UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — When we think of the foundations of democracy, ancient Greece tends to get most of the credit. However, other contemporary and even older civilizations were practicing similar forms of inclusive governance based on the ruins they left behind, according to Jacob Holland-Lulewicz, assistant professor of anthropology at Penn State.
Holland-Lulewicz and an interdisciplinary research team recently collaborated to better understand how ancient civilizations throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia developed more democratic- or autocratic-leaning practices. They published their work — which included 40 different case studies on how, when, where and why certain societies developed their governmental practices — in the journal Science Advances.
The paper’s co-authors are Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History; David Stasavage of New York University; David M. Carballo of Boston University; Sarah B. Barber of the University of Central Florida; Adam Green of the University of York; Dan Lawrence of Durham University; Jessica Munson of Lycoming College; Francesca Fulminante of the University of Bristol; Sarah Klassen of the University of Colorado; Keith W. Kintigh of Arizona State University; and John Douglass of Statistical Research Inc.
“Everyone on the paper has worked on these questions about governance issues of autocracy and democracy in the past,” Holland-Lulewicz said. “The idea was to bring everyone's expert knowledge on different regions in the world, different time periods, and do something more global, standardized and formalized so that we could talk to political scientists and economists and leverage archaeology in a way that we can communicate our research outside of archaeology.”
Holland-Lulewicz recently discussed some of the paper’s key findings.
Q: How did you contribute to the group’s work?
Holland-Lulewicz: My past work has researched governance and political systems and social networks, as well as the Indigenous societies of Eastern North America.
The societies across Eastern North America generally tend to be more democratic, more collective in form. When you place that into this broader global picture, it helps to nail down the idea that democratic forms of governance have existed all across the world at all periods of history. There has long been this narrative that the Greeks invented democracy and then the Europeans picked it up again centuries later, and then from there it spread to the rest of the world. What we show through our case studies from North America, Mesoamerica and Asia is that this story that we tell ourselves about democracy is just not quite right, because it erases all the creativity of humans across the world and through time in regard to how people have come up with ways to solve disputes, make decisions and govern themselves. It was happening much farther afield and going back even before the Greeks and Romans.
Q: What is the “autocracy index” developed for the study?
Holland-Lulewicz: The autocracy index was a measure we came up with to recognize that between more democratic and more autocratic forms of governance is an entire spectrum. Our challenge was to figure out how to place societies across that spectrum. So, we came up with a way to measure how distributed power was in a society, and how inclusive the decision-making process was.
To figure those two things out, we partly relied on architecture. For example, is there a palace? Are the decisions of government made within the palace? Or are they made outside of the palace? Are there structures that are explicitly devoted to governance? If so, what percentage of the population of that political entity can fit in that structure? Even the layouts, are we talking big, huge round structures where everyone can sit and see each other and deliberate?
And then we have other information about political offices. Are political offices selected by the ruler, or are they members of representative families or do they gain their position through meritocracy? The challenge was to find evidence of these things in the archaeological record.
Q: What did you learn from this research?
Holland-Lulewicz: The strongest predictor of where a society falls between democracy and autocracy is where the money comes from to fund that government. Maybe it's not so surprising to us in this day and age, but what’s interesting is that if the money is coming from control over external resources, like mining or oil, you're more likely to have autocracy. Whereas if your fiscal financing is more internally based on things like taxation, which requires power sharing between the citizens paying taxes and the government, that leads to more democratic forms of decision making and governance.
Also, and this one may not be that surprising, is that more autocratic governance is associated with higher inequality. It seems like power sharing in more democratic societies creates or fosters more equity in terms of wealth and equality. And generally speaking, this is like some of the challenges we see today. What's happening to our democratic institutions as private wealth begins to play a much bigger role?
And these things aren't necessarily drivers of autocracy, but it seems like autocrats around the world and throughout time have a playbook that is predictable. They rely on big spectacle. You know, monuments to themselves, parades, etc. Also, when office holders are being hand selected due to loyalty and not based on ability, this is associated with autocratic governance. History doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. When we identify some of these rhymes, these are places maybe where we should pay attention.
Q: How might these findings serve us today?
Holland-Lulewicz: I think a big takeaway, especially for the public and for people who aren't academics and don't dive into these things at this level, is that autocracy isn't a genetic trait. It's not associated with any culture or language or religion. None of that drives whether you're democratic or autocratic. On the other hand, no society or nation is guaranteed democracy. It takes work and it takes institutions that we need to maintain and that we adapt.
There's no inherent or universal link between population size and political complexity and concentrated power and inequality. These things are put together in really creative and complex ways throughout space and time.
Hopefully, what this paper does is help change some of the base assumptions that people bring to the study of governance and the narrative of democracy's origin story. Democracy doesn't know cultural, religious or linguistic bounds. And we here in the United States are not necessarily actually this unique bastion in human history in terms of democracy. We are part of a much bigger story, which to me is more exciting.