What Can Data Drawn from the Hansen-Nielsen Inventory Tell Us about Political Transitions in Ancient Greece

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 topermit systematic analysis of political data. That has changed, thanks to the publication of Hansen and Nielsen’s (2004) Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. The Inventory draws together information on more than 1000 different poleis (city-states). 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. Our objective in this chapter is to begin to explore the Inventory data and that challenge it presents to empirical researchers. Our analysis focuses on transitions in government type.(Published in https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv7h0vnq)