Low-Tech Democracy.

[Cato the Elder]

I have started thinking about how a strong, pre-industrial democracy larger than a city-state might exist, both as a thought experiment and as idle brainstorming for a future game, and I would like to hear others' opinions on the matter.

Lest there be confusion, I should first elaborate on what I mean. By "strong democracy", I mean a centralized government on a more-or-less Western, indirectly and popularly democratic model in which suffrage is widespread, although I am also interested in hearing how other cultural models might create similar results. By "pre-industrial", I mean a state without access to technology postdating the Industrial Revolution (in GURPS terms, TLs 0-4, but focusing primarily on TLs 0-3, as TL 4 saw the emergence of several democracies of one stripe or another). By "larger than a city-state", I mean much larger, up to and including a region as large as a historical empire.

To further stimulate conversation, I have considered some "ingredients" that might be necessary for such a state's existence, although these are obviously not exclusive (or even necessarily correct). Pick and parse at your leisure.

1. Political theory. A democratic state cannot exist if the idea of democracy has not been articulated in political thought.

2. Political will. Democracy relies upon the participation of at least some portion of a state's population. If people cannot, or will not, take part in government, democracy cannot exist.

3. Political stability. Legitimacy must be established to create a democracy, rule of law must be established to allow it to function, and a means of defense must be established to safeguard a democracy from its enemies.

4. Communication and transportation. Information must be disseminated, and officials dispatched, much more swiftly in a democracy than in a less representative state if it wishes to be anything more than a very loose democratic confederation. This is possibly the most limiting factor for low-tech democracies.

With that said, here are my questions. Without resorting to fantastic elements, how might a low-tech, expansive democratic (direct or indirect) state function? How might such a state emerge in the first place? What challenges would such a state be confronted with? Thanks in advance for your replies.

[combatmedic]

So it's a bit like the Latin/Italic parts of the Roman Republic after the Social War?

[Cato the Elder]

I am more interested in a state that holds elections over a widespread expanse. Provincials seemed to agitate for Roman citizenship in order to gain legal rights, not suffrage.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Cato the Elder

I am more interested in a state that holds elections over a widespread expanse. Provincials seemed to agitate for Roman citizenship in order to gain legal rights, not suffrage.

You'd normally have to travel to Rome if you wanted to vote in a Roman election, as I understand it.
But the various allied cities had their own governments, councils, and so on.

What is it you consider 'democracy'?

Were transport speed and communication times in the Thirteen Colonies or the early USA better than in the Roman Republic?

[combatmedic]

1. Political theory

2. Political will

3. Political stability

4. Communication and transportation.

1:
No fancy theory is needed. The tribesmen get together and vote on stuff. Fairly common practice in some societies.

2: True for any government, no?

3: Democracies have often proved unstable. So have other forms of government.


4: Any state would need good transportation and communication to govern a large area. It is arguably more important in a centralized ''democracy.'' Probably not workable over a certain size, in that election and poll results will likely become very cumbersome to collect, count, and disseminate. And gov't may move very slowly indeed if a great many things depend on such counts.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

1:
No fancy theory is needed. The tribesmen get together and vote on stuff. Fairly common practice in some societies.

Voting on stuff is pretty common, yes. Even voting on who should get to sit in a council that then wields power, or voting on who should be come king and wield power alone.

The radical stuff is when it's no longer just normal people who get to vote, but also slaves, chicks, disabled people, poor people, children, atheists, foreigners, those who are cursed, elves, gnomes, orcs, dragons, AIs, uplifted dogs, and other strange kinds of people.

Everybody getting to vote. That's the bit that's hard to swallow. Not the voting thing itself.

[Cato the Elder]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

You'd normally have to travel to Rome if you wanted to vote in a Roman election, as I understand it.
But the various allied cities had their own governments, councils, and so on.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Voting on stuff is pretty common, yes. Even voting on who should get to sit in a council that then wields power, or voting on who should be come king and wield power alone.

Agreed, but I draw a distinction between these sorts of local democracies (tribes, guilds, city-states), which have existed since the dawn of civilization, and a large democratic state.

Originally Posted by combatmedic

What is it you consider 'democracy'?

"Democracy" has a huge number of variations, as many posters have pointed out. I am interested in hearing any workable systems people might come up with, but it seems to me that any low-tech democracy would be necessarily representative (along the lines of The Colonel's post) and federal (with an elected local government theoretically subservient to a national one). It would also probably require a strong executive like a Roman consul or American president to take command in situations where waiting for a council vote would be impractical.

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Were transport speed and communication times in the Thirteen Colonies or the early USA better than in the Roman Republic?

An excellent question. By sea, probably yes; by land, probably not. That is merely speculation, however, and if anyone has a different opinion, I would love to hear it.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

I'd say that for any really wide spread of the vote you need to have a wide spread of literacy and basic education. A peasant out in his field won't have much interest in anything outside his immediate interests unless he can read about the greater world beyond his village.

