Talk:History of democracy

Diodorus mentions that after the Assyrians had ruled Asia for five hundred years "they were conquered by the Medes, and thereafter no king arose for many generations to lay claim to supreme power, but the city-states, enjoying a regimen of their own, were administered in a democratic fashion".^[3][4]

Herodotus in Histories gives an account on a debate over the constitution of Iran (Persia) in 522 BC, where Otanes argued in favor of democracy and the principle of equality before the law.^[5] Otanes recommended that the management of public affairs should be entrusted to the whole nation. He said, "it seems advisable, that we should no longer have a single man to rule over us. the rule of one is neither good nor pleasant... How indeed is it possible that monarchy should be a well-adjusted thing, when it allows a man to do as he likes without being answerable?... I vote, therefore, that we do away with monarchy, and raise the people to power. For the people are all in all."^[6][7][8]

I've moved the above section here because it is only supported by primary sources and therefore OR, but I think it is too interesting to hide it in the version history. Maybe secondary sources can be found (Encyclopaedia Iranica perhaps?). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:46, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

This isn't good use of either of those primary sources. Diodoros is actually (mis)quoting Herodotos in that passage, so he isn't an independent source. Herodotos' representation of the Persians debating whether democracy, oligarchy or monarchy was the best constitution for Persia is generally interpreted as him projecting his own political thought about constitutions (derived from the Greek situation), rather than an accurate transcription of a real Persian discussion. Furius (talk) 02:14, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

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This entire Article should be re-written and an emphasis should be placed on the difference between republic and democracy. Switzerland, Iceland vs England etc,... Very poor Article. Get started all over folks and leave your Anglo-centrism at the doorstep.

De facto there isn't much difference between a Republic or a Democracy, it's merely a semantic one in the context of today. Most republics now have a democratic (bicameral) house of parliament to control the power of the president/ruler and most representative democracies either have a president or a monarch as head of state, if only in name (not wielding real power in most cases). But yeah, a republic doesn't have to be a democracy. Grifo (talk) 01:39, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I believe the big issue with this article as it is ultimately is that it does not have a strong definition of democracy. As another user noted, lots of institutions of group decision making are mentioned passingly, not elaborated on particularly well, and do not make a strong contribution, especially in the medieval Europe section. The issue again with this is that most of these weren't really democratic as group decision making is not necessarily democratic.

I believe the medieval Europe section should be changed to only include the following:

- Uncontroversial cases of popular rule (Dithmarschen Peasant's Republic, Euskal Elizate, maybe the Ibadites of Oman?)

- I like the idea forwarded by another user of including non-state forms of democracy like medieval Abbots and Pirate ships.

- Undemocratic/pseudo-democratic predecessors of modern democratic systems (Swiss Cantons, Parliaments of Medieval England and Scotland, Early Dutch Republic, etc.) should have their own sections ideally, related to their specific relevance to the modern systems. If a past institution has not direct link to the modern democratic system of a country, I think it should not be included.

I'm not particularly keen on the mass inclusion of undemocratic republics such as Venice, Novgorod, and The Hanseatic Leagues, though this may overly complicate and clutter the article. The point I believe the article should be making here is that these were not democracies, and give links to the specific articles on the histories of these institutions. However, I feel that the inclusion of much of these states is clearly only the case due to the general bias towards European history. For example, Medieval Japan had various undemocratic group-decision-making institutions such as among the Samurai or in certain Daimyos, but we should not include them in the article because 1. these were not democracies and 2. these have no relevant connection to the modern day Japanese system of Democracy - Likewise Venice, Genoa, and Tuscany's republics were not democracies, nor have they much relevance to the systems of democracy in modern day Italy, which were founded after WWII, likewise the same is the case with the Icelandic Althing, Polish Sejm, Novgorod Veche. These states were ultimately about as Democratic as modern day China or Iran, if not even less so, and nobody is going to include the Iranian Islamic Republic in an article on the history of democracy 400 years from now. By this standard, it appears the article is largely using democratic as a relative term, based on what the contemporary perception of what was 'normal' for the era is - which is not necessarily what was actually normal for the era. Group decision making processes were very common in Medieval Europe. True democracies like Dithmarschen were exceeding rare (also I should state I'm not married to Dithmarschen being considered a democracy, if someone can find a source indicating it was not as democratic as it may seem I would be interested in that. Just from what I know generally it seems to be the most unambiguous case of popular rule in the middle ages).

