1 Introduction
How did representative institutions first emerge? Explaining their origins is part of a
broader question that remains quite central in the modern world, since representation is at the
foundation of democracy.1 It is also fundamental for our understanding of the territorial, national
state and the constitution of state power, a related and fundamental topic.2 Representative
institutions are, according to some major theoretical approaches, at the root of economic growth
as well. Since the work of Douglass North,3 representative institutions have loomed large in
accounts of property rights and markets, which in turn are critical in explanations of democracy.4
Representative practices also have a central role in the recurrent question of the economic
divergence between East and West.5 Answering these questions thus helps explain why
representative government first occurred in Europe and whether this specific historical origin is
restrictive for the present.
Although representation was a Western European innovation, most of the key factors
invoked to explain its emergence can also be found elsewhere. Bargaining with central authority
over taxation—currently the most prevalent explanatory hypothesis—is a fairly universal
component of political interaction across periods and places, as of course is warfare, another
major explanation. So is the demand for law and justice, the factor that features preeminently in
this account. Nonetheless, the use of assemblies as instruments of conveying local preferences to
the political center is a phenomenon identified with the West, thus posing some enduring
theoretical questions.6
In this book, I offer a revision to key conventional wisdoms in this literature. First, as I
show, representative institutions emerged as central instruments of governance only where rulers
were strong and where they had, especially, the capacity to compel the most powerful social
actors. Our expectations to the contrary are due to a pervasive assumption: that representation is
a right wrested from reluctant rulers. Instead, as I show, representation was originally an
obligation, not a right and any explanation of institutional outcomes needs to address this
outcome.
1
Downing 1992, Ertman 1997.
Mann 1986.
3
North 1981, North and Weingast 1989.
4
Stasavage 2003, Stasavage 2011.
5
Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, 2005, Fukuyama 2011, Besley and Persson 2011, Kuran
2011, Parthasarathi 2011, Congleton 2011, North, Wallis and Weingast 2009, Bates 2010, Clark 2007,
Greif 2006, Hall 1985.
6
Marongiu 1968.
2
1
England, against common stereotypes, was the paradigmatic case of this dynamic:7 it had
an extractive capacity, in both taxes and military forces, that was unrivaled in its period and
which continued overtime, with a brief seventeenth century interruption. To show this, I offer the
first continuous series of English tax extraction, also adjusting for national wealth, from the late
1100s into the 1700s, with comparative data on France. It was also, of course, the case with the
most robust representative institutions in the premodern period in Europe and a leading case in
the liberalization of European polities.
The second conventional assumption questioned in this book is that land concentration,
which is typically considered to inhibit representation, democracy, and economic growth, is
shown to be a critical precondition for these processes. It is where the distribution of land rights
was effectively controlled by states that rulers were able to impose obligations such as
representation at both the central and local level. It is therefore the conditionality of property
rights, not their security (as in the neo-institutionalist literature), that has had positive
institutional effects.
Third, I challenge the main theory explaining representation, the bargaining model. This
posits that representation emerges through an exchange of taxes for rights, typically by weak
rulers. However, such logic overlooks the fact that taxation was intermittent in the early period
as I show. Accordingly, it cannot explain an institution, which is by definition regular, especially
since the dominant strategy in the face of a predatory, but by assumption also weak, state should
be shirking and avoidance.
Instead, I emphasize a basic fact about early parliaments: they were also courts of law.8
They were, moreover, courts of the highest authority, given the presence of the ruler. I argue that
the judicial functions of representative institutions provided the necessary regularity for
institutional consolidation. These regular functions also emerge from truly bottom-up demand, as
opposed to taxation, which is top-down. The main instrument through which bottom-up demand
was mediated was the petition, which conveyed local concerns to the center.
Only when these regular judicial incentives, however, were made to overlap
institutionally with the irregular pressures of taxation did representative institutions emerge as
central organs of governance. I describe this dynamic with the concept of functional institutional
layering; it offers a striking example of the emergent properties of institutional articulation.
Layering, however, happened only where rulers were strong enough to compel attendance and
7
Its early fiscal and military precocity was highlighted by Mann 1988, but the implications of
his analysis have not permeated social scientific scholarship. This has shifted to considering England
as an exception, even a perfidious one, in opposition to the long standing dominance of Whiggish
models of explanation; Bates 1988. Here, I aim to return the English case to its central position in
theoretical analysis, stripping it, however, of any such teleological, triumphalist, or superior overtones.
8
This has long, of course, been a major topic in the historiography of parliaments, but has
been neglected within social science. I examine the fraught debates among historians for almost a
century on whether the “essence” of parliament was judicial or political in Boucoyannis 2005. One
aim of this analysis is to move beyond the now defunct debate around “essence” and to specify the
interaction between the two functions.
2
service from their more powerful subjects. Only when these subjects were bound with ties of
dependence to the ruler was the latter able to mobilize them into regular court service. This
service was not only political, as one could expect; it also included important judicial functions,
such as that of judge or juror.
This combination of factors also allows us to specify a minimum set of conditions that lie
at the root of the divergence of the European West from other regions. As we will see, most of
the key components of a constitutional order were present outside the West, especially the
political vocabulary of grievance that was expressed through petitions. The West only differed in
that the state had greater capacity to impose collective responsibility across its territory, with
England being the most notable example. Greater and better-organized state strength—not state
weakness preserving individual rights, especially in property—was the distinguishing mark of
the case with the most robust representative institutions.
Representation, as a localized practice, was not exclusive to England of course. Emerging
during the medieval period, it became pervasive throughout Western Europe at varying levels of
aggregation, from the city level to that of monarchies and empires extending over considerable
territory. Assemblies could be found in the city-states of Northern Italy and the semi-autonomous
cities of the Low Countries, the cities of southern France and of Castile, as well as the kingdoms
of Hungary and Poland and the duchy of Muscovy. They could congregate all estates or only
towns or the nobility alone in France, and most sections of society in England and Catalonia.
They were, in other words, omnipresent throughout Europe. What is found extremely rarely,
however—in fact, arguably only in the English case—is representation at the polity level, i.e.
integrating extensive territories and populations in a manner that was both inclusive and
effective.
Accordingly, the more critical question is not to explain the practice per se; this can
easily be traced to classical and Church precedents. Rather, the question is why representation
very rarely succeeded in effectively coordinating political action across social classes and over
extensive territories to generate a sovereign, central institution of governance that survived over
time. This is especially critical given how representative practices are undermined by distance. 9
Answering this question in fact also explains how some political entities came to appear
“organic” and thus more adept at applying infrastructural power.10
England emerges as the main successful case of premodern central institution building. It
developed specific features in its institutional structure that have provided both impetus and the
template for constitutional regimes in the modern period; in the nineteenth century, it was
already the “mother of all parliaments.”11 Further, although not the oldest,12 the English
parliament is the only one in continuing existence in a major polity since the 1200s, with only an
9
Stasavage 2010.
Hall 1994, 1-26.
11
Bright 1868.
12
This distinction belongs to the parliament of the Isle of Man. The Icelandic althing, which
dates to 930, served exclusively as a court of law between 1300 and 1800 and went through other
interruptions in function; Jones 2009, Beck 1929.
10
3
eleven-year hiatus in the seventeenth century. It will, accordingly, take up a central place in this
account.
The literature on the rise of representative institutions generally does not specify what
needs to be explained in such a narrow manner. Typically, studies also include localized and
limited instances of participation or representation, such as cities, which are numerous, meaning
their emergence was not as constrained. Instead, I suggest, our focus should be on the hardest
problem: the effective representation of diverse social groups dispersed over extensive territory
in a sovereign system. This criterion alone allows us to describe a regime as constitutional, a
term applied rather loosely for the premodern period to denote some form of legitimate
constraint and collaboration in governance through a regularized and formalized institutional
setting.13
By contrast, localized representative practices continued to occur even within the context
of regimes widely defined as “absolutist” and “imperial,” such as France and the Habsburg
Empire. Counterintuitively, these regimes typically displayed early features that were much more
radical and proto-democratic than the ones observed at that time in England; however (or, as I
argue, because of this), they failed to affect the central mode of governance. Explaining this
dynamic and variation is the main purpose of this book.
