Abstract
Ostracism, the removal of a political leader from ancient Athens for a period of ten years without any additional financial sanction or other punishment, was an important and rather unique institutional aspect of the direct democracy. The present study explains the adoption of ostracism as the utility maximizing choice of a self–interested constitutional writer—cum—political actor to resolve violent political conflict and illustrates that it acted as a type of negative referendum on politicians. Using notions from game theory and spatial decision modeling, the paper goes on to attribute the infrequent use of ostracism to its two-stage decision making process wherein the decisive voter of the first stage differed from the decisive voter of the second stage.
Highlights
The fundamental kinship of ancient and modern democracy has led modern researchers to apply the methodology of public choice to gain a better understanding of the practices of the ancient Greek democracies.1 The present study follows this approach and offers new rational theory perspectives on ostracism, a distinct characteristic of the direct democracy of ancient Athens, 508–322, by which the demos in a two-stage ballot decided to banish a political leader for a period of ten years
She adds further that with the passage of time it served as a continual symbolic reminder to the aristocracy of the supremacy of the demos. She refutes the use of ostracism as a means of resolving policy disputes, since that was the task of the assembly of the demos. She posits that the ostracisms of Aristides, Cimon and Thucydides showed that resort to the mechanism was made at moments of sharp conflict between political leaders and their supporters, while, given the numbers of citizens involved, she finds it unlikely that the elites could manipulate the votes against Hyperbolus
Research on the ancient Athenian practice of ostracism has explored the objective of the process by which political leaders were banished for a fixed, albeit long period of time from active politics, but did not incur any other material punishment
Summary
The fundamental kinship of ancient and modern democracy has led modern researchers to apply the methodology of public choice to gain a better understanding of the practices of the ancient Greek democracies. The present study follows this approach and offers new rational theory perspectives on ostracism, a distinct characteristic of the direct democracy of ancient Athens, 508–322 (all dates BCE), by which the demos in a two-stage ballot decided to banish a political leader for a period of ten years. Considering Cleisthenes, the constitutional writer of the law of ostracism as a rational self–interested actor, the paper inquires into why he introduced ostracism as a method of resolving contests for political power among rival elites, instead of continuing the previous norm of violent conflict and mass exile. It explores the equilibrium outcome of ostracism as a two-stage voting process wherein the decisive voter of the first stage may differ from that of the second.
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