The tension between majoritarian politics and individual rights in Ancient Athens. A constitutional political economy perspective

Scholars have long debated whether Athenian democracy should be regarded as liberal. Rather than seeking to classify the regime as liberal or illiberal, this paper asks why democratic Athens did not develop an extensive system of constitutional rights. Although committed to broad political participation, Athens lacked a formal separation of powers, institutional checks and balances, and a conception of individual rights comparable to those found in modern constitutional democracies. The paper argues that the relationship between democracy and rights in Athens was more nuanced than the conventional liberal-illiberal distinction suggests. It develops a constitutional political economy model in which the constitutional designer chooses the extent of rights to maximise the net expected benefits of collective decision-making. The model predicts that constitutional rights will be limited when majoritarian decisions are expected to generate large and broadly shared benefits while imposing only modest losses on minorities. Applied to Athens, this framework explains why Athenian democracy relied more heavily on citizen participation than on extensive constitutional protections.