INTRODUCTION

For scholars seeking to understand political transitions, ancient Greece – the birthplace of democracy and home to dynamic political entrepreneurs – represents a potentially invaluable source of information. Until recently, however, that information was too dispersed to permit systematic analysis of political data. That has now changed, thanks to the publication of Mogens Hansen and Thomas Nielsen's (2004) Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. The Inventory, which has been augmented by the work of Josiah Ober and his colleagues at Stanford University, draws together information on over 1,000 different poleis. Yet it remains to be seen how useful data derived from the Inventory will be to scholars of political transition, because for the majority of documented poleis, the Inventory contains only sparse information about political institutions. Moreover, the survival of that information was probably influenced by the economic and institutional performance of the particular polis, greatly complicating efforts to infer causal relationships – and most social scientists seek to identify causal relationships. Researchers using the data thus face a formidable empirical challenge.

Our objective in this chapter is to begin to explore the Inventory data on the political institutions of ancient Greek poleis. We will take the Inventory's classifications of political institutions as given. Before commencing, it is important to be clear as to what can and cannot be expected from our analysis. To begin with, it is very unlikely that the data will prove sufficiently rich to provide sweeping evidence for particular theories of transition; for example, to show that a particular set of factors led to democracy, or to determine whether democracy led to economic growth. (Of course, modern data have not provided conclusive answers, either.) Moreover, analysing these data cannot substitute for historical work that verifies or enlarges the set of classifications. Thus, our objective is modest: we hope to demonstrate the potential usefulness of the Inventory information when organised as a dataset, and to complement the historical record (and the empirical literature on modern political transitions) by laying out the data in a fashion that will allow us to offer a new method for approaching questions regarding political transition in ancient Greece.