And to get that you probably need printing and paper. Both of which were late medieval to early renaissance (GURPS TL 3 to 4) innovations in the real world (at least in Europe) but are so simple in principle that they could have come along much earlier. Availability of pre-printed forms for voting makes the secret ballot work and government bureaucracy more functional.

Originally Posted by malloyd

So? What's wrong with voting for whoever you think will best defend the interests of your village?

Literacy and education are definitely a benefit to democracy, but I don't know if they are required per se. As others have said, you can get a lot of distance out of public debate. I don't even know if the printing press is necessary (although again, it helps): I could easily see political operatives traveling from village to village making stump speeches just as friars gave sermons in medieval Europe.

Which brings me to a related note: the existence of political parties. What party politics might one see in a low-tech democracy? Land reform was a crucial element in Rome's political discourse, and I think similar issues would predominate in any low-tech (and thus necessarily agrarian) democracy. Justice and law enforcement, especially between rival districts, might also be a crucial issue at the national level; this was a large part of a medieval king's responsibilities. It might also be interesting to see "pork barrel politics", with local representatives arguing for federal funding to repair a frontier castle or build a bridge across a river.

Originally Posted by ericthered

The meaning of 'Centralized' is making me scratch my head. In government classes I've had Centralized be the opposite of Federal: the central government holds complete power over sub-governing bodies. For some reason, Federalism tends to be in place over larger countries, even in this age of modern communication.

I can see what you mean, although I would argue that a federal state needn't be decentralized (see the modern United States for an example of that). I said "federalized" because I think that a low-tech democracy would necessarily require local districts because of problems in communication. By "centralized", then, I mean that the federal government still holds a great deal of power over the state as a whole.

Originally Posted by William

You will want a good system of roads and a well-funded post, so that levels of government can communicate with each other. Government communications might have dedicated Pony Express stations. Of course, this benefits trade as well.

Federalization will result in regions being jealous of their prerogatives, but the American experience with the Articles of Confederation (and later, the Civil War) firmly supports the necessity of a strong central government with some taxation power, control over purse strings, authority in well-defined legislative spheres, and a standing army if the nation is to remain a single entity. Lacking any one of these things means they will have either no resources to fight regional entities, no political leverage, no areas in which to use their influence, or no muscle to back up the first three.

Excellent ideas all around. The postal system of the Mongolian empire provides a good structure for this kind of society. River and sea traffic would also be hugely important, and perhaps a central body of water (like the Mediterranean, or the Mississippi) made it possible for this democracy to exist in the first place.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

There is a book entitled The Secret History of Democracy which covers more democracies than the usual selective list of European ones.

Much appreciated. I will find it.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I would also think about how ordinary people keep the moneyed, leisured elites in check. Aristocratic feuding, and aristocrats trying to squeeze more money and power out of everyone else, ended quite a few ancient democracies.

I agree. Do you have any ideas? A bicameral House of Lords/House of Commons system, perhaps?

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I wouldn't call it "centralized" or very large in population (only about 300 K people) but is the familiar with the Yeomanry League of the World of Greyhawk?

[...]

It's bottom up and concrete/organic in development, not top down and abstract/theoretical.

I think that a "bottom-up" origin for a democracy makes the most sense, yes. For gaming purposes, however, a "proselytizing" democracy that abolishes old customs and replaces them with a representative government, like Revolutionary France, could be very interesting.

I especially want to provide opportunities for all of the dirty tricks common to democracy (rotten boroughs, "pork barrel" politics, lobbying, and so on) to exist. Any ideas on this front are also welcome.

[Polydamas]

Another possible model would be federations of tribes or city-states, which typically had a central council with representatives from each member. They tended to either be dominated by the strongest member or break up under the slightest pressure, because tribes and free cities were usually enthusiastic about their independence, but in a game one could solidify.

Originally Posted by Cato the Elder

I agree. Do you have any ideas? A bicameral House of Lords/House of Commons system, perhaps?

Some of the typical scenarios to think of are someone just ignoring a court ruling, bribing the judge or murdering the witness because he has ten times the income and political capital and a hundred times the armed force of the court; feuding and self-help which are manageable when each side has a dozen buddies getting out of hand when each side has a thousand soldiers; and people with money using high-interest loans or generous laws around landholding to acquire most of the farmland. Expanding upon partial solutions to these is a bit beyond the scope of a thread, but reading history helps.

[Michael Cule]

I note, in an example that goes against my own argument, that the Swiss Confederation dates back as far as the 13th century, a bit before printing came to Europe.

However, I think that the fact that they and the other city-states and confederations were a lot more participatory than the other options available (monarchy, feudal overlordship and so) we shouldn't allow verbal slight of hand to persuade us to identify them with modern representative democracy which though it has roots way back in the past is a creature of the Enlightenment and after.

