ONCE MORE: ON SIZE AND DEMOCRACY
Size matters. Both the number of persons in a political unit and the extent of its territory have consequences for the form of democracy. Imagine for a moment that you’re democratic reformer in a country with a nondemocratic government that you hope to democratize. You don’t want your country to dissolve into dozens or perhaps hundreds of ministates, even though each might be small enough for its citizens to gather frequently to exercise their sovereignty in an assembly. The citizens of your country are too numerous to assemble, and what’s more they extend over a territory too large for all of you to meet without daunting difficulties. What are you to do?
Perhaps today and increasingly in the future you might be able to solve the territorial problem by employing electronic means of communication that would enable citizens spread out over a large area to “meet,” discuss issues, and vote. But it is one thing to enable citizens to “meet” electronically and quite another to solve the problem posed by large number of citizens. Beyond some limit, an attempt to arrange for them all to meet and engage in a fruitful discussion, even electronically, becomes ridiculous.
How big is too big for assembly democracy? How small is small enough? According to recent scholarly estimates, in Greek city-states the citizen body of adult males typically numbered between two thousand and ten thousand-about the right number, in the view of some Greek political theorists, for a good polis, or self-government city-state. In Athens, however, the citizen body was much larger than that-perhaps around sixty thousand at the height to Athenian democracy in 450 B.C.E. “The result,” as one scholar has written, “was that Athens simply had too many citizens t function properly as a polis.” A century later, as a result of emigration, deaths from war and disease, and additional restrictions on citizenship, the number may have been reduced by half, which was still too many for its assembly to accommodate more than a small fraction of Athenian male citizens.
A bit of simple arithmetic soon reveals the inexorable consequences of time and number. Suppose we begin with a very tiny unit, a committee, let us say, of just ten members. We think it might be reasonable to allow each member at least ten minutes for discussing the matter at hand. So we shall need about an hour and forty minutes for our meeting, certainly not an exorbitant amount of time for our committee members to spend in meeting. But suppose the subject is so complicated that each committee member might require a half-hour. Then we’ll need to plan on a five-hour meeting, or perhaps two meetings-still an acceptable amount of time.
But even a fairly large committee would prove to be a small citizen assembly. Consider, for example, a village of two hundred persons where the entire adult population consists of, say, one hundred persons, all of whom attend the meeting of an assembly. Suppose each