How Tyranny Paved the Way to Democracy: The Democratic Transition in Ancient Greece

Robert Fleck () and F. Andrew Hanssen ()

Journal of Law and Economics, 2013, vol. 56, issue 2, 389 - 416

Abstract: Considerable scholarly work has examined the transition to democracy. In this paper, we investigate a path to democracy that is very different from that typically described. During the Archaic period (800-500 BCE), many Greek poleis (city-states) replaced aristocracies with a more narrow governing institution--an autocrat known as the tyrant. Yet as classical scholars have noted, many of the poleis where tyrants reigned in the Archaic period became among the broadest democracies in the subsequent Classical period (500-323 BCE). We analyze a data set of ancient Greek political regime types and review the history of the best-known Archaic period tyrants in order to explore why a transitory narrowing of power--Greek tyranny was a transitory institution--can set the stage for democratization. We briefly consider other historical and modern examples. Our paper shows why an understanding of progress toward democracy requires recognizing the potential importance of nonmonotonic transition paths.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/670731 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/670731 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/670731

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Law and Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().