Making direct democracy work: a rational-actor perspective on the graphe paranomon in ancient Athens

Carl Hampus Lyttkens (), George Tridimas () and Anna Lindgren
Additional contact information
Carl Hampus Lyttkens: Lund University
George Tridimas: Ulster University
Anna Lindgren: Lund University

Constitutional Political Economy, 2018, vol. 29, issue 4, No 2, 389-412

Abstract: Abstract The specific way the Athenians set up their democracy presents both theoretical and empirical challenges. Decisions were taken by majority vote in the Assembly. To keep politicians in line, the Athenians first used ostracism, which however was replaced by the graphe paranomon around 415 BCE. The latter provided that anybody who had made a proposal in the Assembly could be accused of having made an unconstitutional suggestion, bringing a potentially severe penalty if found guilty. We know of 35 such cases between 403 and 322. During the fourth century the notion of illegality was extended to a mere question of political undesirability. Henceforth any decision by the Assembly could be overturned by the courts, but if the accuser failed to get at least 20% of the jury votes, he was punished instead. While these rules can be seen as a safeguard against bad decisions, they also provided the Athenian politicians with important information about the relative strength of their political support. This effect has not been analysed before, and it may help explain the relative stability of political life in classical Athens. Furthermore this analysis also contributes to our understanding of a curious but often overlooked fact, namely that the decrees of the Athenian Assembly to a great extent concerned honorary rewards, and the use of the graphe paranomon in turn was largely focussed on the honorary decrees.

Keywords: Ancient Athens; Graphe paranomon; Direct democracy; Judicial review; Voter information; Stability of policy; Jury composition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H1 N4 N43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-018-9263-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:copoec:v:29:y:2018:i:4:d:10.1007_s10602-018-9263-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-018-9263-4

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().