Two weeks ago, the discussion arose about what are some examples writers can look at from the past for non-US, possibly non-English self-government. Everyone does empires, or kingdoms, or oligarchies (very popular in sci-fi), technocracies likewise. What about local or regional self-governing societies?
Well, it depends on scale and philosophical foundation. I would argue that your fictional world will have some prerequisites underpinning self-government. First, people valued as individuals, not just as property or members of a group. Second, people with responsibilities, lots of people with responsibilities, so they need to have a voice of some kind in the government. Third, a reason to organize, be it faith or mutual defense or water management. Direct democracies are a hard fit for a large (50K plus people) society, unless technology allows for everyone to participate, and to know each other. Then everyone knows who can do what, who is supposed to do what within society, and can work in smaller groups as well as larger ones.
If you are writing humans, you will have a hierarchy of some sort, even if it is just something like “Og made more arrows today, so Og gets the tender meat this time.” The Athenian democracy and the city-states modeled after it had ranks in society, economic and otherwise, but those ranks tended to be controlled and channeled for the good of society (ideally. Human nature et cetera et cetera.) The strengths and weaknesses of the Athenian model are well known and documented. So you need to keep in mind that your government should be able to turn greed into something neutral, or perhaps beneficial, unless that is your story’s conflict. In which case, well, you have a lot of material to draw on for story ideas.
I would wager that the Roman Republic was one way to channel that, albeit in a way that turned out less than ideal in the very long run. Every male had to serve in the military, so he had a stake in society and a good reason to think hard about the government getting into wars (in theory). Those who bought and maintained horses and the equipment needed to be a cavalry man with his minimum number of support staff (Equites) had more say in the vote than did the ordinary infantry, a bit of a reversal from Athens and other Greek states. A lot of ink has been spent on the Roman government and what worked or didn’t so I’ll let you go digging there.
Two weeks ago, I mentioned Poland. The theory behind the Polish government that developed was that all the nobles had to be able to fight for their lands and the monarch. Thus they should have a say in who became monarch, and what wars he got them into, if it was not a strictly defensive conflict. Those who fought had rights, and were the Polish Nation. At their peak they composed 10% or so of the populace, which gave Poland a higher percentage of voters per capita than England. The system had flaws, and the wealthiest nobles, the great magnates, had a lot more power than did the “could be peasants except for tax exemption and sword” gentry. The liberum veto, where one noble could terminate any action agreed to by the king and the rest, became a massive liability*, and contributed to Poland’s dismemberment in the 1600s-1700s. That said, the system can still serve as a starting point for a fictional government.
The Hanseatic League was a trade-based government that oversaw foreign policy and trade law for dozens of city-states and cities in northern Europe in the 1000s-1400s. Some places had more clout than did others, but the laws of the Hanse were recognized as valid and enforcible. Within the cities, the place tended to be run by patricians, the wealthiest land owners, traders, and craft masters. If you want a republic based on economics and trade, the Hanse is a source to consider. The down side is that English-language works on the governance tend to be sparse. I did my research in German, so I don’t have any titles to recommend.
Individual city states might serve as possible starting places as well, such as Singapore, Florence, and a few others. Archaeologists have postulated that some Copper-Age societies were quasi-democracies or republics, based on the remains of the communities and artifacts. Alas, none of those lasted far enough into the Bronze Age to leave written records or hard evidence of how their systems might have worked.
Chieftanships, monarchies, and empires are easy. Oligarchies are familiar, even if cloaked as republics. Go forth, be creative, and have fun with a democracy or republic!
Mad Genius Club 
23 responses to “Worldbuilding for Democracies or Republics”
Venice is another example of an oligarchic republic. It is worth examining. They were more than a city-state having an Athenian-style empire sprawled across the Mediterranean.
For the Hansa, it is worth searching archive dot org. Limit the search to texts. There are several popular works published between 1900 and 1940 about the league. They are not particularly scholarly or detailed, but would likely provide a world-builder enough information for that end.
Internet Archive is God’s gift to authors.
One good book on the old Venetian Republic that I’ve read is Thomas Madden’s ‘Venice: A New History’. He covers the Serene Republic from its legendary start to its final end under Napoleon.
Having just vacationed there last year, Switzerland sticks in my mind as a hybrid type of republic/democracy. It’s certainly migrated towards a more powerful central government in recent times, but there’s still a feeling of the country being an alliance of the Cantons, no matter where you end up in the country.
An amusing (to me) aside regarding Switzerland: The railways are the way to get around the country if you’re vacationing there. Being an officially multilingual country, the announcements on the regional lines were all given in three languages. First in Swiss German, then French or Italian (depending on where ou were in the country), anf finally in English. The part of my mind that even thought about it was expecting the English to have that weird Euro-English accent that we hear in commercials all the time. I almost laughed out loud when the announcements were delivered by a female voice in the most corn-bred Midwestern American accent you could imagine! It was inspiring.
It’s one of the great differences between American English and the places on the other side of the Atlantic. Received Pronunciation in the UK is basically how to talk like the ruling class with some extra enunciation for radio and projecting to the back of the theater (thea-TUH!) thrown in. Academic French is basically about learning to talk like a professor, Standard Italian seems to split the difference between the two; as best I can tell, it’s a little bit an academic thing and a little bit a RAI thing, RAI being their BBC analogue. The equivalent “generic” accent in America is just some middle-class people from the middle of the country whom the radio broadcasters decided had a not-unpleasant way of talking that was intelligible to most American speakers.
