Athenian Democracy

[VotingPatterns]

In a true democracy, everyone's opinions count and all decisions are made by all parties together. Everyone has a vote and all votes are equal.

This is called an AthenianDemocracy because back in the days of Athens, the town's men would gather in the town centre and debate over issues equally and fairly.

However, Athenian Democracies don't scale very well. See RepresentativeGovernment for one solution. Of course, as soon as you have one person representing a group, all the flaws of majoritarian mob rule wreck your democracy.

Also, Athenian democracies assume that everyone is capable of exercising their vote wisely, which isn't the case. Most people don't have time to spend tracking and researching issues. Consequently, they are subject to ApplyDemagoguery? and things like BarberIsm when they cast their vote.

What you're saying here is extremely undemocratic. The basic assumption in democracy is that people know best what's best for them. Otherwise we should exclude theses less capable individuals from voting for their own good. Of course if we take this to it's logical consequence, I'd have to be king of the world :-). In a true democracy, people even have the right to do the wrong thing. I live in Switzerland and we have a direct democracy (in spirit, anyhow). So far, we haven't been doing so badly -- ThomasMaeder

The real, fundamental flaw with Athenian democracy is that dramatized by Plato's Republic: it leads directly to mob rule. The poor masses will happily vote themselves an unearned share of the money of the rich, or apply the death penalty for no better reason than that they don't like a guy. (Ultimately to their own detriment, since unearned redistribution of wealth only hurts the economy.)

Perceived flaws in AthenianDemocracy:

Athenian democracies are rarely SecretBallot?. This can cause some significant ill-will and beatings if you vote wrong.
Only free male citizens have voting rights. That excludes a major part of the population (females, slaves, etc)

It's probably worth distinguishing between AthenianDemocracy in the abstract versus any particular implementation of the ideals. It seems to me that the above flaws are merely implementation details that could easily be changed without altering the fundamentals.

The details have to include the ways humans think in groups. My research says the instability of humans directly translates to the instability of representative governments.