Ok I'll give my proposal for what a democracy is:

1. A democracy must have elections, either of representatives or directly on issues. These elections must be open to the public, and elections cannot be relegated to just a tiny elite of powerful individuals.

2. A democracy must have a sharing or division of powers and responsibilities among different bodies. It doesn't need to be as developed as modern ones, I'm just looking for some system that guarantees that absolute power is not vested in a single individual or a single body of a small elite.

3. There must be some form of public accountability for leaders. This can be as simple as the public having the opportunity to remove an unpopular leader from office. It could also include things like the power to recall elected representatives, or something like impeachment.

4. Democracies should have some protections for freedom of expression. It need not be absolute, but it should be somewhat respected that criticizing leaders and government policies is not going to get you thrown in prison or exiled.

Let me know if I missed anything, but I think this is a good base. We should also clearly define what a democracy is not:

- Democracies are not elite counsels (this disqualifies all Elective Monarchies, Italian City States, guild Republics, most of Precolonial America, the Irish Tuatha, Icelandic Althing). That being said, some of these may be relevant to modern-day democratic systems and so I'm ok with their inclusion in the context of them setting a precedent of some democratic principles.

- Rulers being accountable to other elites is not democracy. The ruler of the tuatha for example, had to ensure they had the approval of other powerful figures in their tribe. That's not democracy. That's just despotism. In fact, it reminds me quite a bit of the indisputably undemocratic systems of governance used by other tribal societies such as the Bedouins and medieval Mongolia.

- A democracy is not a constitutional republic. Democracies don't necessarily need constitutions either. The United Kingdom's 'constitution' is for example exceptionally complicated, and it is not one document but instead a long list of documents of many different forms, as well as a large set of treaties, contracts, legal cases, granting of rights, and legislative norms, some of which have never been officially written down but instead are installed via legal precedent, complicated by the fact that the United Kingdom is made up of five different countries each with their own proto-democratic systems that all brought their own unique baggage, all of which built upon each other over the past 1000 years.

- Capitalism/proto-capitalism should not be conflated with democracy. Thus bodies like guild republics are disqualified.

Lastly, I'd like a word on the "Indigenous peoples of the Americas" section, which is exceptionally disappointing in my opinion. It seems this section largely exists to disprove the myth that the American government was inspired by the Iroquois government. This is disappointing as it is not the purpose of this article to disprove this myth. That would be more appropriate in articles related to Iroquois government and the History of the American constitution. Instead, I would like to see this section describe democratic systems in pre-colonial Indigenous governments, as well as modern uniquely-indigenous democratic systems. Swagmund Freud666 (talk) 07:28, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

The article is very long, the sections on Athens and Rome are too long, some of it is irrelevant to the issue of democracy and is just general history. The 19th century, when democracy as we know really emerged is just a list of bullet points and doesn't go into enough detail on suffrage and power of parliaments. The parts after that don't really deal with the subject either, and the 21st section is too long. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.165.210.98 (talk) 13:49, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

This article fails to mention the unique Indian device which allows universal suffrage despite a high level of illiteracy at independence. This consists of a simple ballot placed in a box of the voter's choice. One locked box is provided for each candidate and marked with a symbol such as a hand or spinning wheel or broom, etcetera. An electronic machine based on the same principle has been used for the last five election cycles. There are multiple keys, each marked by a unique symbol, and the voter can only press one key, only once. The Indian EVM is not networked and has no software; each machine must be physically secured. Sooku (talk) 07:54, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

I miss a mention of the election of abbots by monks and the election of captains by pirates (not privateers).--Error (talk) 09:57, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