1.1
The Theoretical Landscape
The origins of representative institutions remain insufficiently theorized and understood.
Most understandings of the topic draw from key foundational narratives, typically derived from
nineteenth century classics of liberal historiography.14 They are ultimately inspired by the
explanatory templates for the emergence of the English Parliament dating back to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.15 The prototypical intuition echoes the account of Adam
Smith: it focuses on the growth of trade, which weakened the power of landlords and empowered
the mercantile classes,16 who could now demand political representation in exchange for their
mobile wealth.
This theoretical tradition wedded seamlessly with the narratives on the major
transformations of the seventeenth century, the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.17
Since the concept of revolution implies a reversal of the old (medieval) order, explanations of
13
The concept is not entirely anachronistic. It is sketched in Fortescue [c. 1470] 1997.
Moreover, by focusing on the entire kingdom or regime, this approach is able to link the account of
representative origins to that of state formation, since both are a function of the capacities of rulers to
project power across their subjects.
14
Guizot 1851, Thierry 1860.
15
Spelman [1639] 1979. The literature is voluminous and the historiography is examined in
Boucoyannis 2005.
16
Smith 1994, Book III.
17
The literature again is more than extensive; for a major recent interpretation, see Pincus
2009.
4
English constitutionalism have typically focused on the Early Modern period.18 They are
predicated on assumptions about a weakened crown that is forced to grant expansive rights to
new social groups empowered by the precocious commercial growth of the period.19 The
definitive blueprint for the failure of constitutionalism is, conversely, “overly strong” rulers with
a preference for suppressing rights and engaging in confiscatory taxation.20
The seventeenth century blueprint has survived, to varying degrees, even in the major
theoretical breakthroughs that acknowledged the formative role of the medieval period in
generating constitutional structures. These accounts can be classified according to the key
independent variable chosen into economic, geopolitical, and institutional explanations;
according to the key mechanism applied, however, they can be further distinguished into
functionalist and conjunctural. Common to all these approaches is the premise of a balance of
power between actors engaged in mutually beneficial exchange—the central tenet questioned in
this study.
The economic approach comes in different forms, but all share the common premise of
the systemic transformation of the commercial revolution that begun in the eleventh century.21
When trade and monetization of the economy grew, in such accounts, they are presumed to have
created a new social class capable of bargaining with political authorities in exchange for greater
rights.22 As the English economy, for instance, came to rely on trade and movables, a tax source
that was easily tappable became available. Merchants could use their mobile wealth in order to
wrest concessions from kings needing to fight wars; this resulted, in such accounts, in
constitutional gains through parliament. By contrast, agrarian economies were more difficult to
tax, thus inhibiting the extractive capacities of rulers; coercion, not negotiation, was, in this
logic, the basis of extraction, and representative institutions were suppressed.
To the degree that economic factors are of importance in this account, it is the liquidity
and mobility of economic resources that are causally relevant; structural factors, such as the
distribution of land, remain unexplored. Moreover, the assumption of a balance of power
between contending actors is causally central.23
In explicit opposition to economic and class-based theories, especially of Marxist origin,
war was introduced as a catalytic factor in securing political rights and institutions to broad
18
Occasionally, the Magna Carta is sometimes also invoked; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012,
185-209, Mann 1986, 433, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2005, 452, van Zanden 2008, 354,
Glaeser and Shleifer 2002, 1201, 1208.
19
Brenner 1993.
20
North 1990, DeLong 2000.
21
Pirenne 1951, Lopez 1971, Duby 1974, Pounds 1974.
22
Bates and Lien 1985, Levi 1988, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2005 .
23
North 1990, North and Weingast 1989, Blockmans 1978, 192 Olson 1993, 574 Fukuyama
2011, 424-5, Moore 1967.
5
sections of the population, most influentially in the work of Otto Hintze.24 Military pressures
forced rulers to grant concessions, in such accounts, only because they needed to obtain
resources and collaboration from broad sections of society. How such military pressures affected
society was a function of geographical factors, as well as the dominant mode of military
organization. Islands had predominantly maritime forces, which precluded the coercion of social
groups; constitutionalism, in such cases, could prevail. By contrast, a landlocked geography
necessitated an army, which could be used against domestic society; constitutionalism in such
cases withered. A variation on this theme was offered by Charles Tilly, who also argued that
state formation was the result of pressures of war; states emerged only when rulers could
combine optimal levels of capital accumulation with large coercive capabilities.25 The common
theme of constitutionalism resulting from weak central authority is critical to this logic as well.
Another type of geopolitical explanation focuses on the transaction costs produced by
distance and geographic scale.26 The argument has received compelling confirmation in
Stasavage’s cross-country study that encompasses both territorial states and city-republics across
Europe, over a time span of five hundred years, starting at 1250.27 The core intuition is
indisputable: the costs of governing through consent rise greatly when scale increases, in both
space and population. The mechanics of negotiation are less complex when all can assemble
around the bell of a church than when they need to travel for weeks to attend a central
institution.28 This has long been a core concern for republican theory in particular.29 Small-scale
polities were more likely to have representative institutions than large, sprawling polities.
Indeed, England was small by comparison to France and it never achieved the same integration
that it had internally over the conquered territories of Scotland, Ireland, or even Wales.
The third major tradition focuses also on geopolitical pressures, but introduces preexisting institutions as critical in mediating the effects of both military and economic factors.30
This wave of studies was strongly preoccupied with internal variation in regime type, as much as
with the emergence of the state itself as a form of political organization. Brian Downing sought
24
Hintze 1941, Hintze 1975a, Hintze 1975b, Hintze [1931] 1975. The insight itself went back
to antiquity, where war was already acknowledged as creating a basis for legitimate claims against the
state. In Pseudo-Xenophon’s ancient Athens, “the ordinary people…should have more power than the
noble and the rich, because it is the ordinary people who man the fleet and bring the city her power;”
"Xenophon" 1968.
25
This is the “intermediate capitalized coercion mode” he posited, where rulers succeeded in
“incorporating capitalists and sources of capital directly into the structures of their states.” England
and France were the two cases that illustrate this mode. Alternative forms of state organization, like
city-states or empires, were either capital- or coercion-intensive; the lack of a balance between the two
resources meant that neither form was able to withstand the heavy geopolitical pressures on the
European continent in the Early Modern period, especially with the advent of the Military Revolution,
and the increase in the size of armies and in the cost of military technology; Tilly 1990, 30.
26
Fawtier 1953, Guenée 1968, Blockmans 1978, Blockmans 1998.
27
Stasavage 2010, Stasavage 2011.
28
Stasavage 2010, 628.
29
Madison, Hamilton and Jay 1987, Dahl and Tufte 1973.
30
Tilly 1990, Downing 1992, Ertman 1997.
6
to explain why some states developed absolutist regimes, whereas in others constitutional
regimes were allowed to consolidate, whereas Thomas Ertman extended further, also explaining
variation in levels of bureaucracy and patrimonialism.31 Institutions were key causal variables in
these two studies, but were exogenous and pre-existing. Ertman invoked Hintze’s explanation by
distinguishing between territorial and tricurial types of assemblies.32 The medieval heritage of
parliamentary institutions was thus seen as the crucial differentiating factor that allowed certain
states to evolve on a constitutional path in the face of the geopolitical pressures of the early
modern period.
In short, these studies take the emergence of representative institutions as given and
examined their effects or survival. Assumptions about a balance between contending forces—
what I have identified as the residue of seventeenth century historiography—are causally central
in the accounts.33
As will become increasingly clear below, some of the major problems with existing
explanations are primarily empirical. Yet, additional issues emerge when the theories are
grouped on a theoretical basis. Theories that derive representative institutions from the needs of
dominant social actors display the typical pathologies of all functionalist approaches: they
identify a consequence/preference with the cause. This is a common trait of both economic and
war-based theories (although not of the conjunctural institutional ones, discussed below).
However, the need to create institutions that effectively addressed pressing social
concerns did not necessarily translate into the ability to do so. The collective action problems
involved, for one thing, were serious and would need to be explained. Recognizing how rare the
real desideratum was—the creation of a central instrument of governance that effectively
extended throughout a territory and diverse population—alerts us to the importance of specifying
more carefully the conditions enabling such outcomes to occur.
