Origins of Early Democracy

Ali T. Ahmed and David Stasavage

American Political Science Review, 2020, vol. 114, issue 2, 502-518

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

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:114:y:2020:i:2:p:502-518_14

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().