Athenian Democracy and the Issue of Scale

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 6.2

Understanding that Athenian democracy was representative – but not electoral – leads us to an important insight. Most people today dismiss the Athenian system as inapplicable to modern nation states (or even cities) due to the issue of scale. Some argue that “real” democracy is simply not possible at a large scale, while others re-define democracy by applying the word to modern electoral systems instead. In fact, the Athenians solved the problem of scale – the core problem that has stymied democratic theorists and practitioners for the last couple of hundred years. The Greeks had invented a system of government that worked at a scale larger than face-to-face, in which the citizens ruled through de facto representative institutions selected by lot. And they named this system democracy.

An Athenian population of 30,000 - 60,000 citizens may be small by modern standards, but it is still far too large for face-to-face “participatory” democracy in which all citizens participate in all decisions. With modern understanding of probability and scientific sampling, we know that a representative sample does not need to keep growing proportional to the growth of the population being sampled.  A sample of 6,000 citizens (annually drawn for the lottery pool, and typical of the People’s Assembly) could accurately represent a population of 300,000,000 as well as 30,000.¹

Some will dispute my contention that Athenian democracy was representative. Some have argued that sortition was simply an efficient means of achieving the principle of “rule and be ruled in turn” through rotation. This argument asserts that office holders were not viewed as representatives of the communities, classes or tribes from which they came. Some evidence to the contrary comes from the fact that each of the 139 geographic units of Attica (Attica being the geographically larger demos made up of neighborhoods within Athens and farm villages that surrounded that capital city) were entitled to a number of seats on the Council of Five Hundred, roughly in proportion to their population.

It has also been argued that the Athenians, despite their astonishing advances in mathematics, did not know probability, nor have a “theory of representation.”  The science of statistical sampling would not be discovered until the late eighteenth century. Perhaps the Greek use of sortition was not a conscious strategy to create accurately representative bodies. But these bodies did effectively function as representatives of the citizenry as a whole. As many observers have noted, any Athenian cook understood that by giving the soup a good stir and sampling a spoonful, one got a good sense of the soup as a whole. We can also note that the Athenians had no “theory of gravity” (or a faulty one), yet went ahead and utilized gravity in daily tasks anyway. Even if it were possible, it would be ridiculous for all citizens to participate in making all decisions, for the simple reason of time and efficiency. Instead, it makes sense for any society to apply rotation or a division of labor – to delegate some decision making to a subset of the population in turns (whether through election, lottery, or some other means), to leave free time for most people to engage in productive or leisure activities.

All citizens over the age of 30 could put their name into the lottery pool to serve as a member of a legislative panel, the Council of 500, or the court. Each volunteer had an equal chance to actually serve.  However, there remains one fundamental distinction between direct democracy and what we are familiar with as a representative democracy. In the Athenian democracy, any citizen over the age of 18 who wished (and could make the time and effort) was allowed to participate in the Assembly, hear arguments, speak and vote on issues. This principle of the right to “opt in” is one place where the issue of scale in a society of millions can become problematic. While the Athenians narrowed the purview of the Assembly (it is not commonly known that after 403 BCE Athenians removed the power to make new laws from the Assembly and vested that authority in large legislative panels selected by lot), on some key issues that only the Assembly could decide, such as war and peace, which would have been particularly salient for those under the age of 30, all who wished could participate without being selected by lottery. Perhaps a national referendum on issues such as going to war would be appropriate for a modern democracy as well. 

Athenian democracy was predicated on the concept of voluntary self-selection. Citizens were paid a modest sum for their democratic service, and this seems to have resulted in more elderly and poor citizens participating. The culture was such that most citizens probably did participate at some time, but it was not mandatory nor universal. The Greeks had a disparaging word for citizens who were not sufficiently civic-minded to participate. This word was idiotēs, from which we get the English word “idiot.” Whether one calls this “pure,” “real,” or “assembly” democracy, however, it is this opportunity for any citizen to self-select and participate in the assembly that underlies one specific dilemma of scale. 

The challenge of scale for mass participation might nominally be addressed in the modern world by electronic communications and the Internet. But while posting online allows anyone to make their argument on some issue, it does not solve the scale problem that nobody can hear or read all of these submissions. A workaround might be feasible that assures all comments are read by at least some other participants in an electronic assembly, and through some scoring process the most useful arguments could be raised to the top to be read by more people. The ultimate challenge, however, is not the technical ability of a system of electronic assembly to allow unlimited participation, but whether millions of people will choose to, or even should be asked to, participate in the nearly countless number of public policy decisions to be made every week at the national, state, regional, municipal and local levels. As the sheer volume of decisions grows, the amount of research and thought each person devotes to their votes, or comments, inevitably declines, until it devolves to uniformed poll-taking of a relatively small, unrepresentative sample of self-selected “know-it-alls,” most of whom know much less than they think they do.

A modern sortition-based democracy might refine such a system, or abandon this assembly element, relying on the allotted representative elements instead. Alternatively, a modern democracy might satisfy the self-selection concept by allowing the formation of a large number of smaller bodies that all contribute to the decision making process on important issues in some way; though the impact of each individual obviously declines as the number of participants grows. In my own published design of multi-body sortition, I proposed that any person who wished could join an interest panel to help draft policy proposals. Since these would be self-selected and inevitably unrepresentative, they would not be making final decisions, only providing raw material for genuinely representative bodies to consider.

The common assertion that Athenian democracy is only possible in smaller societies is erroneous. Democracy based on sortition actually has the opposite problem with scale. Rather than democracy being problematic for communities with too many people, it is problematic when the communities are small, but too large for face-to-face democracy. Random selection with many mini-publics works best when the society is large enough that statistically representative samples can be drawn for all sorts of decisions, while not imposing too much of a time burden on any individual person. In a small community, such as a town, in order to not be too time burdensome (selecting the same citizen repeatedly for different mini-publics), they would need to either have very small bodies that risk being un-representative, or delegate certain decisions, perhaps to a broader regional governmental level.

The purpose of democracy is not to mandate participatory “busy work,” trying to get everybody constantly involved in making public policy decisions. The purpose is to make decisions in the interests of the community as a whole, while protecting political equality and including and respecting the rights of minorities. To accomplish this, a society needs to assure that decisions are thoughtfully made by genuinely representative groups of people, who take turns (rather than becoming entrenched), who have the time, motivation and resources to seek out diverse sources of information, and engage in meaningful deliberation, before making decisions  A well designed lottery system is the optimal tool for achieving this democratic vision.

1. The courts could have between 201 and 1,501 (or even more) randomly selected members, depending on the nature and importance of the issue they were deciding. The legislative panels had at least 1,001 members selected by lot.