the council of areopagus as a judicial establishment monitored the proper implementation of rule of law in the polis (city-state) of athens. while, the main responsibility and duty of areopagus was to adjudicate the cases of the most serious crimes, it intervened in the political affairs as well. eventually, after long-lasting political conflicts between athenian oligarchy and democracy, this e...

This paper studies the endogenous emergence of political regimes, in particular democracy or oligarchy, in heterogeneous societies in which institutions do not ensure political commitments. Democracy emerges if the ruling coalition that makes political decisions represents the majority of individuals of the population, while oligarchy emerges when the political decisions are made by a minority ...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the numerous metaphors that Plato employs in his Republic symbolise ignorance, immorality, and political inadequacy “multitude”, other words people who live a democracy. Plato’s symbols highlight negativity – illustrated dialogues as well Athenian demos order suggest only role must play: becoming subjects “divine” philosophers perfect city described Republic....

In his famous book " Democracy and its Critics " (1989), Robert A. Dahl argues that, historically speaking, there have been two transformations of democracy. These transformations have brought about different models of democratic governance and different interpretations of the concept of democracy. By the fi rst transformation Dahl refers to the the emergence of the classical model of democracy...

Summary The politeia established in Athens 317 after a covenant between Cassander and Demetrius of Phalerum was variously described by ancient authors as tyranny, an oligarchy, democracy. Even among modern scholars there is no agreement about its definition. A close study the architecture so-called regime comparison with almost contemporary constitution Cyrene, imposed on African town Ptolemaeu...

I BEGIN WITH A QUANDARY that is very familiar to Martin Ostwald: Classical Athens saw the invention of both democracy and political theory, yet while we have a number of examples of criticism of democracy, no systematic defense of democracy-no democratic theory-survives from an Athenian pen. I propose that the conundrum is best explained by assuming that from the late fifth through the late fou...

We augment the mechanism used in Nash implementation with a political process that collects the opinions of a subset of individuals with a fixed probability distribution. The outcome is a function of only the collected opinions. We show that the necessary – and sometimes sufficient – condition for implementation by a specific political process can be either weaker or stronger than Maskin monoto...

Traditionally, political scientists define political institutions deductively. This approach may prevent from discovery of existing institutions beyond the definitions. Here, a principal component analysis was used for an inductive extraction of dimensions in Polity IV data on the political institutions of all nations in the world the last two centuries. Three dimensions of institutions were re...

This paper develops a positive theory of growth and redistribution in which agents care about both their absolute and relative levels of consumption. As in Alesina and Rodrik (1994), public goods are productive and are financed by a tax on capital. Equilibrium tax policy is chosen by a pivotal voter and is shown to reflect the strength of status preferences and the distributions of wealth and p...