From the Greek polis to civic tech: evolution of participation

Introduction

Participation in collective decision-making is one of the foundational questions in the history of Western political thought. From the earliest democratic experiments to contemporary digital governance, societies have continuously asked the same core question: who decides, how decisions are made, and on what basis they are considered legitimate.

Across centuries, participation has never been static. It has evolved alongside social structures, economic systems, and technological capabilities. From direct deliberation in the Greek polis to representative institutions, and more recently to civic tech and digital democracy, the underlying challenge remains unchanged: how to enable many people to think, deliberate, and decide together.

This article explores the historical evolution of participation through a specific lens: the parallel emergence of democracy and collective intelligence. Rather than treating democracy solely as a political system, it is examined here as a social and cognitive infrastructure that allows distributed human knowledge to be transformed into collective decisions.

This perspective complements the analysis developed in Digital democracy: why it matters today, extending it backwards in time to understand how contemporary challenges are rooted in much older democratic tensions.

The Greek polis: democracy as collective cognition

In the city-states of ancient Greece—most notably Athens—democracy took the form of direct participation. Citizens gathered in the ekklesía to debate public matters and make binding decisions. This was not merely a political arrangement, but a shared cognitive process.

The polis functioned as a collective mind. Decisions emerged through spoken argument, persuasion, and confrontation of perspectives within a physically shared space. Knowledge was produced socially, in real time, through interaction.

From a philosophical standpoint, this early form of democracy illustrates what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as the core democratic intuition: collective self-rule grounded in public reasoning.

However, this model rested on clear and often overlooked structural constraints:

participation was limited to adult male citizens, excluding women, slaves, and foreigners;
the scale of the community was small enough to allow face-to-face deliberation;
public issues, while important, were less technically complex than modern policy challenges.

Despite these limitations, Athenian democracy established a principle that remains foundational: decisions gain legitimacy when those affected by them take part in their formation.

This principle continues to inform contemporary participatory approaches, including those explored in the principles of collaborative democracy, even when direct participation is no longer feasible at scale.

From direct participation to representative democracy

As societies expanded geographically and demographically, direct participation became impractical. The rise of representative democracy was a response to scale, complexity, and the need for institutional continuity.

Representation introduced a new cognitive architecture for decision-making. Instead of many individuals deliberating together, a smaller group of representatives concentrated the tasks of interpretation, synthesis, and decision.

This model offered clear advantages:

it allowed governance of large and diverse populations;
it enabled specialisation and professional decision-making;
it ensured continuity and stability over time.

However, representation also transformed how collective intelligence flowed through the system. Knowledge increasingly travelled upwards, filtered by institutions, experts, and political elites.

Over time, this created a growing cognitive distance between citizens and decision-makers. Participation was reduced largely to elections, while everyday knowledge, local expertise, and lived experience struggled to influence decisions.

This dynamic is reflected in many contemporary governance challenges described in analyses of participatory platforms, where engagement often fails to translate into real decision-making power.

The issue, therefore, is not representation itself, but its progressive disconnection from deliberation. When representative systems stop absorbing distributed knowledge, their capacity to respond to complexity weakens.

Democracy and collective intelligence: an evolutionary parallel

Seen through a long-term historical lens, democracy can be understood as a technology for organising collective intelligence. Across centuries, democratic systems have attempted to solve the same underlying cognitive problem: how to integrate multiple perspectives into coherent and legitimate decisions.

In small-scale societies, collective intelligence emerged naturally through direct interaction. As scale increased, representation functioned as a form of cognitive compression, concentrating decision-making in fewer hands.

While efficient, this compression reduced the system’s ability to process diverse and distributed information. The result is visible today in the difficulty institutions face when addressing complex, interdependent challenges.

This interpretation aligns with the OECD’s analysis of deliberative democracy, which highlights the limits of purely representative models in handling complexity ( OECD – Deliberative Democracy).

The contemporary crisis of democratic legitimacy can therefore be understood as a crisis of collective intelligence: institutions struggle to think at the same level of complexity as the societies they govern.

The crisis of traditional participatory models

Throughout the twentieth century, democratic states faced increasingly complex decision-making environments. Public policies became more technical, societies more pluralistic, and problems more interconnected at a global level.

In this context, traditional participatory mechanisms revealed structural limits:

citizen participation was largely confined to voting;
consultations were often symbolic and non-binding;
conflicts intensified around decisions perceived as imposed from above.

The Council of Europe has repeatedly highlighted these tensions, emphasising the need to reconnect participation with real influence (Council of Europe – E-democracy).

These dynamics are further analysed in the Concorder pillar Digital democracy: why it matters today, which links declining trust to the erosion of meaningful participation.

As traditional models struggle to cope with complexity, interest has grown in approaches capable of reactivating collective intelligence through structured deliberation.

Collective intelligence: philosophical and cognitive foundations

The concept of collective intelligence has been developed across multiple disciplines, including philosophy, cognitive science, political theory, and computer science.

