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April 2016 - Democracy means the rule of the people (in Greek). That is where each individual person has a vote about what to do. Whatever the most people vote for wins. There is no king or tyrant, and anybody can propose a new law. One problem that immediately comes up in a democracy is who is going to be able to vote. Should people vote who are just visiting from some other city-state? How about little kids, should they vote? Or should there be some limits?

The earliest democracy in the world began in Athens, in 510 BC; in Athens they let all the free adult men who were citizens vote, rich or poor. That was great for poor men, but bad for women, who were pretty much shut out of the political power they had had in the Archaic period.

When democracy turned out to work in Athens, many other city-states chose it for their government too. But most of them allowed even fewer people to vote than Athens did: most of the other city-states only allowed free adult male citizens to vote IF they owned land or owned their own houses (that is, the richer people). They didn't let women vote either.

One big problem for democracies was that it was very inconvenient for men to always be going to the meeting-place to vote. Most men had work to do, planting their grain, making shoes, fighting wars or whatever. They couldn't be always debating and voting. So most democracies sooner or later ended up choosing a few men who would do most of the voting, and the rest only came when there was a really important vote. It was hard to decide how to choose these few men, and different cultures did it different ways. Athens did it by a lottery. If you got the winning ticket then you were on the Council of 500. Men served for a year (and women couldn't serve at all).

Democracy spread around the Mediterranean Sea, but it was pretty much wiped out by the Roman Empire about 100 BC. Still, places like Athens continued to use democratic methods to make their own decisions on local matters for a long time after that.

A thousand years later, in the Middle Ages, some cities in Italy - Siena, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Venice - went back to having a democratic government. These were all organized in slightly different ways, but none of them allowed the poor, women, or children to vote, and some had a lottery system like Athens.

These Italian democracies, too, were eventually conquered by the Holy Roman Empire and ruled by German emperors. But in the 1700s, people began to fight for democracy again. In America, the Revolutionary War brought the Constitution in 1789, which let free adult men vote if they owned their own farm or business. A few years later, the French Revolution brought democracy to France (for a short time). And in the early 1900s, democracy came to Spain - for a while. None of these let women vote. Today many countries are democracies, and in most of them poor people, people of color, and women have now won the right to vote, though children and foreigners still can't. The amount of power available to voters, however, still varies widely from country to country, and many countries are still not democratic at all.

Professor Carr

Karen Eva Carr, PhD. Assoc. Professor Emerita, History Portland State University

Professor Carr holds a B.A. with high honors from Cornell University in classics and archaeology, and her M.A. and PhD. from the University of Michigan in Classical Art and Archaeology. She has excavated in Scotland, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, and Tunisia, and she has been teaching history to university students for a very long time.

Professor Carr's PSU page

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