Democracy, corruption, and transparency in ancient Athens and in the 17 th to 19 th centuries Britain (original) (raw)

Rethinking Anti-Corruption Reforms: The View from Ancient Athens

2011

The ancient Athenian democracy was a model of economic and political development. This paper looks at Athens' various legal and institutional reforms for combating bribery. Unlike contemporary anti-corruption agendas, the Athenians treated anti-corruption reform as a process in democratization. Although it is impossible to measure the efficacy of their reforms, the historical record suggests that they were successful insofar as they fostered less disruptive patterns of corruption over time. To account for why this might have been the case, I examine one design feature essential to these reforms: the creation of a private right of action for "anyone who wanted" to prosecute a bribery suit. As I argue, this feature could have established a 'political' level of enforcement that eliminated the most disruptive patterns of corruption over time.

Anti-Bribery Legislation in Practice: How Legal Inefficacy Strengthened the Athenian Democracy

2000

Classical Athens was a model of democratization and development. Over the course of the 5 th and 4th centuries BCE, Athens enjoyed a democracy that grew increasingly participatory and truly saw 'rule of the people'. The democracy preserved political and legal equality, fostered cooperation and collective action, and promoted public accountability. During this time, on a wide variety of economic, social and cultural measures, Athens became the preeminent city-state (polis) in the classical period. Moreover, Athens enacted paradigmatic policies to combat bribery: short (one-year) terms in office, officials selected primarily through lottery, frequent monitoring of officials' behavior, collegial not monopolistic authority, effectively little discretion for magistrates, and oppressively high penalties for bribery (ten times the amount of the bribe or, more often, disfranchisement or death). Despite these textbook anti-bribery reforms, by all accounts bribery appears to have been commonplace in Athens. How could this be? Why were Athens' reforms ineffective? And how could Athens succeed so much if it had so much corruption? This paper addresses both of these questions and attempts thereby to complicate our understanding of the relationship between bribery and democratization, bribery and development. As I argue, Athens' reforms were 'ineffective' because the Athenians frequently used the courts for overtly political purposes; to this extent, they did not have a principle of the 'rule of law', on which contemporary anti-bribery reforms are premised. Ineffective legislation, however, proved a boon to the Athenian democracy. With commonplace bribery and frequent bribery trials, the Athenians created institutions that aimed not to minimize bribery, but to harness it for the good of the community. I detail three ways in which regular bribery trials and the practice of bribery could have strengthened the Athenian democracy: bribery trials could be used to rethink collectively what 'democracy' should look like; bribery could act as a touchstone for political innovation; and bribery could be used to forge new, more democratic political technologies.

An oligarchic democracy: Manipulation of democratic ideals by Athenian oligarchs in 411 BC

This paper explores the stratagems of the Athenian oligarchs on their way to power in 411 BC. It focuses on political propaganda-- the cynical manipulation of democratic ideals, principles and procedures for the purpose of promoting oligarchy as a different form of democracy. The study challanges the widely accepted view of a moderate Theramenist faction in an attempt to demonstrate that until the oligarchs have usurped power there is no justification for differentiating between extremists and moderates among them. As to the historiography of the revolution, the paper argues that, for all its weaknesses and deficiencies, on the whole Thucydides' account is a genuine attempt to free history from the distortion of propaganda, whereas the parallel account of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia , despite recent attempts at its rehabilitation and validation, appears by and large to have achieved precisely the opposite effect -- perpetuating by means of systematic omission and commission the historical distortion generated by propaganda.

Democracies, Ancient and Modern

This paper provides a critical survey of recent approaches to Athenian democracy. Typically, modern interpretations start from the assumption that Athenian democracy can be a useful resource for rethinking contemporary political issues. To be useful presupposes that it is well understood. Thus the results of new methods of historical-philological source criticism are brought forward to assist in the reconstruction of the ideology and cultural discourse that underpinned the working of Athenian democracy. What is highly problematic in this effort, the author concludes, is that by stressing the time-bound actualities of Athenian political experience, the historicist approach is eventually unsuited to produce paradigms worthy of emulation.

Ancient Democracy and the Modern Era

Corruption in the Contemporary World: Theory, Practice, and Hotspots

corrupted currents of this world/ offence's gilded hand may shove by justice/ and oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself/buys out the law." 1 Such an observation raises an obvious question, for even if we can recognize the "corrupted currents", we do not know their source. In the preceding chapters we argued that the currents flow from the violation of generally accepted boundaries separating social or economic power and political power. We noted however that the limits are not absolute. Private social and economic power and political (public) power permeate one another, and the frontiers between them lack permanency. Nevertheless, we noted that there are situations that are especially susceptible to efforts to win what Burke called "undue influence," that is, to exchange one for the other in a manner that contravenes the principles that underlie the order that allows both to exist contemporaneously. In the following chapter I shall argue that one of the important differences between ancient democracy and the modern regimes of the West lies precisely in this realm. All periods and all governments have known the attempt to purchase one form of power by the other. Nevertheless, in the ancient world the difference between individual desires and social or economic interests was clearer, and the concept of the common good was emphasized. Consequently, the boundaries between the power and good of the citizen and those of the collective were rather stable. The medieval order, for its part, was based on divinely ordained boundaries that dictated reciprocal relations between unequal members. In the modern era, by contrast, the rights of the individual became the subject of politics, so that the boundaries between the social and economic on the one hand and the political on the other became blurred and shifted with political fortunes. The collective good, to the degree that it exists, is seen as the sum total of individual goods, and the boundaries have become a question of political struggle between individuals and their representatives. In the U.S. this has developed into a form of regime that one could call "civil rights based plutocracy." In essence, my argument is that the modern state, especially as it developed in the West, became a "hotspot" of corruption. It is in this sense that the term acquired a new meaning: from corruption of the state to corruption in the sense used nowadays.

Democratization: A Modern Economic Theory and the Evidence from Ancient Athens

In Boix's account, transitions to democracy only occur if elites think they do not stand to lose very much from a redistribution of assets. In this paper, I look at whether Boix's model applies to the case of classical Athens. My investigation suggests that elite Athenians at the end of the sixth century still stood to make considerable losses from a democratic redistribution. That Athens nonetheless transitioned to democracy at the end of the sixth century suggests that Boix's account is of limited help here.