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Theme Five: Potential constitutional responses to oligarchic democracy.

This theme explores speculative and innovative approaches to constitutional design. These go beyond the sorts of reforms or innovations considered under the fourth theme, and include more radical and fundamental changes to the way democracy might work.

The main institutional forms of democracy found in the world today are based on a small number of models devised in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions (Lane, 1996). These in turn were descended from Medieval European monarchies, in which limited and contractually obligated monarchies were advised and constrained by parliaments which represented ‘estates of the realm’. Across most of Europe in the high middle ages, these parliaments acquired a more or less stable institutional identity, and were able – with varying degrees of vigor and autonomy – to exercise legislative, financial and deliberative powers (Myers, 1975). The medieval state was based not on equal citizenship, but on distinct ‘orders’ – such as the clergy, nobility, burgesses and peasantry – which each had certain chartered rights and special communal privileges that the monarch was legally obliged to respect (Myers, 1975).

Given these origins, perhaps the oligarchic of nature liberal-democracy as we know it is intrinsic to its institutional design, and that only by radically changing that design on the macro level, not by micro level tinkering, can oligarchy be overcome. At the heart of this thematic enquiry is the view that the oligarchic tendencies seen in liberal-democracy are unsurprisingly derived from the process of election itself, which systematically favours the few. Compared to the institutions known to Ancient Greeks or medieval Italian, all existing models of liberal-democracy, which are based on elections perhaps once every four or five years, would seem barely democratic. We therefore see to identify alternative constitutional ‘roads less travelled’, emerging from the experiences of ancient and medieval city republics. We wish to explore innovative approaches which, in the words of Harrington (1997), ‘ransack the archives of ancient prudence’, to see what new things be gleaned from the history of pre-modern forms of republicanism.

The centrality of the constitution to the relationship between money and power has deep roots in political thought. It can be found, for example, in Aristotle’s classification of regimes into oligarchies and democracies. For Aristotle, democracies are states in which the non-rich majority rule, while oligarchies are those in which the rich minority rule. Aristotle makes it clear in Book IV, Part III, of The Politics that it is the wealth of rulers, not their numerical strength, that marks the distinction between these two types: if there were a state in which the rich were a majority, but these excluded the poor from holding office and participating in government, then it would be an oligarchy – albeit an unusually broadly based one (Sinclair, 1982).

Classical and medieval political thought, drawing on the intellectual tradition of Aristotle, Cicero and Polybius, celebrated the ideal of the ‘mixed constitution’ – a system of government in which the interests of the few and the many would be balanced and harmonised (Honohan, 2002). Sometimes, this gave rise to institutional structures in which the three traditional forms of government were blended: rule by the one, the few, and the many. However, the ‘one’ (the monarchic element) often had an executive rather than sovereign status, so that the real dynamic of power-sharing was between the rich, privileged ruling few and the non-rich, less privileged, co-ruling many. For two millennia, this classification of regimes based on whether they were ruled by the rich few or non-rich many, coupled with a preference for the mixed constitution as a way of harnessing the strengths and overcoming the weaknesses of each ‘simple’ form, provided a common framework for the understanding of the good state, at least within Western societies.

The close and symbiotic relationship between wealth and power, and both the necessity and the difficulty of ensuring that the rich few do not overbalance and consume the non-rich many, was a recurring theme of classical history. Aristotle writes, in The Constitution of Athens, that the government of Athens was originally ‘in all respects oligarchical’. The poor were ‘in a state of bondage to the rich’. The land was ‘in the hands of a few’, and those who worked the land for rent were liable to be sold into debt-bondage. The living and working conditions of these people must have been both miserable and precarious. Yet, according to Aristotle, ‘The hardest and bitterest thing then to the majority was that they had no share in the offices of government; not but what they were dissatisfied with everything else, for in nothing, so to say, had they any share.’ In other words, the people were aware that, at root, their problems were constitutional; having no say in public decision making, they had no share in anything else. Draco had attempted to reform the constitution, still keeping the most important offices (the nine archons who had executive and leadership functions) in the hands of the rich, but allowing the Council to be selected indiscriminately by lot from amongst the citizenry, including the poor. However, this was ‘to no avail’, because the rich retained ownership of the land, while the poor were still in fear of debt-slavery. Dissention and division between the rich and poor continued until the time of Solon, ‘the first to come forward as the champion of the people’. Solon’s new constitution cancelled debts and abolished slavery for debtors.

Livy (DATE) recounts, in Book II of his History of Rome, that after the expulsion of the kings, ‘the people of Rome became a free people, the civil and military affairs of which were governed by annually elected magistrates, and in which the laws were more powerful than individual men’. Yet the early Roman Republic was a state in which the privileges of citizenship were not equally shared. Real power rested in the patrician order and in the body which represented their interests, the Senate. The two consuls in whom executive power and political leadership were vested were annually elected, but the voting system was designed to give greater weight to the richest citizens, and the office of consul was limited to those who belonged to the patrician class. The laws favoured the rich. The civil laws were not written down, but were preserved as oral customary law amongst the patricians, meaning that the legal rights of ordinary citizens, the so-called plebians, were difficult to ascertain or enforce. The Roman state was also almost constantly engaged in wars for territorial expansion amongst its neighbours. The plebian citizens were required to pay taxes and to fight in wars, but the booty of war and the distribution of land went mainly to the rich. Debt – a consequence of being absent from one’s farm or workshop while fighting wars – could lead easily to enslavement (Adcock, 1959; Greenidge, 1901; Wood, 1988).

