From the beginning of Roman statehood, various types of population gatherings played a huge role. They had different names – tribe committees, centurial committees, and curial committees. Their shape and competencies have evolved, so I do not want to go into excessive detail here and will continue to refer to them generally as folk assemblies.
Generally, it can be said that the purpose of the people’s assemblies was to pass laws and elect the highest republican officials. The people of Rome gathered either in the Forum or on the Campus Martius and expressed their will in the form of a resolution. This system, with some changes, functioned practically until the end of the 1st century BCE, because only with the advent of the empire, when the former republic was replaced by an autocracy, the republican electoral system as an institution became completely empty.
Today we often tend to beautify and compare republican institutions to our own. From this perspective, the fall of the republic and the rise of the empire appear as the replacement of democracy with tyranny. But let’s be honest: the Roman republic had as much in common with democracy as the electric chair had with the chair.
Rome in the Republican era was not a democracy! Why? Because the very system of functioning and voting at people’s assemblies was a contradiction of modern democratic ideals. First things first:
Firstly, voting at people’s assemblies was organized in a very specific way. It was not the general population who voted at the same time, but subsequent groups. For example, in the centurial assembly there were 35 groups and each subsequent group cast one vote. A resolution that received 18 votes in favor was considered adopted. So 18 groups could make a decision that would bind the entire society. This clearly shows that, in principle, such a system could lead to the adoption of a resolution that enjoyed the support of only a minority of the population (e.g. it was enough for a resolution to receive support from 51% of the votes in 18 groups, even if it was opposed in the remaining 17 groups there were 100% of the votes, the resolution was adopted anyway!). On a side note, this is broadly reminiscent of, for example, the method of electing the US president, in which individual states choose only electors, who then vote for the candidates, which may lead to a situation in which a candidate enjoying lower overall public support is elected president.
Secondly, the most important thing was the way of classifying the population into particular groups. The perfidy of the system was that the division into groups dated back to the earliest Roman history and was based on who had what wealth or how many soldiers a given group was able to provide in the event of mobilization. These roots of the system meant that, for example, in centurial committees, the groups gathering the richest citizens were much smaller, while the groups that included the poor were huge. What did this result in? Well, the fact that a handful of the richest citizens forming one group had the same weight in the assembly (as a group) as a group of tens of thousands of the poorest citizens – both had one vote each! In other words: the few citizens associated with the 18 richest groups were able to outvote the much larger citizens associated with the remaining 17 groups.
But that’s not all: the practice of the electoral system was designed in such a way that successive groups voted: from the highest (the richest) to the lowest (the poorest), but only until a majority of votes was obtained. Thus, it was enough for the richest 18 groups to vote in favor of the resolution, and the remaining 17 groups did not speak at all! The voting was simply over! It is easy to guess that the poor had little to say.
In some types of people’s assemblies, territorial divisions were important. They were also voted on in groups, but these groups were created differently – according to administrative division, so basically in a way that gave the population greater equality. But that’s just a theory. Why? Because, especially at the time when all inhabitants of Italy gained civil rights, separate groups were created for them. But voting took place only in Rome. So, in practice, such gatherings were attended primarily by residents of the capital itself, and apart from them only a handful of visitors from other Italian cities who happened to have the time and money needed to make the long journey. And again, consider the weight of votes! In this case, a handful of newcomers from Italy, scattered in many groups, were able to outvote the population of Rome itself, divided into much smaller numbers. Someone may say that such a system handicapped the native Romans. But nothing could be further from the truth! It was beneficial to the Roman aristocracy, which was able to use money to persuade citizens from neighboring cities to go to the Roman assembly and vote by the will of the nobles.
Another limitation of democracy in Roman republican institutions was the method of putting resolutions to a vote – only resolutions proposed by the official who convened the meeting could be voted on. You could only vote “for” or “against”, without the possibility of proposing any amendments. Moreover, there was no substantive discussion at the meeting (the proposer of the resolution and its opponents could convince the people about their reasons by speaking before the meeting).
When discussing the limitations of Roman republican “democracy”, I naturally ignore such “obvious things” as the fact that only male residents, free and with civil rights, were entitled to voting rights. So in practice – a relatively small part of the entire population living in Rome and the surrounding area.
To sum up – when admiring the democratic character of the Roman republic, we must remember that in reality, popular assemblies were not any form of real “rule by the people”, but rather a tool for controlling the plebs by the wealthiest oligarchy, which only apparently delegated the creation of laws and the election of officials to the people, but in reality it retained all the tools to impose on the state – under the guise of democracy – decisions that enjoyed the support of the wealthiest layers of Roman society.
