Examining 31 ancient societies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, researchers found that democratic systems were more widespread than once believed — and not determined by population size or geography.
The Acropolis at Athens by Leo von Klenze.
The word ‘democracy’ was, of course, invented by the Greeks — demokratia meant simply that people (demos) had power (kratos).
This definition did not refer to any specific institutional mechanism, rather democracy was defined as an objective.
Common wisdom and scholars rooted in Western social science often presume that the core features of democratic governance — checks on concentrated power and citizen inclusiveness — were also exclusive to the Classical Mediterranean world, only to lie dormant for more than a millennium and be revived in Renaissance-age Europe and its colonies, from where it subsequently spread.
Yet this widespread viewpoint, whereby what we refer to as collective (or democratic) forms of governance were exclusively born and spread in the West, has rarely been systematically assessed.
“People often assume that democratic practices started in Greece and Rome,” said Dr. Gary Feinman, the MacArthur curator of Mesoamerican and Central American anthropology at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center.
“But our research shows that many societies around the world developed ways to limit the power of rulers and give ordinary people a voice.”
In an autocracy, just one person or a small group holds all the power; examples of autocracy can include absolute monarchies and dictatorships.
In a democracy, decision-making power is shared among the people. Elections often go hand-in-hand with democracy, but not always — many autocrats have been freely elected.
“Elections aren’t exactly the greatest metric for what counts as a democracy, so with this study, we tried to draw on historical examples of human political organization,” Dr. Feinman said.
“We defined two key dimensions of governance. One of them is the degree to which power is concentrated in just one individual or just one institution. The other is the degree of inclusiveness — how much the bulk of the citizens have access to power and can participate in some aspects of governance.”
In their new research, the authors examined 40 cases from 31 different political units across Europe, North America, and Asia, spanning thousands of years.
These societies all had different methods of record-keeping, and not all of them left behind written records.
So, the researchers had to find different ways to infer what the governments in these historical contexts were like.
“I think the use of space is very telling,” Dr. Feinman said.
“When you find urban areas with broad, open spaces, or when you see public buildings that have wide spaces where people can get together and exchange information, those societies tend to be more democratic.”
“On the other hand, some architectural and city-planning remnants indicate a society where fewer people concentrated power.”
“If you see pyramids with a tiny space at the top, or urban plans where all the roads run toward the ruler’s residence, or societies where there’s very little space where people could get together for exchanging information, those are all proxies for more autocratic cases.”
The scientists created an ‘autocracy index’ to place each society they studied along a spectrum — from highly autocratic to strongly collective.
“Among archaeologists, there’s entrenched thought that Athens and Republican Rome were the only two democracies in the ancient world, and that in Asia and the Americas, governance was tyrannical or autocratic,” Dr. Feinman said.
“In our analysis, we saw societies in other parts of the world that were equally democratic to Athens and Rome.”
“These findings show that both democracy and autocracy were widespread in the ancient world,” said New York University’s Professor David Stasavage.
“Societies also developed ways for people to share power and facilitate inclusiveness, revealing that democracy has deep and widespread historical roots. I think a lot of people would find that surprising,” said Dr. Linda Nicholas, a researhers at the Field Museum.
The team found that population size and the number of political levels did not account for whether a society would be autocratic, which challenges the established idea that demographic and political scale naturally leads to strong rulers.
“Instead, the strongest factor shaping how much power rulers held was how they financed their authority,” Dr. Feinman said.
“Societies that depended heavily on revenue that was controlled or monopolized by leaders — such as mines, long-distance trade routes, slave labor, or war plunder — tended to become more autocratic.”
“In contrast, societies funded mainly through broad internal taxes or community labor were more likely to distribute power and maintain systems of shared governance.”
The study also shows that societies with more inclusive political systems generally had lower levels of economic inequality.
“These findings challenge the idea that autocracy and great inequality are natural or inevitable outcomes of complexity or growth,” Dr. Feinman said.
“History shows that people across the world have created inclusive political systems — even under difficult conditions.”
A paper on the findings was published this week in the journal Science Advances.
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Gary M. Feinman et al. 2026. The distribution of power and inclusiveness across deep time. Science Advances 12 (12); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aec1426
