingly interesting experiments. The citizens governing and inclusive institutions advocated by Samuel Huntington as the sole recipe for a successful democracy evolved over millennia, in fits and starts, through long periods of trial and error.

2. The Ancient Roots of Democratic Principles

The constant state of warfare and the large numbers of slave peoples attracted to these city-states gave added emphasis to the struggle for control, including the adoption of democratic principles and ideas. It was often stated that the aim of the city “is the security of life, property, independence, and freedom in relation to all other inhabitants”. This establishment of the state for the aim of achieving liberty, rather than the consolidation of the power of the ruling class, is a distinctly early democratic idea. In order to assert popular control of the executive, it was thought necessary to devise the crucial element that separates a true democracy, apart from any accidental tyranny of the majority, namely a system of machinery within the organization. The initial principle of democratic sovereignty might have potential, but the citizens removed themselves from the electoral machinery of their new state on a simple framework that would ensure, quite simply, that they would be free of any corrupting influence on their personal and economic lives usually associated with the wage-state.

From the very beginning of organized state activity, the seeds of democratic thought were sown through the ruling factor of the majority. The early city-states were simply ruled by a minority of male citizens who could trace their homes and blood back over a long lineage to the original founding of the particular city. Work was done by a slave class over whom the citizens exercised absolute power to ensure the continuation of the well-ordered state. Through the need to maintain a large slave population (especially in the agricultural-based city-states in which the early Greeks lived), the citizens of the state had to constantly fight for their land to ensure supplies of materials from which to live, as well as to keep the poor, or less than fully ‘Greek’ citizens from breeding a slave population large enough to threaten the established order.

3. The Development of Democratic Systems in Classical Antiquity

Athenian democracy’s performance was so extraordinary that, after more than 2,400 years, it still arouses admiration. Its beginnings coincide with the twilight of the aristocratic regime, marking the dominant ideology of those times. From the start, as many scholars compare for Pericles’s famous “Funeral Oration.” On the other hand, Athens was a city that experienced favorable social and economic conditions: non-marketable slaves provided all the town’s services, while citizens could take part in all the tasks associated with political life. Economic life was self-sufficient and structurally agrarian. The navy was essential for the city’s well-being. Large silos made the city more durable in the event it was besieged. The oligarchies, although they tried in vain and with various stratagems to abolish the popular government, helping, at times abusive foreign intervention, had to accept it reluctantly and at most waited for moments of luck, as they realized they had been carried out in 411 BC, 404 BC, and 30 BC.

Following the mythical period, the evolution of democratic systems in Greece overcame the cultural and ethnic restrictions of this archaic system. Political organization changed from being limited to Greek city-states to being expanded by Romanization. In some cases, it spread across the classical Hellenistic Mediterranean world. Democracy passed from being a city-national or city-regional model to encompass increasingly anonymous political systems. At first, Athenian direct democracy served as a paradigm. Since the Renaissance, the power of classical Athens has been celebrated in its federal union with eminently Periclean features. Although its root is Ionian with great mixings, Western civilization traces its origins from Athens.

4. The Rise and Spread of Modern Democracy

The question of the rise and proliferation of the democratic form of government is thus an essential aspect of our main theme, i.e., that of examining the extraordinary growth and quite sudden disintegration of the Graeco-Roman classical world. The phenomenon is of the very utmost interest, and can even be said to have a preponderant claim on our attention. For this reason, the subject will be dealt with in some detail, and the time-scene will be broadened. We are all of us, indeed, particularly well-qualified to analyze this aspect of the classic world. This is because we ourselves live in the matrix of a civilization which, after nearly two millennia of absolute imperial autocracy, has returned to its ancient Graeco-Roman roots to re-adopt the democratic ideal; an ideal which many other nations created by the Graeco-Roman expansion have also appropriated, and which others still, refusing to share our confident faith in the perfectibility of humankind, titubate between the restored authoritarian regimes set up by men or the tyrants of the bogy days of their history.

But although these fundamental beliefs are very old, the adoption of the democratic system of government has not been either universal or permanent – quite the reverse. The present state of affairs in the world, where the doctrine is generally accepted without question, is of recent growth. The rise of the democratic system of government produced a new form of civilization in its surroundings – the Graeco-Roman civilization from which the modern system is in part derived, and with whose extent and transformations this paper is concerned.

The evolution of democracy, as we shall use the term in its proper, modern sense, will be taken to date from the time when the Assembly and the Council of the People at Athens became an authoritative government. The essential principle of democracy is that the general body of citizens may take part in its government. This principle springs from the beliefs that all men are born free and equal, and that the interests of the individual citizens are bound up with those of the general community.

5. Challenges and Future Prospects for Democratic Governance

The time-constitutive or firm-rooted perspective sees democratic government contradicted by the “three Cs” of democracy: communitarian demands which are not backed up by the required disbursements of tax revenue, coercion which asks for a say based on mere engagement to reach a particular economic objective, consensus by the policymakers. From a business perspective, though, the “free market encroachment” fable would not only be enhanced but would also be very apt for the task of being the weavers of “rule-based competition” getting democratic votes as “consumers in a strong sense”. The assimilation game in a global world played along power political and central banking lines could only make the lingering discrepancies between democracy as horizontal legitimation provided by voters and “deep” supranational governance procedures ever more acute. If we consider the best-knowledge function of markets working in democratic systems, the alleged or identified threat by non-democratic regimes diminishes because of the competition for policy credibility. In the light of sluggish growth rates of major industrialized countries and of slow pre-accession signals given by emerging and transition market economies waiting for the opportunity to join world trade, competitiveness and the danger of low-growth feedback loops are a much more pressing, “non-existential” matter for the health of modern democracies.

This chapter codifies and outlines all the challenges democracies are facing and will face in the future if we consider the “long” and “longer” term sic et non. Given the increasing global dimension of economic activities as well as competition for markets, the accelerated reaction and learning processes fostered by a more open global market economy, a more integrated global economy is thereby steadily limiting policy discretion in many areas. The European parliamentary road to the single market in highly sensitive areas like monopolies, state aids, or the largely blocked liberalization path taken by airlines competing in long-haul networks and air cargo.