According to social epistemology, knowledge is not an individual possession but a relational process. Societies can be understood as distributed cognitive systems, where understanding emerges from interaction.

Pierre Lévy famously defined collective intelligence as an intelligence that is “universally distributed, constantly enhanced, and coordinated in real time” (Collective Intelligence).

This vision finds a strong parallel in neuroscience: just as neurons generate intelligence through networks of connections, individuals contribute to collective intelligence only when linked through structured processes of communication and decision-making.

From this perspective, democracy functions as a cognitive coordination mechanism, enabling societies to process complexity, correct errors, and converge on shared solutions.

From civic tech to digital democracy

While early civic tech initiatives focused primarily on transparency and feedback, digital democracy represents a more mature stage in the evolution of participation. The shift is not technological, but procedural.

Digital democracy moves beyond providing channels for expression and instead concentrates on how participation feeds into decision-making. It requires designing processes that connect input, deliberation, and outcomes in a visible and accountable way.

This transition involves several critical elements:

structuring deliberation rather than leaving discussion unbounded;
clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of participants;
ensuring traceability between contributions and decisions;
linking participation to concrete and verifiable outcomes.

These principles are explored in depth in the principles of collaborative democracy, which frame participation as a means to improve decision quality rather than as an end in itself.

From history to practice: contemporary experiences

The historical evolution from the Greek polis to digital democracy is not merely theoretical. It is reflected in concrete experiments where participation has been embedded into institutional decision-making.

Cases such as Barcelona’s digital democracy model show how structured platforms can integrate citizen input into public policy while maintaining institutional responsibility.

Similarly, complex territorial conflicts like the Santa Palomba public inquiry highlight how participatory processes can help manage disagreement, surface trade-offs, and improve legitimacy in high-stakes decisions.

These experiences demonstrate that participation becomes meaningful only when it is embedded within a clear decision framework, rather than operating as an isolated consultation.

From individual minds to collective intelligence

Across history, human societies have progressively externalised cognitive functions: from oral memory to writing, from books to digital networks. Each transition expanded the capacity to think together beyond individual limits.

Scholars such as Yochai Benkler have shown how digital networks enable new forms of distributed coordination, reducing reliance on centralised hierarchies (The Wealth of Networks).

In this context, digital democracy can be seen as an evolutionary step in which institutions begin to recognise collective intelligence as a decision-making resource. The goal is not to have everyone vote on everything, but to design conditions in which distributed knowledge can emerge, be compared, and synthesised.

When properly designed, digital platforms act as collective cognitive extensions: they gather information, structure debate, and make decisions traceable over time. Without deliberative design, however, the same technologies risk amplifying noise, polarisation, and misinformation.

Towards new models of participation

The historical trajectory of participation suggests that no single model is sufficient on its own. The contemporary challenge lies in combining representation, deliberation, and participation in a coherent and scalable way.

Digital technologies offer significant opportunities, but only when accompanied by careful institutional design. As emphasised by the Council of Europe, technology should strengthen—not weaken—democratic principles (Council of Europe – E-democracy).

In this perspective, new participatory models are not political concessions, but an evolutionary necessity. In a world shaped by complex and interdependent problems, decision quality increasingly depends on the ability of institutions to activate, coordinate, and value collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence: key references and research

The concept of collective intelligence has been developed across multiple disciplines, including political theory, philosophy, cognitive science, organisational studies, and digital governance. The following references provide a robust theoretical and empirical foundation for understanding how collective intelligence supports democratic decision-making.

OECD – Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions
Comparative research on deliberative and participatory institutions
Examines how structured citizen participation improves decision quality by mobilising distributed knowledge.
OECD – Deliberative Democracy
Frameworks and evidence on deliberative processes
Shows how deliberation enables collective reasoning beyond electoral representation.
The GovLab – Collective Intelligence Project
Applied research on collective intelligence in governance
Focuses on how institutions can systematically tap into public expertise and lived experience.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Social Epistemology
Philosophical foundations of distributed knowledge
Frames knowledge as a social process emerging from interaction, not individual cognition alone.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Collective Decision-Making
Analytical approaches to group decisions
Analyses how procedures affect the rationality, fairness, and legitimacy of collective choices.
Pierre Lévy – Collective Intelligence
Foundational text on collective intelligence
Defines intelligence as “universally distributed, constantly enhanced, and coordinated in real time”.
Yochai Benkler – The Wealth of Networks
Networked collaboration and social production
Demonstrates how digital networks enable large-scale cooperation without centralised control.
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Interdisciplinary research on collective problem-solving
Provides empirical studies on how groups can outperform individuals under the right conditions.
UNDP – Inclusive Governance and Participation
UN framework on participation and governance
Links inclusive decision-making to policy effectiveness and democratic resilience.

Taken together, these contributions frame democracy not merely as a system of representation, but as a collective intelligence infrastructure: a set of rules, processes, and tools that determine how societies think, learn, and decide together.

👉 Want to see how these principles work in practice? Explore the features of Concorder or book a free demo to discover how structured participation can improve collective decisions.