This is a particularly salient, but underappreciated, problem in the Hintzean model, which
has influentially tied a constitutional outcome to an insular geographical position, with few
31
Downing 1992, Ertman 1997.
Territorial assemblies, like the English one, consisted of representatives who were locally
elected and had strong ties to the territories they represented. Tricurial ones, by contrast, were
assemblies that reflected the division of society into three orders, or estates, clergy, nobility and labor.
The weakness of the latter type, according to Hintze, lay in its lack of territorial integration, and this
prevented the formation of organized opposition to the Crown; Ertman 1997, 19-25. As I show
throughout the book, the precocious organization of local government in the English case was a
function of early state power. Ertman (ibid.) of course recognizes this point, but the framing of English
governance as a “collaborative venture” again leans in the direction of the balance of power
hypothesis.
33
Downing 1992, 19, 21, 141. In Ertman, it is the representative institutions themselves that
are strong enough to counter central authority where they had a territorial character; Ertman 1997, 1925.
32
7
military pressures and only a maritime force.34 Yet not only does the model not hold, but logic
predicts exactly the opposite: the lack of an external enemy and of a coercive capacity by the
state should produce strong centrifugal tendencies—not constitutionalism. In a territory that has
not yet been unified as a coherent political entity, there is no communal identity, let alone
“national consciousness.” Accordingly, lack of threat or war should produce not merely a
decentralized, but an anarchic structure.
Absent an external threat and given a weak bargaining position of the crown, why would
social actors attend a central institution (parliament) and agree to taxation in the first place? Even
when the taxing authority promises to offer public goods in return, incentives are to free-ride.
The default reaction towards taxation, absent a coercive state structure, is shirking and
avoidance, even in modern, public-goods providing states. And since taxation is the mechanism
generating representation in these accounts, we should have every reason to expect that
representation should be shirked as well—again, absent a coercive apparatus: why attend
parliament if you have no intention of paying taxes and if the state lacks the power to force you?
As a result, we should expect centrifugal forces and a weakening of any constitutional structures
when war pressures, and state coercive powers, are weak, contrary to what Hintze predicts.
Distance-based geopolitical arguments, on the other hand, have a core logic that is widely
confirmed. Distance imposes transaction costs. But the fact remains that even in governed
territories that were small in scale, such as the royal domain in France—the Île-de-France—and
its surrounding provinces, representative practices failed to consolidate into a central, regular
institution. By contrast, other regions, such as Languedoc, Provence, and Burgundy, developed
assemblies that remained the main organ of local government down to 178935—just as England
did. And even though England had a precocious parliamentary regime within its borders, this
system was not extended into Scotland or Ireland—nor, fully, into Wales. At the same time, even
the smallest units, city-republics, systematically failed to retain representative government over
time.36 This variation and the question of how such problems of distance were overcome in some
cases but not in others, even within a relatively small-sized region like England, and sustained
over time, remains unexplained.
On the other hand, the institutionalist explanations presented here, by adopting a
conjunctural approach that explains outcomes as the result of the interaction of exogenously
determined factors, avoid the common pitfalls of functionalism. However, they take the
existence of “medieval constitutionalism” for granted, or at least explain variation in
representative institutions in terms of the Hintzean classification which is, itself, colored by the
34
This is of course empirically untrue, as England was invaded many times since Roman
times, just as it was able to invade neighboring lands itself, without any impediment from its
insularity. The reason why it appeared to have “insular security” during these centuries was the result
of its effective internal organization, which made invasion costly. The security effects of insularity
were in fact endogenous to domestic characteristics, but this does not affect the main logic analyzed
above. I am showing that even if we accept Hintze’s premise of insularity as given, the logical
conclusions do not follow.
35
Blaufarb 2010.
36
Stasavage 2014.
8
seventeenth century filter that identifies representative institutions as collaborative and thus
contractual. As such, they too mistake a consequent for a cause; in other words, they suffer from
endogeneity problems, which it is the task of this analysis to supersede.
In the next section, I provide an outline of the theory, before moving to consider the ways
in which it addresses the theoretical issues posed by existing literature.
1.2
The Theory
Existing theories on state and regime formation are widely influential, across fields.
However, a novel framework is needed to explain how representative institutions emerged in the
first place. The framework proposed here focuses on two main conditions: the distribution of
land and the power of the ruler (especially over the most powerful). These two further shape the
integration of the court system throughout the polity. The court system processes the key
mechanisms in this dynamic: the degree of conditionality of property rights to land, petitions,
taxation, and representative practices themselves. Variation in institutional structure is therefore
at the core of this explanation, as is the distribution of power that undergirds it.
I argue that parliaments emerged as centralized instruments of governance not where
rulers were weak or where they were balanced against social groups holding resources, but
where they were more powerful than leading social groups. Specifically, effective representative
institutions emerged where rulers were strong enough to extract from and compel attendance by
the uppermost social actors in representative institutions. In the premodern period, such
compellence occurred where rulers controlled most land in their territory, as land was then the
most critical wealth-generating resource. Institutional effects were tied to a system of conditional
land-holding: when lands were granted conditionally to powerful actors, their resulting
obligations included support of royal institutions, of which the central parliament and local
courts were critical. Representative institutions foundered where central authority was too weak
to enforce such obligations.
A concentration of power and land were thus the preconditions for efficient institution
formation, by enabling compellence of the strong. If powerful social actors were not compelled,
they lacked the incentives to attend the centralized institutions. Only such actors had the capacity
to effectively mobilize and eventually turn those institutions into fora of constitutional
interaction; without them, representative institutions could not consolidate. No elite taxation, no
representation.
When regimes are able to compel the powerful, by making them contribute in either
service or resources, they are also able to integrate broader social groups. If such broad-based
integration does not occur, a regime cannot be described as representative. Even when only small
segments of the population are actually represented, an integrated polity means that the outcomes
of this representation become generally binding. This is the critical component of the story that
highlights the problems in existing accounts, ones that focus instead on the role of mercantile and
non-noble, urban groups and the bargaining dynamics around taxation. As we will see, where
9
urban groups dominated (as in Castile) representative institutions lacked the strength and
inclusiveness to become effective instruments of governance, if they survived at all.
The prevalent focus on taxation, moreover, ignores another critical point: that war and
fiscal pressures were intermittent. Taxation was not the critical factor in generating the regular
incentives necessary for the consolidation of institutions. Regular incentives derived instead from
the judicial role of parliaments as courts of justice: the administration of justice and the hearing
of petitions, in particular, allowed both the effective transmission of grievances from below and
state action in response. The role of parliaments as courts has long been a major theme of
historical scholarship across European cases for this period, of course.37 But it has remained
secondary and epiphenomenal in the social scientific scholarship, if it is mentioned at all. Here I
present a case for their causal importance: judicial functions, as well as the handling of petitions,
provided incentives for regularity that fiscal demands, by being intermittent, lacked. The
conjunction of these factors was necessary for central representative institutions to emerge.
As we will see, however, petitions were a universal medium for the expression of
grievance: the demand for rights and justice was not a peculiarity of European polities, but was
found from classical antiquity to the medieval and early modern Ottoman and Russian Empires
and to the far east. Rather, what distinguished Western European cases were a more efficient
organization of state power and a greater capacity to impose collective action over disparate
groups of people at a supra-local level of aggregation. This organization allowed petitions to
become collective and, when implemented, to apply throughout the jurisdiction—which, again,
is by definition necessary for a regime to be described as representative. As we will see, it is on
this dimension that the non-European cases differed.
