Ancient Athens, 400s BC, 10%
Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1500s, 10%
Britain mid 1700s: 8%
Britain after reforms of 1832: 15%
USA before 19th Amendment: 20% peak actually voted.
USA after 19th Amendment: 35%
And so on. The percentage is more revealing than the label.
Athens puts all modern democracies to shame in who actually held office, and ensuring that those that did had real skin in the game.
I imagine contemporary politics would look very differently if officials that fucked up risked ten years of exile by public vote.
But would be wonderful. You will see an increase in responsability.
Well, unless you were a woman, a slave, or under 30, in which case oh well. Let's not exaggerate the glory of Athens.
The key difference, in Athens, is most political appointments were by random lot. It was literally a government by the people. No matter who you were, if you were eligible to vote, you could end up with political office. This is just not true with our modern democracies. Most people eligible to vote have no realistic path to political office.
Point is, this was rather small portion of population. And who you were, who parents were, mattered a lot in whether you was eligible to vote.
> This is just not true with our modern democracies. Most people eligible to vote have no realistic path to political office.
There is too many of us eligible.
Sure, but what does voting matter if the options basically are the same?
> There is too many of us eligible.
Right, but I'll repeat the criticism you levied above. In modern democracy, who you are, and who your parents are, matters a lot in whether you are de facto eligible to hold office.
The same as in Athens. Sure, you could throw your lot in, but... did you have the means to run for the office? Did you have supporters that "discouraged" other candidates from running?
The Athenians in office I can currently recall all came from rich or influential families. (I may well be wrong - my recall is certainly extremely spotty. I'd love pointers if anybody knows of an analysis on Athenian officials & their backgrounds)
Exact same in Athens.
Turns out, even in Athens, for the really big jobs they were kind of picky - dokimasia is an excellent filter to remove those you don't want. (Part of the process was questioning your "moral character", which is a pretty good proxy for "has an in with the powers that be").
And if we exclude high-visibility offices, there's a lot of people who can and do run in the US, for their local offices. School boards, city council members, commissioners, etc.
If we want to debate shortcomings of modern democracy, we might want to focus on the devaluation of local offices to the point of only focusing on national office.
It's not that illogical to exclude slaves because a slave in office gives their masters influence over an official, exclude people without land because they were susceptible to bribery, and exclude women who could get pregnant.
> exclude people without land because they were susceptible to bribery
This however means, Athens dont put other democracies in shame at all.
Imagine Google hires new developers with one condition: if they fuck up they'll never get another job in America for ten years.
It will virtually guarantee that the only applicants are those with a delusion of grandeur or those who can't get a job elsewhere.
This sort of creates an incentive to moderate the use of ostracism to the times someone really fucked up bad.
To illustrate the point lets create 2 fictional countries each with 100M population. In their most recent elections they both had 30M vote. By your measure they have equivalent levels of democracy at 30%.
However if we say that in country 1 half of the country is under the age of 18 and is ineligible to vote and only calculate using eligible voters this becomes 60%.
If in country 2 1/10 of the population is under age 18 and ineligible to vote their number becomes 33%. So country 1 has nearly twice the democracy of country 2.