Athenian Democratic Principles

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 6.4

There are several important principles and practices of democracy developed by the Athenians that can be applied today. My intention is not to idealize Athenian democracy – this was a society that held slaves, excluded women from citizenship, and created an empire by conquering other city-states. However, many of its procedural principles are useful for democratic reforms today. To allow us to focus on the institutional structures that can be used for self-rule, regardless of how the boundary of participation rights are set in a particular historical period, I will set aside for the moment the “undemocratic” narrowness of the definition of political citizenship in both Ancient Athens and in the early United States. Both Athens and the early United States excluded women, children, resident aliens, and slaves. But poor laborers in Athens, who were citizens, were fully enfranchised (even paid a wage for political  participation), unlike most  early US states, which excluded even white males without a certain amount of property or wealth. 

Athenians were proud to be a society governed by law, rather than by men. Even Socrates, who was a critic of democracy, so believed in the “rule of law” that he declined to flee when given the chance, and instead accepted the death penalty he was given for impiety and corrupting the youth. The Athenian view was that the constitution (though, like the UK, not a written document) was the ultimate authority, rather than the people gathered in the Assembly. The primacy of law, rather than the men who happen to hold office, was more genuinely honored by Athens than by most modern electoral governments. In the United States, it is nine people appointed by elected presidents and approved by elected Senators who interpret the constitution to decide what powers those elected officials may wield, and not surprisingly, those powers have steadily grown over time. In Athens the court that interpreted the constitution and the legality of decrees, etc. were made up of one to two thousand randomly selected citizens over the age of 30 who had taken the heliastic oath to be impartial, uphold the law and seek justice. Criminal and civil court cases had much smaller courts, whose members numbered in the hundreds. There were no professional judges.  A person who initiated an unconstitutional law or procedure could even be prosecuted, and severely punished. However to discourage trivial prosecutions, the person initiating the prosecution had to deposit court fees as a surety and could be heavily fined if his case did not win at least one fifth of the votes in the court’s decision.

Perhaps most fundamental for democracy is the principle of isonomia – the ability of all citizens, without regards to wealth or status, to exercise equal political rights. Through sortition (the use of lottery), all citizens over the age of 30 who wished had an equal chance and high likelihood of actually serving on deliberative bodies or as magistrates, in panels of ten, who implemented the laws. This is fundamentally different from the extremely unequal actual chance of being elected to political office under modern systems of election.

Another principle is isegoria – every citizen had the right to speak at the People’s Assembly if they wished. Few citizens ever actually spoke at the People’s Assembly, but the right of any citizen to add new information or offer arguments intended to persuade, was deemed to be fundamental. Note that this is not quite the same as an individual right to have one’s vote counted. A single individual’s vote in the People’s Assembly in Athens, as in mass elections today, had little significance. For an individual’s vote to make any difference there would need to be a tie that the individual’s vote broke (or created). In this case, the vote of every single voter on the winning side would also be decisive in determining the outcome. This probably would never have happened. Indeed, votes on most matters before the People’s Assembly were rarely actually counted.  The majority will of the People’s Assembly was determined by nine randomly selected citizens (proedroi) who assessed the show of hands.¹ 

The true significance of isegoria has to do with the opportunity of any citizen to give informational input and make proposals, rather than merely a vote. Unlike a single vote, a single piece of important information has the serious potential to swing the ultimate decision. Isegoria can be thought of as not merely an individual right but also as a community benefit. The polis would be extremely unlikely to suffer if one individual couldn’t vote, but stood to lose a lot if a particular citizen with unique and possibly crucial information or argument was denied the right to contribute it, and the People’s Assembly made a bad decision as a result. Isegoria protects such “speech acts” rather than merely voting rights. 

It was the combination of the new Athenian principle of political equality (isonomia), and the right to speak and contribute in the Assembly (isegoria), with the equal opportunity to serve on smaller deliberative and executive bodies, assured by use of the lot, that formed the essence of Greek democracy. 

Professor of ethics and philosophy, Paul Woodruff, presents several other principles of Athenian democracy in his book First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. Many of these are relevant today including general education (paideia), and the ability of people to use reason, even in the absence of perfect knowledge, to weigh contrary arguments (antikeimenoi logoi). Nearly all political decisions, whether today or in Classical Athens, are inevitably made without full knowledge or certainty. In an elective system, however, leaders feel the need to project certainty in order to entice and assure voters. The ability of average people to combine common sense, personal experience and education, to govern themselves in the face of uncertainty, forms what the Greeks called “citizen wisdom” (eubboulia).

1. The vote on ostracism (to exile an individual for ten years who might be deemed a threat to the democracy) was conducted using physical ballots – a name scratched into a piece of pottery – which had to be counted.