This organization was mediated through a key mechanism: the imposition of collective
responsibility. A widespread trait of premodern societies, collective responsibility is recorded
even in the smallest communities, within and beyond Europe, as a spontaneous and effective
means of conflict resolution and social order. Its incidence varied, however, according to the
societal levels it was applied to; this depended on the powers of central authorities. For instance,
it was applied at the county level in England, through royal authority, as opposed to the village
37
In fact, it was the epicenter of English historiography on the topic for almost a century after
Frederic Maitland published a major work presenting the judicial aspect of parliamentary business in
1893. Maitland’s perspective was a challenge to the dominant Stubbsian view, which typifies the
“Whig” approach to the emergence of parliament, whereby progressive social forces gradually
succeeded in imposing constraints on the executive, especially through bargaining on taxation; Stubbs
1896. Paradoxically (given Maitland’s generally liberal and progressive views), the judicial approach
has been identified as conservative and reactionary, whereas approaches focused on fiscal politics are
seen as progressive. As I’ve argued elsewhere (2005), no inherent reason exists for this association,
which has more to do with the fact that Maitland’s thesis was championed and furthered by two very
conservative scholars, who had difficulty hiding their contempt for the democratic process and the
Commons; among many works, see Richardson and Sayles 1981. Although this debate is now defunct,
my approach in any case circumvents it, by showing how both aspects were necessary for
parliament—but it is also the case that the true bottom-up, i.e. popular, incentive, should be located in
the social demands for justice, not in the royal demands for resources.
10
or town level in other cases, where central authority was weakest. The more effective the supralocal organization of collective responsibility, as in England, the more representative practices
and institutions became robust.
The institutional foundations of these processes, of petitions and collective responsibility,
at the local level were the regional courts. The effectiveness of court institutions was a function
of how integrated they were at the polity level. When state powers were high, local courts could
be conscripted to support the procedures required by representative activity. For instance, courts
were where petitions were drafted, collective responsibility was implemented, and
representatives were selected. Without local courts having binding power throughout the polity, a
central system of representation could not be sustained. Again, it is where central royal authority
was strongest that local court structures could be integrated.
Figure 1: Main Structure of Argument
The centrality of royal strength to this entire dynamic can only be fully recognized when
we acknowledge a crucial fact about premodern representation: it was an obligation before it
became a right. We take it for granted that, as today, representation is a right demanded by
citizens from the state; however, historically, it was an obligation imposed by the state on its
subjects. But modern democratic politics and the difficulty of ensuring participation should not
make that surprising, especially given the contributions of rational voter theory—how much
more so under conditions of underdevelopment, when representation had limited positive
consequences initially, whilst imposing onerous fiscal obligations.
That representation was originally obligatory is shown from evidence on fines and
measures for attendance failure, even though liberal historiography long resisted this point and
still does, occasionally.38 The penalties were pursuant to its legal nature: the practice of
representation was borrowed from the Roman legal form of plenipotentiary powers.
Representatives were summoned to attend and participate in the decision process, whilst holding
the represented community liable to ensuing obligations. This was widespread across Europe
38
I explore the historiography of the English Parliament and the evolving assessment of its
judicial functions, which were considered conservative, in Boucoyannis 2015.
11
from an early period, but the enforcement of the principle varied greatly across cases according
to ruler strength. It was greatest in England, where the powers of kings were greatest, as I show
in chapters 6 and 7; hence the greater strength of its institutions.
In a sense, therefore, the argument reprises the old Tocquevillian theme that tied
absolutism to weakness and constitutionalism to state strength.39 It also provides a more
analytical articulation of how legitimacy sustains interlocking institutions, by tying
representative institutions to bottom-up demands. This is key to explaining how Mann’s
infrastructural power gets built and articulated as well.40 However, it moves beyond the
Tocquevillian understanding to posit that strength and weakness were causal conditions, not
outcomes, of regime variation. England created an “organic” regime because it was capable of
overcoming fragmentation. And France developed absolutist structures because it was too weak
to do otherwise. The strategy of “divide and rule,” which Tocqueville identified as a root cause
of French pathologies, was the optimal strategy in the face of an incapacity to control social
groups that were far too recalcitrant, because they voiced demands that were much more radical
compared to English ones.41
Having outlined the general theory of the argument, I next proceed to explain how my
approach overcomes some of the key concerns raised against institutionalist approaches. I
explain how my argument integrates an analysis of prior social conditions in the assessment of
the causal effects of institutions; what the main mechanisms are that explain institutional change
and variation over time and how they cannot be considered endogenous to any of the usual
macro conditions, like economic growth; how political obligation, not individual rights, are at the
foundation of the constitutional order and how the effective organization of the state ensured that
such obligation was collectively imposed; and, finally, I show the centrality of inequality in
explaining institutional emergence and how this forces us to revise some stereotypical organizing
devices in the literature, about “limited” vs. “predatory” states. Empirical evidence shows that
the most limited ones were, instead, the most predatory, especially over their most powerful
social actors.
1.2.1 The Logic of Emergence: Power and the Social Foundations of Political Institutions
Institutionalist approaches are typically faulted for failing to determine whether
institutions are endogenous to prior conditions, whether economic, social, military or other.42
Absent such determination, their causal effects (and the value of the approach) remain uncertain
and questionable. Two responses to this question are preeminent. In one, institutions act sim
ply as coordinating devices that enable actors to resolve collective action problems and eliminate
39
Tocqueville 1856, Hall 1994, xii-xiii.
Mann 1984, Mann 2008.
41
Hall 1994, xiii articulates the implications of this neglected insight to twentieth century
collapse of totalitarian regimes.
42
Waldner 2003, Boix 2015.
40
12
free riding.43 In the other approach, distributional conflict in the light of asymmetries of power is
central and institutions are the medium through which this conflict unfolds.44 This distinction is
typically framed as a definitional one, but is more appropriately seen as one of institutional
consequences. Seen in this light, it becomes clear that the distributional approach is primary, as
many institutions do not have a coordinating role, but all have distributional consequences.45
The same conclusion is arrived at by looking at institutional origins, as is done here.
Origins allow a more direct assessment of the question of whether institutions are endogenous to
technological or economic forces or whether they constitute an independently-generated
treatment on those pre-existing conditions, with differential effects. For instance, it is correctly
observed that major transformations preceded the emergence of representative and other political
institutions after 1100 AD. Revolutions in military technology (the use of the horse and iron
stirrup) and, after that, in agriculture (the use of the heavy plow) had both occurred by the
eleventh century, securing in some regions the domination of heavy cavalry that was so
important in the creation of the monarchies that came to control major European territorial
units.46
But these macro-level phenomena do not explain the most critical variation in
institutional form, that between representative and non-representative regimes in Europe. No
evidence exists that the main European cases, examined here, with variation on this dimension
also varied systematically as a result of such macro changes. Instead, as I show, variation was a
function of the capacity of the ruler to impose of uniform system of obligation throughout his
territory. As a result, macro phenomena also do not explain the variation in the degree to which
technological and economic breakthroughs could be exploited by the societies in question,
resulting in differential rates of growth and political development.47 Not all European countries
exploited the opportunities of the commercial revolution, at least not equally, and as I show
throughout this book, this variation had to do with exogenous factors typically of a legal nature,
most notably whether property rights were conditional or absolute and how well the ruler could
enforce them.
Counter to stereotypes, it was strong ruler power that enabled the creation of institutions
(as well as conditionality, which I treat in the next section). The institutions described in this
study thus are, at a first level, a function of the power of the actors creating them, as well as a
means to distribute goods to elites that provided the social basis for that power. Far from a
bargaining game under conditions of mutual need, representative institutions stem from
asymmetric conditions, where one actor, the ruler, possessed both physical and intangible
attributes that secured a preponderance of power and authority. The more this was so, the more
robust the resulting institution.
43
Shepsle 1989, Bates, Greif, Levi and Rosenthal 1998.
Hall and Taylor 1996, Thelen 1999, Knight 1992.
45
Mahoney 2010, 14.
46
Boix 2015, 5, 149, 156.
47
Crouzet 1990.
44
13
An account of origins thus reveals an intriguing paradox: the conditions of emergence
(high concentration of central powers) were the inverse of the posited outcome of representative
institutions (shift of sovereignty to the people). Such inversions of perspective, as we will see,
are a common feature of an account of origins, such as this one. The transformation from one
condition to another was a function of the nature of property rights and of the power resources of
the ruler, which varied exogenously to economic conditions (kings in richer Castile were weaker
than kings in poorer England, and landholders had more obligations tied to their property rights
in England than in Castile). Moreover, polities that moved towards popular sovereignty, i.e. ones
that became republics, were always preceded by a phase of centralized rule—one, however, that
is typically neglected in historical scholarship focused on the more precocious period of selfgovernment, but which I bring to light in chapter 4. Moreover, republics typically evolved into
oligarchies. One could even posit a regime cycle from monarchy, to republic, to oligarchy, to
centralized rule again.