I feel like the rule of thumb comes down to dispersal of weapons/ability to use force within a society. The more centralized the control of weapons/force, the more centralized the concentration of power, and vice versa. (I don’t know enough about the Hanseatic League to know if they were an exception, but generally merchants to either protect their goods or hire it done, so a large merchant class would tend to lead to a similar dispersal of force/weaponry). Also potentially interesting to worldbuilders are a few very decentralized areas dominated by armed, but small scale landowners/warriors, including saga era Iceland, the Upstalsboom League of Frisia, and the Old Swiss Confederacy.
One more decentralized area dominated by armed but small scale landowner/warriors was the Dithsmarschen Peasant’s Republic. It was part of or an ally to the Hanseatic League, supplying them with axe-armed mercenaries and holding off local lords from their boggy homeland. They also used to blackmail the nearby Hansa cities when they felt disrespected by getting the fighting men together, going down to the Eider or Elbe, and simply seizing every single ship that passed along until the Hansa gave in.
Way cool, hadn’t heard of them, or the term “peasant republic” before. Could be useful for searching later.
Apparently there were several in medieval Europe, with the Helvetic Confederation AKA Switzerland being the best known and most powerful.
Remote places far from the centralizing power’s influence and protection is a recurring theme in these situations in general, but marshes are a particularly strong motif, between Dithsmarschen, Upstallboom (I think…) and early Venice, before they got rich.
If you want to get a feel — up close and personal! — for government, attend your municipal meetings. You’ll see perfectly reasonable, rational, nice people disagree wildly and vociferously about why your township needs to build the Taj Mahal of community centers with an Olympic-size swimming pool.
Normally, you, dear taxpayer, would instantly vote “no” unless your child is on the swim team or aquatic league.
But Hershey is more complicated. We’re a destination resort in central PA and we host all kinds of events, including athletic ones. The nice clerk at Nora Roberts bookshop in Boonsboro, MD told me that her son had just played soccer (on his travel team) in Hershey!
Building an Olympic-sized pool means we’d host swim teams from across the Eastern Seaboard, all of whom would stay in our hotels and eat in our restaurants, especially in the off-season when Hershey Park is closed.
Our board of supervisors must cope with citizens who want services for free; county, state, and federal requirements; developers of all kinds, and most of all, the Entities who own at least 1/3 of the land in the township even though you wouldn’t know it. The Entities (that’s what they’re called) are the Hershey Trust, Hershey Co., and Hershey Entertainment and Resorts.
Municipal meetings will give you a feel for government on a very local level. They can be entertaining and they’re free.
I know it’s just legal speak but “The Entities” make them sound like those energy beings Captain Kirk was constantly arguing with 😉
The Entities have a great deal of power in township politics, even though you don’t see them publicly. Our supervisors must always factor them into any decisions. The Entities are the first stop for any local organization raising funds, whether it’s the library hosting a book festival or getting the trolley running again like it did when Mr. Hershey was still alive. Some people treat them, the Park, and the tourists as cash cows. They are not.
You ignore The Entities at your peril if you’re trying to get anything done much past the neighborhood level. The supervisors really do have to argue with them! The West End project is a case in point.
For the fictional example – “Freehold.”
I went through this while writing my ‘Republic of Texas Navy’ books. What I ended up with is a pastiche of the U.S. Constitution, the current Texas State Constitution, and some ideas of my own.
Third, a reason to organize, be it faith or mutual defense or water management.
I’d say this part is the most important, and I’d even take it a step further: if you want to write about a successful democracy, the first thing you need is a demos: a group that considers themselves, for whatever reason, to be one people. That’s the only way that you even have a chance of getting elected leaders who are out to do the best for the body politic as a whole rather than getting as many of the spoils as possible for “their” people and diverting the cost to the “other.”
Conversely, if you want to write about a failing democracy, having something go wrong with the demos is a good place to start. Individual corruption is survivable, but when the country starts to fracture into different groups who no longer consider the others their fellows… Well, that’s when things start to get “interesting” in the full literary sense of the word.
Excellent point about small-scale groups cooperating vs working against the system. Madison’s “faction” problem in Federalist 10 talks about exactly that problem.
Athens was, in fact, awkwardly large for its form of government. It was known at the time.
Also note that all forms of government are vulnerable according to the forms of transportation and communication they have — “king of kings” was a thing because it was literally impossible to rule any other way, only a subordinate king on the spot was able to act quickly enough — but democracy particularly feels them.
That’s the thing that’s why “everyone knew” that there’s no way the Winged Hussars would show up to break the Siege of Vienna, right?
Because they had to all agree to go do that.
(There’s a * for a footnote but no footnote, guessing that’s what was going to be in the foot note.)
No, actually it was going to be about the Russians, Austrians, and Germans buying off certain nobles to block moves that would have made it harder to dismember Poland. Sorry about that! I got distracted with some Life happening and forgot to add the note.
There was enough going on that there’s no lack of cool things!
While not quite ‘democratic’ in the modern sense, folks might want to look at things like the Japanese ikki, leagues formed of various smallholders, village headmen, local temple heads, jizamurai (either the bottom of the samurai caste or the top of the peasantry, depending on who you ask) that fought against the samurai, sometimes with great success. The historical ninjas of Iga and Koga provinces were ikkis that used guerilla warfare, according to some authors.
In Europe you had groups like the ‘Peace Leagues’ in eastern France and western Germany during the Middle Ages that tried, often vainly, to enforce the Peace of God and Truce of God and protect themselves from the more lawless knights. Oh, and apparently the idea of chivalry was promoted as part of it too. It’s interesting to note that,. according to the books I’ve read, both the Japanese ikki and European ‘Peace Leagues’ used to have written charters detailing everyone’s duties and what protection they could expect as a member, and that said charters had the signatures done in a circle. So no one could say they were first or complain about being last.
Parallel example from ancient India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licchavis_of_Vaishali