The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China

by Matthew Kroenig

Political scientists have devised standards to ensure that scholars do not cherry-pick historical examples to prove their argument, so please permit me to pause for a brief moment to consider why I study the following cases. Best practices call for scholars to select cases in order to ensure (to use social science jargon) “variation on the independent variable.”13 In other words, for this study, we need to look at both democratic and autocratic great powers and trace how their domestic political institutions affect their power trajectories and the outcome of great power competitions. Since democracies have been relatively rare historically, this narrows down substantially the number of cases we could possibly study. We begin, therefore, with the world’s first democracy, Athens. We then continue to the world’s first republic, Rome. Open government then vanishes for several hundred years only to return to the Italian Peninsula in the late middle ages and early Renaissance period.