ELITE AND INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACIES

How open is the political process? Who gets to participate, and who is excluded? Broadly speaking, democracies can be either elite or inclusive. Elite systems limit political rights to a relatively small percentage of the adult population; inclusive systems grant near-universal adult suffrage and guarantee open contestation for offices. Historically, free democracies tend to be more exclusive than liberal democracies, although this is in part because inclusive democracies of any stripe are a relatively recent phenomenon.

Athens limited political rights to male citizens. Women could be citizens but had no political rights. Foreign residents (metics) had economic rights but no political rights, and slaves had neither economic nor political rights. Noncitizens, including metics, slaves, and their descendants, had no alternative path to citizenship. This meant that even during the golden age of Athenian democracy, only 12 percent of the population had political rights.

Women were excluded from the political process almost everywhere until the end of the nineteenth century. This limited political rights even in the most open democracies to less than 50 percent of the adult population. The most common justification for denying women political rights was that they allegedly lacked the capacity for rational thought, and remained locked in a perpetual childlike state of nature.