I understand that it wasn't a longlasting experiment, nor a profound one in respect to law and order which is in essence also part of a fully functional democracy, yet it is a vital one to depict the time and age of which these philosophies gained more attention and the number of followers grew a lot. Yet, the forming of the rogue pirate Republic of Nassau is missing in the list. I plea to add it as well to the list for aforementioned reasons and to make such a list as complete as possible. And it wasn't merely for economic reasons the English crown ended this rogue Republic in a few years after it was formed. It also feared (the spreading of) its ideals it was built upon, including its democratic and equalitarian nature. Grifo (talk) 01:28, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

We should definitely remove GIF "Democracy since 1816". It not only uses only modern borders, it is also obviously painted from a western point of view. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Darer101 (talk • contribs) 16:06, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

The History of democracy#Historic origins section includes the following statement:

Anthropologists have identified forms of proto-democracy that date back to small bands of hunter-gatherers that predate the establishment of agrarian, sedentary societies and still exist virtually unchanged

I couldn't find this in the cited text, though specific page numbers could help. Regardless, this is disputed by Graeber and Wengrow:

For much of the twentieth century, anthropologists tended to describe the societies they studied in ahistorical terms, as living in a kind of eternal present. Some of this was an effect of the colonial situation under which much ethnographic research was carried out. The British Empire, for instance, maintained a system of indirect rule in various parts of Africa, India and the Middle East where local institutions like royal courts, earth shrines, associations of clan elders, men’s houses and the like were maintained in place, indeed fixed by legislation. Major political change – forming a political party, say, or leading a prophetic movement – was in turn entirely illegal, and anyone who tried to do such things was likely to be put in prison. This obviously made it easier to describe the people anthropologists studied as having a way of life that was timeless and unchanging.

This article will need some work to address the systemic bias here. Freoh (talk) 19:57, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

The current lead section states that democracy is generally associated with the efforts of the ancient Greeks. I couldn't find this in the cited source, though page numbers might help. Regardless, this seems like a poor use of weasel words. What does it mean to be "generally associated"? Freoh (talk) 10:40, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

The vast majority of scholarship on the history of democracy draws a link from Ancient Athens and the democratic aspects of the Roman constitution, through Renaissance & Early modern political thinkers, to modern democratic states. One symptom of this is the fact that "democracy" is an ancient Greek word Demokrateia. A relatively recent book-length study of this is Cartledge, Paul (2016). Democracy : a life. New York, NY. ISBN 9780199837458.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link), which also supplies further references. My feeling is that this article has become so focussed on nuancing that picture (e.g. there were societies elsewhere that had institutions like democracy) and is so deficient on the early modern period, that that this general narrative (which does need to be nuanced) gets lost entirely. The history section in the wiki article on democracy is a much better piece of work (Democracy#History). Furius (talk) 11:02, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

I disagree that the history section in the wiki article on democracy is a much better piece of work. It starts off by saying democracies and republics have been rare without citing page numbers and ignoring evidence to the contrary. Freoh (talk) 11:24, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

The current History of democracy#Democratic societies section states that it is believed that ancient Greece was the beginning of democracy, but the cited source pushes back against this idea. Who believes this? What does it mean for ancient Greece to be the beginning of democracy? Democracy had more than one beginning, and I haven't seen any evidence for an absence of democracy pre-Athens. Freoh (talk) 12:02, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

See the book that I just referred you to, page 1. Furius (talk) 12:31, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Even that source admits that it's controversial, and his argument uses a fairly precise definition of democracy:

However, despite those acknowledged ambiguities, one thing was not in dispute or open to argument about ancient Greek demokratia: whether you loved it or hated it, it denoted and connoted power, or, more precisely, political power (the derivation of ‘political’ from Greek polis will require separate exegesis later on). Isakhan and Stockwell and at least the great majority of those scholars whose work they edit do not share that precise ancient Greek focalization and concentration on power.

