Democracy

Democracy—government by the many as opposed to government by the few or rule by a single person—began in ancient Athens and is generally dated from the democratic reforms introduced by Cleisthenes in 510 b.c.e. The Greek experiment with democracy, in which adult male citizens made decisions about the city-state and voted for public officials in regularly held elections, lasted with brief interruptions until 322 b.c.e., a year after Alexander the Great died.

The Republic of Rome, which began around the same time as Greek democracy in 509 b.c.e., similarly included some degree of citizen participation in making political decisions and selecting public officials. However, the republic was dominated by an aristocratic body called the Senate. Banners carried by the Roman legions proclaimed “S.P.Q.R.” (The Senate and the People of Rome). The Roman Republic ended around 27 b.c.e., when Octavian Caesar was given the honorary title of Augustus and in effect became the emperor of the Roman world, beginning a long succession of Roman emperors.

The democracy of the ancient Greeks was a direct democracy: all citizens could participate in discussions on important political issues and vote on important issues such as war and peace. The concept of democratic government reasserted itself in the tenth century in the form of representative, instead of direct, democracy in Iceland, where the first parliament, the Althing, began meeting to make laws and judge disputes (albeit without a chief executive or a monarch). A parliament that included representatives of the common people, the aristocracy, and the monarch developed later in England. There, together with written constitutional limitations on the monarch's power, such as Magna Carta (1215) and the Bill of Rights (1689), representative democracy evolved. When English colonists came to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they brought with them the rights and principles embodied in this then-unique form of democratic government.

Representative democracy, in which citizens elect from among themselves representatives to act on their behalf in making laws and policy, had several important advantages over the Greeks' direct democracy: (1) It was not necessary to gather all of the citizens of a political jurisdiction in one place to determine government policies. (2) It permitted the rise of a class of politicians who could develop an expertise in various areas of government concern. (3) Every citizen did not have to be an expert on all subjects relating to government decision making; only those chosen as representatives needed to be so informed (See Representative Government).

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