It was in this context that the ordinary people, those of the so-called plebeian order, sought to complete the move to a genuine res publica – a state in which the public good, not that of a narrow elite class, prevails. Pushed to breaking point, the plebians decided on an extreme course of action – a secessio plebis, or secession of the plebians. The plebians shut up shop, left the city, and refused to fight. This might be seen, in modern terms, as a combination of a general strike and a military mutiny. It left the patrician order isolated. It highlighted the fact that for all their power, wealth and prestige, it was they who were dependent upon the plebians, and not the plebians who were dependent on them. Without plebians to carry spears or follow ploughs, the patricians were rulers over an empty ghost of a city. This drastic action by the plebians forced the patricians to the negotiating table. The outcome of these negotiation was a constitutional change: the creation of a new office, that of ‘tribune of the plebs’. The office of tribune would be limited to plebians and elected exclusively by the plebians, with the right of veto over the decisions of the consuls in order to protect the distinct class interests of the plebeian order. Machiavelli, commenting on this development in his Discourses, argued that it perfected the republic, because it balanced the republic with the addition of a lively democratic element, and thereby provided a means by which the people could restrain the nobles (Viroli: 1998).  People faced with ‘bread and butter’ issues – debts, poverty, subjection to the arbitary power of the rich over their lives and livelihoods – sought redress through constitutional change. They tried, above all, to change the system of government, to increase their voice and their veto power in the decision-making process, and to secure for themselves constitutional guarantees.

This is not, however, a subject of merely antiquarian interest. Rather, it is a practical – if necessarily speculative – enquiry into alternative institutional designs. The long history of democracy may provide a radical corrective to the flaws of democracy-as-we-know-it, which has the capacity, suitably adapted to current needs, to rescue democracy from the oligarchic tendencies of its currently dominant form. In particular, we are interested in the practical application of the ideas put forward by scholars such as J.P. McCormick in Machiavellian Democracy (McCormick, 2011) and by Kevin O’Leary in Saving Democracy  (O’Leary, 2006)– in institutions, that is, that specifically represent the non-elite and give them real powers over public decision making. Despite the growth in the interest in the civic republican tradition in the history of political thought and in political theory, the implications of these ideas are yet to be absorbed in to the practical world of designing constitutions – and that is a gap which we, in this theme of the project, would very much like to bridge.

In particular, we are interested in the constitutional possibilities of sortition (selection by random lot). This mechanism was widely used in classical and medieval republics.  It has long been apparent, from Aristotle and Rousseau, that election is an inherently oligarchic process (Manin, 1997; Dowlen, 2008), because it favours those with wealth, leisure and connections. Random lot, in contrast, is a democratic (in the sense of anti-oligarchic) device, since it is blind to all considerations of wealth, fame, popularity, status, education, connections and ability. Random lot, compared with elections, not only allows for a more truly representative sample of the whole population to be taken, but also prevents the rise of cliques and factions, ensures the equal distribution of offices, rewards, burdens and honours, and removes the need both for fund-raising and campaign spending.  

It may be that there are very good reasons not to choose members of Parliament or chief executives by random lot, since random lot has no chain of delegation and accountability, and removes the element of popular choice. Yet it is possible that random lot could usefully be introduced at other points of the constitutional system, where achieving a truly representative sample of public opinion, or avoiding party cliques, is of greater importance than delegation and accountability: for example, in the selection of second chambers, or in the choice of ‘tribunate’-like officials who might, say, have the power to call a referendum or to impeach a president. There is now some established practice in using random lot to select members of constitution-making bodies (in Ireland, for example), and we would welcome papers examining both the theoretical and practical implications, from an anti-oligarchic perspective, of using random lot as part of the ordinary legislative, policy-reviewing and appointing processes.

Another aspect of pre-modern constitutional design was the selection of public officials from sectors of society. In Florence, for example, the method of selecting magistrates was revised in 1343 such that the three strata of society - the majors, minori and minuto – were each given equal participation in the process of selection, which ‘gave power to the lower artisan class for the first time’ (Dowlen, 2008: 90). This can be seen as a form of reservation, similar to that discussed in the previous section with regard to scheduled castes and tribes in India, although based the representation of particular guilds, membership of which was an approximate measure of wealth.

 

Possible Questions to Consider:

  • What former anti-oligarchic practices and institutions from pre-modern civic republicanism are worthy of reconsideration under contemporary circumstances? (This need not be limited to those discussed above: could ostracism, for example, be a useful anti-oligarchic measure?)
  • What are the uses and limitations, as an expressly anti-oligarchic device, of random lot?
  • Can existing models of constitutionalism be augmented by certain innovative / restored practices, without challenging the essential structure of a representative, election-based system?
  • What would a constitutional model derived from ‘ancient prudence’ look like, and would it actually be an improvement over existing models? How general principles be applied in a contemporary setting?

Find other thematic areas of investigation:

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