Power and wealth in the pre-modern period (as in much of the developing world today),
was determined by control of land: the more land was concentrated in the hands of the ruler, the
greater the strength of the state, as long as such control was actual and not merely nominal (a
point of confusion for many cases, such as Castile, Russia, or the Ottoman Empire at different
times, where de facto power was actually weak, not strong). It is in the cases of effective control
of land that we observe centralized representative institutions. But concentration of land is
believed to inhibit economic and political development in modern scholarship. However,
historically, it was the precondition for more successful institution-building: it was endogenously
transformed into more inclusive structures.
This relation, however, is not one of sufficiency: concentration of land is, instead, simply
a necessary condition, I argue, for the emergence of representative institutions. Concentration
could occur without generating representative institutions, as we observe in the Ottoman and
Russian regimes. Consequently, the institutions were not simply “endogenous” either to power
relations or to the distribution of land. Other factors were important, primarily the type of
property rights and the mode of organization of collective responsibility. I will examine both of
these below, but first I will elaborate further on the paradoxical importance of centralized power
for the emergence of representation.
Power Centralization and Representation
Concentration of power and centralization of government are preconditions for
representative institutions in this account. Yet such conditions are typically perceived as
suboptimal or pathological forms of political organization.48 That is so because they are assumed
to imply coercion and suppression of local preferences, dynamics that are inimical to
constitutional (or democratic) regimes. The assumption also permeates the historical statebuilding literature, which ascribes great importance to patterns of “local government.”49 There,
48
Scott 1998. See the fresh and dissenting view in Treisman 2007. The literature on the topic
is more than extensive of course; a classic study is Riker 1964.
49
Ertman 1997, Downing 1992.
14
the opposite assumptions—of a balance of power between social actors, of a pluralism and
political fragmentation as key to constitutional (or state-building) outcomes—are pervasive in
studies of very different theoretical orientations.50
However, these assumptions mistake a consequent for a cause. Centralization on some
key dimensions is necessary for constitutional outcomes to emerge. This is so because disparate
preferences and practices need to be homogenized if the entire regime is to be codified under one
category—i.e. outcomes need to be observed at the polity, not the local level. A state, as an
aggregate of varying practices and institutions, cannot be termed “constitutional” if state law is
respected in some regions but not in others.
To understand this insight about centralization we need Michael Mann’s distinction
between infrastructural and despotic power.51 The perspective in this account suggests that
infrastructural power implies that the center effectively controls the institutional structure of the
state and society, although this may occur in different ways. Yet infrastructural power is assumed
to be in tension with centralization, partly because centralization is typically identified with the
opposite, despotic, arbitrary power and the use of violence.
However, premodern and many modern despotisms have been revealed to be
infrastructurally weak by the historical and sociological literature on these regimes.52 The
assumed “centralization” of absolutist regimes has emerged from historical studies more as an
aspiration of the government than an empirical reality, in the face of social groups too powerful
to control. State weakness made the exercise of violence mandatory for effective control of
territory. Weak states, however, can only target the weak, and as a result such violence has high,
broad, and visible impact. Consequently, such practices are commonly misinterpreted as signs of
“strength”53—in fact, however, the weak are targeted by the state simply because the strong are
beyond its reach.
Further, the term “centralization” usually implies that the state is acting without consent
from the people, i.e. arbitrarily—hence again the tension with representation. However, the more
consent is avoided, the more coercion needs to be used, and the less the effective capacity of the
state to secure compliance.54 Conversely, where consent is secured, coercion can be latent, and
control is higher—but this is observed, historically, I argue, where effective centralization and
power concentration was high.
50
Blockmans 1978, 192, Hechter and Brustein 1980, Hopcroft 1999, Zolberg 1980, 689,
Downing 1992, 19-22, Ertman 1997, Hui 2005.
51
Mann 1986.
52
Despotic, personalized governments, however, are not necessarily infrastructural weak; see
the insightful analysis in Slater 2003. In fact, as much of the analysis will suggest, the early English
polity had many features in common with such regimes; it was certainly more personalized and
patrimonial than bureaucratic, as the comparison with the Ottoman Empire will make clear.
53
As pointed out in different ways in Henshall 1992, Migdal 1988, and Chaudhry 1993. That
violence is a sign of weakness is also a core insight in the thesis of Arendt 1970.
54
Kalyvas 2006.
15
The centrality of consent for constitutional strength is an old Tocquevillian insight; it is
typically, however, contrasted with absolutist or totalitarian states, which are assumed to be
centralized.55 My refinement to this argument is partly classificatory, by showing that absolutist
states are attempting to centralize in the face of social fragmentation; states predicated on
consent, by contrast, are actually effectively centralized, by securing that central preferences are
locally applied. Centralization and concentration should thus be tied to infrastructural power,
together with consent.
Furthermore, centralization is not only congruent with the seeking of consent; it is, I
argue, a necessary precondition for its effective institutionalization. In fact, to explain why
representative institutions thrived in a few cases so as to become central organs of governance
we need to understand why they became central institutions. Conversely, explaining why some
states developed absolutist forms of governance does not always mean explaining the nonemergence or complete suppression of representative institutions. Just as contemporary
authoritarian or totalitarian regimes display a domestic institutional structure of varying
strengths, premodern absolutism was typically marked by localized institutional strongholds.
For instance, France, even at the height of the so-called “absolutist” period in the
seventeenth century, was far from devoid of representative assemblies. Peripheral assemblies
continued to thrive in the provinces called pays d’état, such as Provence, Burgundy, Brittany,
and Languedoc. Of the thirty-nine French provinces with estates (pays d’état), 24 had estates that
were still functioning at the time of the French Revolution in 1789. Such assemblies were
actively maintained by absolutist rulers, as shown by path-breaking scholarship, because they
were better able to attract credit in the financial markets than Paris,56 but also because they were
highly efficient in organizing the military defense of the borders.57
Yet, there was no representative institution at the center of the French political system:
the Estates General was last called in 1614 and had an intermittent history prior to that. It is this
fact that justifies coding the regime as “absolutist,” by contrast to that of England. The problem
therefore is to explain how a fairly large state such as England (and a few more cases in a more
localized and limited way, such as Catalonia and Hungary) consolidated a parliament as a central
instrument of governance, whereas that did not happen in cases such as France or late Castile.58
Indeed, albeit with some fundamental differences, the same “jurisdictional fragmentation”
undermined both the political and the economic growth of medieval and early modern Spain.59As
I will argue, this requires explaining how the collective action problem of social groups with an
interest in limiting the authority of the ruler was solved, given the distributional implications of
55
Tocqueville’s idea is explored and expanded in Hall 1985.
Potter and Rosenthal 1997, Hoffman, Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal 2000.
57
Blaufarb 2010. In the 1660s, “French people were willing to lend to the Estates at 5 percent
for indefinite durations when they required 8 percent or more for direct loans to the king of short
duration;” Potter and Rosenthal 1997, 577.
58
Runciman 1993, 51, Ertman 1997, 19.
59
This is the powerful argument in Grafe 2012.
56
16
alternative outcomes.60 Classic explanations, predicated on a bargaining logic or geopolitical
constraints, are underdetermining, as I will show.
1.2.2 The Logic of Change and Variation: Endogenous or Exogenous?
I have suggested so far that political institutions, especially representative ones, emerged
out of the practice by which rulers granted lands conditionally to their followers in order to both
reward them and secure the governance of extensive territory. This practice was not unique to
Western Europe, or indeed to the premodern period. It can also be found in Russia, the Ottoman
Empire, China, and Japan, among some of the well-documented cases.61 It remained a staple of
state-building policy into the modern period, as the distribution of military bounty lands to
populate the American West in the late nineteenth century shows.62 At the root of a key
institutional trajectory for Western political institutions, therefore, lies, not a unique conjuncture,
but a widely prevalent mechanism of distribution of power and resources.
