11:20 - 13:00
Parallel sessions 2
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11:20 - 13:00
P2-S28
Room: Auditorium (200pax)
Chair/s:
Allison Spencer Hartnett
Discussant/s:
Melissa Ziegler Rogers
Origins of early democracy – a reappraisal (panelHPE)
P2-S28-3
Presented by: Federica Carugati
Federica Carugati
King's College London
In the tradition of political economy, democracy is a recent phenomenon – one that appeared in waves from the late 19th through the end of the 20th century. As the waves receded, trust in the success and survival of democracy has waned. But is democracy really a recent phenomenon? And can we learn about its success and survival from its historical antecedents? In a series of recent contributions, David Stasavage has broadened the view of early democracy beyond the handful of well-known ancient and early modern European experiments. Relying on the anthropological database known as the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), Stasavage (Stasavage 2020; Ahmed and Stasavage 2020) has shed new light on the origins of historical democracies, arguing that early democracies developed where information asymmetries made it harder for rulers to extract revenue, when the size of the community was small, and when subjects had an exit option. The measure of early democracy employed in these studies, however, provides only a limited picture of the types of governance subsumed under the label “democracy” – indeed, democracy simply means the presence of a council. Drawing on a new, unique dataset of historical communities engaged in collective governance across the world and throughout history (from the 4th millennium BCE to the 20th century CE), this paper tests Stasavage’s account. In so doing, it provides a more accurate picture of the conditions that enabled different types of democratic governance to emerge in different regions, times, and across different community sizes.
Keywords: early democracy, institutions, history and political economy

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