Origins of Early Democracy

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics I

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.

Authors

• Ali Tanveer Ahmed, New York University

• David Stasavage, New York University