Secret ballots, parliamentary privilege to grant immunity from arrest, open debate, the idea of a 'loyal Opposition'. All of those are quite modern and without them democracy looks a lot like what its opponents accuse it of being: mob rule.

The idea that the laws should be openly published and known by everyone goes back a long way though. The idea that as many government decisions as possible should be made publicly so that the people can see what's going on... Well, that one's still an ongoing battle.

And I would say by the way that one person's demagogue is another person's radical reformer and if the peasants are offered viewpoints that might cause them to vote for someone other than their feudal lord's son for parliament then that's a damn fine thing for the health of the state.

I also consider that any praise of the Roman Republic is... At this point I have to pause and take a deep breath and sip some tea to calm myself down. The Republic was designed to be a rigged game right from the start and was always played that way. I have no sentimental admiration for it and regard the idea of instilling paralysis deliberately into a constitution to be a madness that always serves the interests of the established political elites.

(Dammit, I'm getting more and more radical in my old age. I hope when I stop being able to remember to put my trousers on in the morning I won't start looking for some barricades to man...)

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Cato the Elder

1. Political theory. A democratic state cannot exist if the idea of democracy has not been articulated in political thought.

The ideal of democracy, in various forms, is quite ancient. Item 1 is not hard to find in history.

4. Communication and transportation. Information must be disseminated, and officials dispatched, much more swiftly in a democracy than in a less representative state if it wishes to be anything more than a very loose democratic confederation. This is possibly the most limiting factor for low-tech democracies.

That comparison overlooks something basic. Any form of government at low tech levels tends to be 'loose' once it gets above the city-state (or equivalent) level. It's true that most of the great empires of history were monarchical, but in practice those great empires always had a lot of local rule. They had to do so to work. When that local structure broke down, as it did (for ex) in the later stages of the Roman Empire, the result was generally collapse.

So your low-tech democracy will tend to be loose. It might or might not be technically a confederation, but it'll necessarily have a lot of local control, just as it would if the central authority were an emperor or a high priest or whatever.

With that said, here are my questions. Without resorting to fantastic elements, how might a low-tech, expansive democratic (direct or indirect) state function? How might such a state emerge in the first place? What challenges would such a state be confronted with? Thanks in advance for your replies.

The most probable form it could take would be the 'loose democratic confederation' you mentioned above. This could potentially work, because at low technology levels, most of life is local anyway, even in a big empire. There are some exceptions, but in general food has to be produced locally because transporting bulk foodstuffs is difficult at low tech levels. Most manufacturing tends to be local, though again some exceptions have existed.
Travel tends to be slow, difficult, and often dangerous (though a big empire can reduce the danger considerably), so there are incentives to do things locally.

So what does the central state provide to such an assemblage? The same sorts of things monarchical empires do, to begin with. Policing the roads, keeping one city-state from destroying another, setting standards for trade and commerce, providing a reliable currency, providing defense from dangerous outsiders, etc.

Now, if your city-states are on the big side, the central government might build and maintain Roman-style aqueducts to provide water for the cities and agriculture in dry regions. Maintaining the road network is an ongoing chore that needs organization, money, and scale. Certain raw materials simply are not locally available (if there is no iron ore, there won't be any iron mines), and that provides another reason to maintain large trade networks.

It's simpler for such a state to congreal around a monarch, but it could be democratic, in part because most of what the central state would be doing would be pretty basic, by today's standards. It would probably not be a multiparty democracy in the same sense that modern liberal democracies are, because the central state wouldn't be elaborate enough to generate that. More likely you'd have a governing council with an elected representative from each city-state or equivalent, and that council would then elect the president or whatever to actually run the state and command the armed forces.

The big difference between such a democratic empire and traditional ones would be that the central official would likely rule for a set time, and might be removed from office by the council without (at least in theory) using force. The armed forces would probably be so organzed that they are paid by and chartered by the state as a whole, rather than individuals in the service of the state.

But the resulting federation would still bear a distinct resemblance to the Roman Empire, the Han Chinese empire, the Indian empire, etc. It would do a lot of the same things, and not do a lot of the same things, as the other realms.

Now, local politics would quite possibly be vibrant, with parties or the equivalent, and all the fun and games we associate with democracy. Maybe small regions might display such tendencies.

The common defense would be more popular and sustainable if there is a distinct cultural unity encompassing the city-states. If the people of each city-state recognize a common identity with the people of the other cities, it's a lot easier to hold the democratic federation together. A common religion, a common language, common heritage, all help.

But that, again, is also true of monarchical realms. The Roman Empire never got much bigger than the territories of Classical Civilization, for ex, and when it did its rule was always tenuous.

Even if the whole thing is working, though, most citizens are likely to be primarily interested in local politics. The comparison would be the EU today, or the USA in the early decades, when interest in State government tended to be greater because the State government impacted daily life much more.