Those who advocate direct or participatory democracy appeal to the government of ancient Athens as their model of the way government should be. Athens supposedly had the first real democracy, and as far as they are concerned, there has never really been real democracy since. Dahl has been a major proponent of this way of looking at democracy, and in fact it has been suggested that Dahl was the founder of what might be called the Yale School of Democratic Theory, those who believe in promoting direct democracy as much as possible. More recent writers in this vein have been Graham Smith, Fischkin, and O’Leary.
Smith suggests four criteria for judging how democratic a government is: inclusivity, popular control, deliberative decision making, and transparency. A government is more democratic if it is more inclusive, includes more of the total population, if it allow popular control of government processes, if it makes decision through clear deliberation, and if its processes are transparent to the people.
We can use these criteria to judge the nature of the ancient Athenian government. The results are not promising for using Athens as a model of democratic government.
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