Nonetheless, the causal sequence from land distribution to central representative
institutions entails a number of further steps. Not all of them can be treated in this introductory
context, but some of the central mechanisms can be singled out. These mechanisms serve both to
explain change over time in the English context, but also variation with other European cases, as
the analysis below will show. Here I discuss conditional property rights, institutional layering,
and judicial petitions. These allow me to illustrate the way in which the mechanisms accounting
for change and variation cannot be reduced either to a functionalist logic or to broader economic
or technological forces.
The primary mechanism of change and variation is the conditional character of property
rights: land was given on condition of fulfillment of obligations and the system operated only to
the degree that central authority remained capable of enforcing these duties. In the English case,
the conditionality entailed obligations that included participation in and compliance with
parliamentary activities. Conditionality, rather than security, was the critical mechanism in
institutional emergence. The typical ascription of political and economic change to more secure,
usually absolute, property rights is empirically unfounded: it projects a functionalist logic by
mistaking a long-term consequence for a cause.63
The concept of conditional rights cannot be derived from either economic or
technological change either: it was an aspect of medieval feudalism64 and was found throughout
60
Knight 1992.
Millar 1992, 203-73, Kelly 2011, Kümin and Würgler 1997, Zaret 2000, Heerma van Voss
2001, Bailey 1979, Hung 2011, Keirstead 1990, Schneider 2006, Koo 2007, Krotoszynski 2012.
62
Frymer 2014, especially 124ff.
63
North 1990, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2005.
64
See Appendix A for a brief discussion of feudalism, a widely contested term within
historical scholarship, but one, which, appropriately defined, is admitted as valid for the English case
even by prominent critics such as Susan Reynolds. Anyone familiar and concerned with these debates
is encouraged to consult that discussion.
61
17
Western Europe (and beyond), alternating with allodial (unconditional, absolute) rights, which
prevailed in parts of France and late Castile, among many others. No clear logic ties either type
with economic conditions, although the link is more plausible between feudal rights and ruler
strength. Where ruler strength was high, as in England, conditionality could continue to be
enforced; where it was weak, as in Spain, rulers simply had to cede jurisdictional rights to local
lords. If anything, the pattern is inversely related to economic wealth: according to some recent
estimates, English GDP per capita was about half that of Spain in 1300 and still about 20% less
than it in 1500, yet it is in the former that conditionality was more effectively imposed.65
Even redefined in this way, however, conditional property rights still cannot be identified
as exclusive to the West and thus the key to its differential political trajectory. To show this, I
present conditionality through an original and unorthodox comparison, between England, which
led developments on property rights in Europe, and the Ottoman Empire, the quintessential
“sultanic” regime. Typically, the Ottoman Empire is paired with absolutist France,66 as is
Muscovy.67 But the similarities between the English and these “sultanic” tenurial systems are
striking. They also suggest that property rights were not the distinguishing trait of the European
trajectory. Conditionality also existed in some instances in the Russian system of land grants.
The Ottoman system, on the other hand, often displayed subtle but greater protection of peasant
rights over land and more bureaucratic features. The critical difference between England and the
Ottoman system, instead, lies in the superior capacity of the English crown to create a systematic
organization of its territories based on corporate representation and centered around local but
state-controlled judicial courts, a systematic basis of differentiation.
Another major mechanism of change and variation was institutional layering. This
occurred when an institution designed for one purpose was overlaid with another that responded
to different incentives. For instance, a function that was irregular, if administered in an
institution designed for a different purpose but for which there was regular demand, could
thereby acquire an institutional continuity that was unattainable if the irregular function had had
an independent institutional frame. In the case of representative institutions, it is the fusion of
institutions with judicial and political/extractive functions. Such layering, as I explain in chapters
2 and 3, was the critical variation of the English case which ensured that the irregular practice of
taxation was institutionally superimposed with the regular practice of judicial, court meetings;
absent such fusion, as happened in the French case, representative institutions faltered.
This account differs strikingly from the conventional wisdom on representative
institutions, which focuses on fiscal dynamics to explain their emergence, following a
distinguished tradition in historical sociology and public choice.68 However, tax demands were
intermittent in the early period, because war was intermittent too, and both generated resistance
when the population was able to shirk. Such negative incentives could not generate the constant
65
Álvarez-Nogal and Prados de La Escosura 2012, Broadberry, Campbell, Klein, Overton and
van Leeuwen 2010.
66
Barkey 1994.
67
Pipes 1974.
68
Schumpeter [1918] 1991. Among many, Bates and Lien 1985, Cheibub 1998, Mares 2006,
Brennan and Buchanan 2006, Scheve and Stasavage 2010.
18
pressures necessary for a regular institution to emerge. Regularity required systematic pressures
from below. These pressures, I argue, stem from demands for justice, not from bargaining over
taxation.
The English parliament differed in layering political/fiscal functions on the judicial
institutions that resulted from regular bottom-up demand for redress of grievances, via petitions.
Institutions consolidated where the ruler’s power advantage enabled such institutional layering.
Without such integration, the incentives necessary to create a regular central institution were
lacking. I show the causal effects of such layering through an original comparison of the early
English Parliament and the Paris Parlement; two institutions that had the same functional origins
as judicial courts, but diverged over time. Institutional layering thus explains the conditions
under which bottom-up demands integrate with top-down demands, without resorting to a
functionalism that assumes that which needs to be explained.
The bottom-up demands from societal actors widely dispersed across the territory also,
however, required some regular mechanism of transmission to the center. This was provided by
the third mechanism, the practice of petitions to rulers. Petitions were not unique to Europe or
England. They were already widely observed in antiquity and across geographical regions.69
Petitions were also pervasive in most premodern regimes, critically important in contexts as
disparate as the Ottoman Empire and Russia. How such petitions were organized and aggregated
from the local to the central level was crucial for systemic outcomes at the institutional level.
Unlike in the Ottoman Empire, where petitions were mostly individual or, at most, at town level,
in England petitions were eventually distinguished by their systematic collective character
described in Parts 2 and 6. Petitions became collective through greater state capacity, by being
organized at the county level, mediated through county courts. These petitions formed the basis
of legislation as bills of parliament, thus providing the concrete links tying local grievance to the
evolution of Parliament as the increasingly main legislating body.
Without such complex and interacting mechanisms co-occurring, representative
institutions would not have become the central organs of governance that were able to shape
regime type, generating decisions that bound social actors in the localities. But these mechanisms
also cannot be reduced to any macro-level economic or technological forces. Nor can a simple
functionalist logic suffice to explain their success in the English case, as the same demands
appear, with near-identical substantive content, across time and place; only where such demands
were collectively organized, however, did they aggregate into constitutional outcomes. The
careful delineation of mechanisms linking initial conditions to final outcomes exemplifies the
way in which an institutionalist approach can most accurately explain such outcomes in their
specificity, as opposed to in generalized ways that rely on stereotypical affinities (e.g. the widely
assumed connection between trade and representation) to gain plausibility and persuasive power.
69
Millar 1992, 203-73, Kelly 2011, Kümin and Würgler 1997, Zaret 2000, Heerma van Voss
2001, Bailey 1979, Hung 2011, Keirstead 1990, Schneider 2006, Koo 2007, Krotoszynski 2012, Bryen
2013.
19
1.2.3 Collective Responsibility and Individual Rights: The Inverse Logic of Political Obligation
and The Divergence of the West
A central contribution of the book is thus to highlight the importance of collective forms
of organization for the emergence of representation. It was the state imposition of collective
responsibility at the county level in England, I argue, that structured the practice of
representation in a manner that made it an effective system of governance that extended
throughout the territory and over all social groups. Collective responsibility meant that a social
group assumed responsibility both for the actions of its members and vis-à-vis external authority,
which could extend to judicial matters or fiscal obligations. This assessment runs counter to
assumptions about the importance of individual rights as the distinguishing feature of the
Western trajectory, with England as its most evolved form.70 In an inversion that is typical of
many conclusions from this analysis, individual rights become important only because collective
responsibility was already effectively imposed across multiple levels and throughout society, as I
show in chapters 3 and 13 of the book.
