David Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Stasavage's argument that early democracy declined only to rise again in the late Middle Ages may be treated as a development of his prior, shorter book for the Princeton Economic History of the Western World series in which he argued for the significance of representative assemblies in the emergence of a system of public credit.Whereas States of Credit (2011) was limited to Western European city-states, The Decline and Rise of Democracy expands and extends the scope of Stasavage's argument.The title of the book has a touch of paradox, but only a touch, since the referent of democracy is double and time-bound-elaborated, it would read "The Decline of Early Democracy and Rise of Modern Democracy" (see 4, 7, 258-259).The book is divided into three roughly equal parts of one hundred pages, titled "Early Democracy," "The Divergence," and "Modern Democracy," each comprised of four chapters, complete with an extensive scholarly apparatus of endnotes and bibliography.Democracy is defined as a mixed constitution (8, 24) founded on "the idea of constraining rulers to obtain consent from their people" (102).It comes in two variants: the direct form Stasavage calls early democracy, which boasted constant if restricted political participation, and the indirect, representative government without mandates, dubbed modern democracy, with broad if episodic political participation.The author sets out to argue for two, connected hypotheses: (1) democracy is, historically speaking, a natural mode of political development for human beings; and (2) the current distribution of democratic and autocratic regimes across the globe is explained by the deep history of the respective regions.Specifically, autocracies result where the state or the bureaucracy preceded democracy, whereas wherever rulers had to seek consent for their coercive and extractive purposes, democracies developed.If (1) and (2) are true, Stasavage infers, then we should reject the view that democracy was invented in the West and hold instead that democracy is natural to human beings; this could soothe us "in our current age of democratic anxiety" (xi).It is Europe's lack of science and civilization that explains the political divergence between it and China or the Middle East (13; this is one of several ironies peppering Stasavage's history, see also 11, 18, 44, 46, 84, 217, 305).The deep history of early democracy and early autocracy shows that China is "simply an alternative route for governance and a very stable one" (26); in the Middle East, early democracy "died out under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates" (166) because rulers inherited a state bureaucracy, allowing them to pursue the autocratic alternative.Autocrats
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".