Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/259891 
Year of Publication: 
2004
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2004:19
Publisher: 
Lund University, School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Lund
Abstract: 
Around 600 B.C., Athens was ruled by a birth aristocracy. Some 150 years later, the city-state was a "democracy". A rational-actor perspective, as perceived in the new institutional economics, sheds additional light on this intriguing transformation by focussing our attention on the incentives of individual actors, for example. Furthermore, it illustrates the unpredictable nature of the long-run consequences of institutional change. Repeatedly, a result of the intra-elite competition for power was that members of the elite unwittingly contributed to the changes that eventually undermined their own dominant position as a group.
Subjects: 
institutional change
unintended
democracy
Athens
JEL: 
D72
N43
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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