The English political system in particular was more effective in imposing legal
frameworks for both collective action and collective responsibility, through formal and informal
types of corporations.71 This is especially relevant since representation was originally, in the
medieval period and throughout Europe, an obligation imposed by the crown (chapters 6 and
7).72 The practice in fact originated in the Roman legal form of plenipotentiary powers, the
powers given to legal agents to act in court or any other capacity. The purpose of transposing this
legal form to political practice was to ensure that local communities would be collectively bound
by decisions of their representative; it was not, in its early stages, a right demanded from below.
This ensured compliance at the local level—one of the main weaknesses of representative
systems on the European continent, where such obligations were weakly enforced. Only after
parliamentary practice was institutionalized and corporate collective action began to procure
benefits for the represented did representation become a coveted right.
The insight reinforces the importance of state capacity for Western, especially English
developments, but it also provides the dimension on which the West pivoted in trajectory,
diverging from non-Western cases with which, on many other dimensions, it had many
commonalities, as I also show in the book.
Collective responsibility itself was not exclusive to England or Western polities. In fact,
it structured Russian communities since the medieval period; however, it did so based on strong
kinship ties, not state-created administrative divisions, as in England. Rulers exploited kinship
ties to compensate for the weakness of imperial infrastructural control; state authority was too
70
The thesis of Macfarlane 1978 is not without controversy, but is a bold statement of a
stereotypical view.
71
My historical analysis of corporative structures thus intersects with the burgeoning literature
on the role of corporations in the market economy and politics; Ciepley 2013, Kuran 2005.
72
Historical scholarship has long emphasized this point; Post 1943, Post 1964. An empirical
pattern emerging from the analysis that follows is that the less well enforced such obligation was, the
less robust the representative institutions.
20
weak. As Russian historians have extensively chronicled, relations with the state were
overwhelmingly atomistic—a feature also observed in the Ottoman Empire. Difference on this
dimension—the level at and basis on which collective action was organized, combined with the
use of the principle of representation and the taxation of the most powerful—are what
distinguished England. It is the conjunction of these factors with corporate organization, all
enforced by the state, that enabled representative institutions to form. Obligation—not rights nor
cost-benefit calculations nor bargaining over taxation—first propelled the formation of
representative institutions in the West.
1.2.4 The Positive Externalities of Inequality and Concentration of Power: The False
Dichotomy of “Inclusive” and “Extractive” Institutions
Inequality is widely considered as one of the most important pathologies of the current
political and economic orders.73 It is also true, however, that it has been seen to be the foundation
of political order: as Adam Smith argued in an influential statement, the need for civil
government was first triggered by the unequal acquisition of property, a theme recently
revived.74
Here, the link is confirmed in a slightly different form, as inequality is the necessary
condition for the development of representative institutions; it is, however, inequality of power
and wealth not between societal actors, but between them and the ruler. Only where both
resources, power and wealth, are skewed in favor of the ruler can actors be incentivized to
support the creation of the institutional structure that enables representation. This asymmetry
remains overall active in the English case and is self-reinforcing, only to briefly fall apart in the
seventeenth century; I show this throughout the text through both qualitative analysis and
empirical measures, such as tax and military extraction. This insight has three important
implications, regarding the assumption on the balance of power, the “limited” character of the
constitutional state, and the relevance of land inequality for political development.
State-Society Balance of Power: Empirical Description or Normative Goal? First, the
vaunted idea of a “balance of power” between ruler and ruled is a normative aspiration, not an
empirical description. All cases of robust representative governments had a central authority that
was capable of compelling social groups, especially the most powerful social actors. It is the
relative advantage of the ruler on this dimension that distinguished England. In varying degrees,
it is also observed in Catalonia and Hungary. In fact, as the chapters on France, Castile, Hungary,
the Flemish semi-autonomous cities and the Italian city-states show, the more a balance of power
is empirically approximated, the more representation weakens. When central, executive authority
weakens, so does the institutional equilibrium that enables representation. Republics may
emerge, but they are short-lived and eventually drift into oligarchies, as exemplified by the
Italian cases. This is one of many dimensions in which an account of origins mandates a
reconsideration of some foundational tropes, a topic I return to in the conclusion.
73
74
Hacker and Pierson 2010, Gilens 2012, Piketty 2014.
Smith [1776] 1981, V.i.b.2. See also Boix 2015.
21
The Predatory Character of the “Limited” State. The second major implication of the
centrality of power preponderance between ruler and ruled concerns the concept of the “limited”
state. The term is so common that it is axiomatic it denotes the successful constraint on central,
executive power by a society that is institutionally organized. It is also taken to indicate a more
limited capacity to extract from society, especially in taxation. But the empirical reality of
“limited,” constitutional states is, again, exactly the opposite—as one would expect given the
revision above. Per capita taxation in “limited” states was strikingly higher than in “absolutist”
ones. This point has now been systematically demonstrated for the period from 1650 to 1913
through panel data on eleven European countries,75 which show that the causal effects of a
centralized but “limited” government, such as Britain’s or the Netherlands, were striking: a 5965% increase in per capita taxation compared to less constitutional regimes.76 By contrast, in
France, when power was evenly balanced between the nobility and the king, fiscal revenue was
minimized.77
I show that this pattern held already from the medieval period, in other words before the
revolutionary changes of the seventeenth century, despite the period of weakness that preceded
the Glorious Revolution.78 Historians have long suggested this, through case-specific evidence:
the English, Joseph Strayer notes, could match the French “man for man” and “pound for pound”
in the 1290s, despite having less than a fifth of their population and “much less” than a fourth of
their wealth.79 Below, using new datasets on per capita revenue and troop extraction, I show that
the pattern extends from the late 1100s until about the late 1500s, when English politics took an
absolutist turn England. The more consent was institutionalized, the greater the extractive
capacity of the state.
That being the case, it is apparent that one of the central organizing devices in the
literature on state and institution building is also in need of revision. Powerful theoretical models
posit a polarity between “inclusive” (i.e. representative) institutions and “extractive” ones or
between “producers” and “looters.”80 This stems originally from the public choice assumption of
a predatory state that requires limits through societal opposition.81 The record shows instead that
the most inclusive institutions were also the most extractive ones, with England (and selfgoverning cities) at the high end of the spectrum. What appears as a distributional conflict
between state and society is, in fact, upon closer inspection, the result of variation in the capacity
of the state to distribute the tax burden throughout society.
States that appear “extractive,” such as Castile or France, suffered from a fundamental
weakness in the ability to tax the most powerful social actors: they only appeared as
predominantly and unduly “extractive” because the tax burden fell disproportionately on those
75
Dincecco 2009, Dincecco 2011.
Dincecco 2009, 74-5. Dincecco’s study has 1,515 observations of tax revenue from regime
years, of which centralized and limited were 713; ibid..
77
Rosenthal 1998, 72-3.
78
Strayer 1970.
79 Ibid..
80
Acemoglu and Robinson 2005, Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, Boix 2015.
81
Levi 1988.
76
22
least able to pay. By contrast, the distinguishing trait of the English (but also the Catalan, as well
as the city-republican) fiscal regime, especially in the early period, was its remarkable capacity
to compel the highest strata of the elites to contribute. In chapter 7, we will see in detail how this
top-down sequence of extraction was critical for the gradual incorporation, in a systematic and
sustained way, of lower social strata, thus earning the label “inclusive” for the regime. The
English state was, indeed, inclusive; but what it included that was excluded on the Continent was
the elites, not the lower urban and commercial classes, as typically assumed.
This revision, moreover, has implications for the Gordian knot of political economy
discussions of state power: that a “government strong enough to protect property rights and
enforce contracts is also strong enough to confiscate the wealth of its citizens.”82 This is the
central puzzle in much of the literature. The answer here is to suggest that the better such rights
are protected, the more wealth the government gets to confiscate in any case—as long as it
sustains that strength by preserving the conditional nature of such property rights. That
relationship remains under dispute for modern democracies,83 but it is less so for the premodern
period. For an account of emergence, in any case, it is key.
