457. The Origins and Spread of Democracy feat. David Stasavage

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

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23d ago 55:21

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What factors influenced the development of early democracies, the role of technology in governance? Who came up with the concept of fairness in taxation, and the evolution of democratic institutions over time?

David Stasavage is in the department of Politics at New York University, and also the author of several books. His latest book is titled The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today.

Greg and David discuss the historical divergence between Europe and China in both economic and political terms. They explore themes such as the emergence of representative assemblies in Europe, the necessity of rulers to obtain consent and information, and the contrasting ability of Chinese rulers to tax without broad-based consent due to their developed bureaucratic systems.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Is democracy on the rise, or on the decline in today's world?

50:32: We're still in a position today, I think, where there's certainly a lot more people living under democracy than was the case in the early 19th century, right? And that's a very significant thing because, in the early 19th century, of course, we had sort of proto-democracies in some cases, and it then spread in Western Europe, but the rest of the world had been conquered by Europeans. And, pushed into having conqueror Europeans, colonizers weren't particularly eager in early stages to promote democratic institutions in areas that they colonized. In fact, sometimes they did away with indigenous democratic institutions. So that is why the book does say decline and then rise because, yes, there's some backtracking going on; it's serious, it's important, but there's been a pretty big rise all the same.

The more you expand democracy’s meaning, the less meaningful it becomes

26:59: The important thing to recognize about democracy is that the more you load on to the term, the less meaningful it becomes.

The ripple effect of a bond default

43:26: I think with today's economy, everybody recognizes that if you have a default—like, say, something on U.S. Treasuries—that's going to have massive, obviously massive, negative economic consequences. Whereas, if you think of England with those first few loans they issued in 1688, if they had been defaulted on, things wouldn't have been great in London, but it's not like there would have been some massive negative economic shock.

England's balancing act—bureaucracy and democracy

32:36: Chapter 9 of the book (The Decline and Rise of Democracy) is called "Why England Was Different," and different in the sense of having simultaneously pursued this sort of consensual route of governance, while also seeing over time a bureaucracy develop. So that today, when we think of democracy, we don't think in a modern democracy that bureaucracy is, I mean, apart from someone that wants to say, "Oh my God, we have to abolish the IRS because otherwise we'll be in, you know, a dictatorship," that we don't think of these two things as being opposites. We think, of course, we need a bureaucracy to run things because who else is going to do this on a daily basis in such a large republic?

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