By Gary M. Feinman

As democracies around the world face mounting challenges and pressures, discussions about autocracy often focus on personalities and ideologies or tend to link governance practices to differences among specific cultural traditions. Yet a growing body of comparative historical research has provided evidence that a more fundamental question deserves attention: How was and how are governments funded?

Across thousands of years of human history, one of the strongest predictors of whether governance becomes concentrated in the hands of a few is not population size, technological development, cultural affiliation, or even geography. It is the degree to which governing institutions depend on revenues drawn from their citizens versus resources that rulers can control independently.

This finding is part of a March 2026 global comparative study of 40 historical cases spanning Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The analysis measured governance along a continuum ranging from more collective and inclusive systems to more autocratic ones. Contrary to long-standing assumptions, the authors of this study found only weak relationships between autocracy and population size, political scale, or hierarchical complexity; the strongest association, by far, was with revenue generation. Governments that relied heavily on externally controlled resources were much more likely to have power concentrated in the hands of rulers and narrow elites.

The logic is straightforward. When revenues come primarily from taxes on local production, labor obligations, or market activity, rulers depend on the cooperation of those who generate wealth. Revenue extraction becomes a negotiated process. Citizens, merchants, farmers, and producers gain leverage because governments need their continued participation and compliance. This encourages accountability, representation, and institutional checks on power.

The opposite dynamic emerges when rulers can finance themselves through resources that are easier to monopolize. Historically, these have included royal estates, slave economies, control of mines, long-distance trade routes, and war booty. In such cases, governing elites become less dependent on the broader population. If rulers do not need citizens to sustain their governments, they have fewer incentives to share decision-making authority with them. The public loses bargaining power precisely because it is less essential to state finances.

This relationship is hardly confined to the ancient world. Political scientist Margaret Levi famously argued that the history of governance is deeply intertwined with the history of revenue collection. The new comparative archaeological evidence supports that insight on a far broader temporal scale, extending the pattern across millennia and continents.

The implications extend beyond governance. The March 2026 study found a significant relationship between autocratic governance and higher levels of socioeconomic inequality. Societies in which power was more concentrated also tended to exhibit greater disparities in wealth, measured through differences in housing, access to valued goods, burial treatment, and other indicators. Conversely, more collective or democratic systems generally displayed lower levels of inequality.

These findings dovetail with a 2025 research examining economic inequality across deep history. Drawing on the largest global archaeological dataset of residential wealth disparities ever assembled, my coauthors and I found enormous variation in inequality across time and space. Importantly, inequality did not rise uniformly with social development, urbanization, or agricultural intensification. Rather, different societies followed different pathways, with governance being an important factor.

This conclusion challenges a deeply rooted narrative. For generations, scholars have assumed that larger populations inevitably required more centralized authority and that centralized authority generated greater inequality. The new evidence suggests otherwise. Large-scale societies have existed with relatively collective forms of governance, while smaller societies have at times exhibited striking concentrations of power and wealth. Neither autocracy nor inequality is an unavoidable outcome of scale or political complexity.

Instead, autocracy and inequality seem to reinforce each other through a series of feedback loops. Concentrated power facilitates privileged access to resources. Unequal access to resources strengthens the position of governing elites. Fiscal systems based on externally controlled revenues further weaken the bargaining capacity of citizens. Over time, these processes can become mutually reinforcing, resulting in societies that are simultaneously marked by political exclusion and economic disparity.

The lesson is not that economics mechanically determines politics. Nor is it that every society follows the same trajectory. The historical record is far too diverse for such simple conclusions. The evidence, however, suggests that political institutions and fiscal structures cannot be separated or analytically siloed. How governments obtain revenue shapes incentives of rulers, leverage of citizens, and ultimately the distribution of both power and wealth.

This may be the most important takeaway from the two comparative deep-time studies. Democracy and autocracy are not simply products of culture, geography, or historical destiny. Nor are high levels of inequality inevitable. Across human history, societies have repeatedly developed mechanisms that constrained rulers, broadened participation, and moderated disparities in wealth. They have also repeatedly moved in the opposite direction.

If there is a consistent message from the archaeological and historical records, it is that the distribution of power and wealth is intimately linked. And both are profoundly influenced by the ways governments finance themselves. Recognizing this connection may be just as important for the future of democracy as it has been for understanding its past.

Gary M. Feinman is an archaeologist and the MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.