The word "democracy" is used much more broadly these days, see Democracy#Types of governmental democracies. I don't think that we should act like it's a general belief that ancient Greece was the beginning of democracy in general without more context. Freoh (talk) 01:06, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Cartledge admits that there is some discussion (and I acknowledge that too fwiw), but he comes nowhere near suggesting that the mainstream view is not that Athens was the first democracy. See also: Woodruff, Paul (16 March 2006). First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-530454-1.; Mitchell, Thomas N. (2019). Athens: A History of the World's First Democracy. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-24660-5.; Kagan, Donald (1991). Pericles Of Athens And The Birth Of Democracy. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-86395-5.) You have yet to provide any evidence that any scholarly source claims it was not, let alone that that is the mainstream opinion. I don't see how Cartledge's emphasis on democracy as the power of the people is distinct from modern interpretations of democracy, nor does he claim it is (they "do not share that precise... focalisation" not "they have a different definition"). Nor would he accept that the ancient Greek democracy was a totally distinct and different entity from modern ones, since the whole point of the second half of his book is to illustrate the line of descent from ancient to modern democracies. Furius (talk) 15:24, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Yes, this about the 5th place you have raised this. Heaven knows how many editors have pointed out defects in your reasoning. Johnbod (talk) 21:02, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Sparkie82 has added some text on democracy among animals. I strongly oppose this change. Firstly, the BBC is a good source for news, but not a reliable source for history. Secondly, I think it gives undue weight to put this in the first sentence of the text body. Thirdly, this is an article about the history of democracy, while this kind of animal behaviour has no discernible history. Since there are some academic articles that use the term democratic in connection to this behaviour, I could agree with a mention in democracy (certainly not as the first sentence of the text body though), but I think it better belongs to eusociality. T8612 (talk) 13:49, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree. The concept of "democracy" is been progressively diluted by constantly increasing various limited forms (primitive-democracies or tribalism) to the point we are losing focus from the main subject. Talking about a tribalism in X or Y country does not help the article. When I wrote the antiquity sections more than a decade ago, I did so with an open minded and being inclusive. However, it feels now that this might have been a mistake as it does not stopped the push for alternative theories not supported by the mainstream scholarship.User:A.Cython

I also agree. The weak point of this article is actually the history of democracy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, which is composed largely of bullet point lists. The edge cases are not irrelevant, but many of them are defining "democracy" as any form of group decision making, which is actually only one of the concept. Furius (talk) 23:32, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Nearly every article I've read titled "History of...", in which the subject has origins predating written history, will include some mention at the begin of its chronology about what is known about those prehistoric origins. Some articles will have just a sentence or two, while others will have an entire section about it. This aricle would be incomplete without a mention about what is known about the prehistoric origins of democracy.

As to the cited source, WP prefers secondary sources, which are often feature stories that themselves reference academic sources. Sparkie82 (t•c) 01:39, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

(1) WP:NEWSORG: "Scholarly sources and high-quality non-scholarly sources are generally better than news reports for academic topics". (2) The suggestion that these forms of group decision making are in some way the "prehistoric origins" of human democracy - stated in your edit here, implied by their inclusion in an "Origins" section in this article - is not in the source provided, making it WP:SYNTH or WP:OR. Furius (talk) 17:39, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

@Furius: Your comment "I agree. The weak point of this article is actually the history of democracy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, which is composed largely of bullet point lists....", had nothing to with democracy among animals which totally confused me and is why I tried to refactor the section (thinking you had accidentally posted to the wrong thread). Sparkie82 (t•c) 18:15, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

This article is not titled "History of human democracy", it's "History of democracy". All evidence indicates that democracy predates humans. If you think we should use the scholarly sources that say this instead of the secoundary sources, I'm ok with that. Sparkie82 (t•c) 18:15, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm agreeing with User:T8612's objections and with User:A.Cython's comment that this article has become overly focussed on edge cases (prehistory, India, animals) at the expense of actually providing an account of the core points in the history of democracy.

It is highly questionable that "democracy" exists among animals. A puff piece from a BBC magazine won't cut it and at best establishes it as a WP:FRINGE opinion. Note that "democracy" is not just group decision making; it is a type of government. Our article on democracy and our article on government both present their topics as exclusively human phenomena. Furius (talk) 02:44, 30 October 2022 (UTC)