The Potential Irrelevance of Land Inequality for Political and Economic Outcomes. A
final implication is also highly relevant for the present day. Inequality, especially of land,
continues to be a major preoccupation in the developing world. Yet the progress made is not
overwhelming. Despite almost a century of major land reform efforts in Latin America, for
instance, only about half of all arable land (14% of total land) has been either redistributed or
expropriated between 1930 and 2008.84 Moreover, this change has not had appreciable impact on
levels of inequality.85 Land redistribution was also a major policy goal in Africa and other parts
of the developing world, with mixed results so far.86 Underlying these programs lies the belief in
the necessity of land redistribution on an equitable basis for economic growth and political
development.
However, descriptions of land inequality in Latin America, which hosted autocracies
throughout much of the twentieth century with high levels of poverty, report measures of
inequality that are in fact better than those observed in Britain, either historically or even today:
90% of the land in Latin America was still controlled by 10% of the population in the 1960s, but
as late as 1873, all land and homes in Britain were in the hands of 3.6% of the population and
even today 0.6% of the population owns about 70% of the land (members of the extended royal
family in fact).87 Such measures are poor descriptors of empirical reality, unless they specify the
tenurial regimes implied. With formal concentration of ownership, but a highly articulated
82
Weingast 1995, 1.
Timmons 2010, Cheibub 1998, Persson and Tabellini 2004, Lott and Kenny 1999.
84
Albertus 2015, 12.
85
A recent study attributes the decline observed only in the last decade to higher education
spending, followed by stronger foreign direct investment and higher tax revenues, not land reform—an
unsurprising outcome, given that only a small percentage of the population remains agricultural;
Tsounta and Osueke 2014.
86
World Bank 1975, Deininger and Binswanger 1999.
87
Lapp 2004, 2, Cahill 2001.
83
23
tenurial regime, England was the lead industrializer and the most evolved liberal democracy, and
this already before agriculture ceased to be the most important economic resource.
With striking findings, the relation between democracy and redistribution, hitherto
assumed to be ironclad, is increasingly being taken apart.88 Moreover, echoing the same
historical logic, land redistribution is now, counterintuitively, shown to be a policy implemented
by autocracies, not democracies.89 But if both economic and political development are at least
possible under conditions of high land inequality, as in Britain, then the focused preoccupation
with land redistribution might be beside the point and the great difficulty in overcoming it
perhaps not as critical as it has been made to be. The English case suggests that an alternative
path might be worth consideration. Land inequality can interact with mechanisms that generate
incentives strengthening constitutional, if not democratic, structures and enabling economic
growth. Such mechanisms typically will constitute treatments that are far less invasive than land
redistribution and may thus be a more tractable way of reform. One such mechanism in this
historical account is conditional property rights, or more simply tenurial, rental relations. Tenure
is in fact finding increasing confirmation in the developing world as an efficient and often far
less costly means of land allocation,90 overturning decades of institutional and theoretical
prejudice against it.91
In fact, the cumulative implication of this analysis on the question of land inequality is to
suggest instead that the key difference that enabled differential outcomes in England and in parts
of the developing world, such as Latin America, had to do with state capacity and especially the
capacity of the state to tax the most powerful elites.92 The historical record suggests that it is the
extractive weakness of the Latin American state that created the economic pathologies,
especially deep poverty and underdevelopment, observed in that region.93 Accordingly, reform
policies are better targeted, at least in the short term, to the increase in extractive capacity of the
most powerful, especially over their wealth, rather than just their income, as the highest indicator
of capacity.
1.3
Case Selection and Plan of the Book
The conclusions presented here derive from the study of key European cases. The period
covered is extensive and varies according to the case, ranging from the eleventh to the
seventeenth century. The period is selected for each case to start before the evidence suggests
88
Aidt and Jensen 2009, Mares and Queralt 2013, Soifer 2013, Slater, Smith and Nair 2014,
Ansell and Samuels 2014, Albertus 2015.
89
Albertus 2015.
90
Deininger and Feder 2009, Deininger, Jin and Nagarajan 2008, Rigg 1988, Chadha and
Bhaumik 1992, Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak 2002, Left Gets It Right: India 1993, Jin and Deininger
2009, Otsuka 2007.
91
Borras, Carranza, Franco and Manahan 2009, Borras, Carranza and Franco 2007, Payer
1979.
92
Soifer 2013.
93
Sokoloff and Zolt 2007, Centeno 2002.
24
institutional emergence. The purpose of the analysis, however, is not to develop a full causal
model, but only to specify a set of necessary conditions for the outcome to occur, representative
institutions as central organs of government. The main necessary condition tested is state
strength and weakness, measured in terms of effective control of land and, specifically,
taxation.94 However, representative legal practice also emerges as important, as do centrally
imposed supra-local organization. It has been shown that a smaller number of cases, about five,
suffices to establish claims about necessary conditions.95 Of the nine cases examined, with much
within-case variation adding confidence in the results, none have central representative
institutions without all three necessary conditions.
Accordingly, this is not an argument about sufficient conditions: some of the cases
examined, especially the non-Western ones of the Russian and Ottoman Empires, are widely
claimed to have all land concentrated in the hands of the ruler, but no representative institutions;
they lacked, however, both the tradition of legal representation and the organization of collective
responsibility at a supra-local level that the argument also posits as necessary.
The main case that is positive on outcome is England, with additional evidence provided
by Catalonia, certain periods of Hungarian history, and the early history of Castile, Flanders and
the Italian city-states.96 No case replicates the English pattern entirely, primarily because the
power of the ruler was weaker elsewhere. But the central dynamics can be observed. The
chapters on Flanders and Italy are particularly important, as they address a potent
counterargument, that representative institutions emerge instead from bottom-up practices.
I also examine cases in which rulers did not effectively control the land, de facto at least,
if not de jure: France and Castile.97 Both of these also had a tradition of representative practice.
In general, cases that score negative on the causal variable provide evidence that when the cause
is absent, this is sufficient for the outcome to be absent as well; it is indirect evidence for the
necessity of the condition.98 Here, however, France and Castile display variation in the degree
and type of (de jure/de facto) control at different periods and this accounts for the gradation in
outcomes observed, with periodic weaker representative institutions that are, in the French case,
94
State strength is conventionally measured through taxation; Hendrix 2010, Besley and
Persson 2009. This obscures the critical question of how a state builds capacity in order to extract, but
for the purposes of this discussion, the capacity can be taken as exogenous: as I show in the following
chapters, the capacity precedes the appearance of the dependent variable, representative institutions.
95
Dion has shown this, using a simple Bayesian model of inference, at 95% confidence; Dion
1998, 135, Mahoney 2000, 395-6. And as Mahoney explains, analysis of necessary conditions is
“important when evaluating certain outcomes of exceptional interest;” ibid.
96
“Positive on outcome design” is the appropriate way for establishing necessary conditions,
in most accounts; Ragin 2000, Dion 1998, Braumoeller and Goertz 2000.
97
Throughout the premodern period, rulers typically had the juridical control of land;
accordingly, most variation occurred at the level of the effective capacity to enforce such rights.
Exceptions to such control were heads of confederal units and of republics.
98
Seawright 2002, 185.
25
phased out at the central level. Such ordinal comparison offers indirect evidence about the claim
on necessary conditions for representative institutions.99
Further, since extended periods of time are covered in each case, within-case variation
conforming to the logic of the argument increases the strength of the claims: Hungary, France,
and Castile, in particular, show significant fluctuations in the value of the independent variable,
with predictable movement in outcomes. Finally, process-tracing is extensively applied in the
analysis, either to disconfirm existing theories (as in the evaluation of the thesis on the role of
mercantile wealth in the emergence of the English Parliament) or to explain how deviations from
high values in the key independent variables account for variations in outcomes.
As the initial goal of the analysis was to disconfirm the widely posited assumption of
state weakness as the prerequisite for constitutional outcomes, showing that the locus classicus,
England, obeyed a different logic was sufficient. However, the additional cases serve to increase
confidence in the claims and establish further patterns. The selection of cases aimed to cover the
main ones that have underlied most historical accounts, with variation in both dependent and
independent variables. Cases like Poland, Norman Sicily, the Scandinavian countries, or the
large number of small German states, are not covered here. This is primarily due to lack of
evidence available about the critical early period, prior to institutional formation: accounts begin
by taking the institutions for granted, as did most literature on the Italian city-states, for instance.
Systematic evidence is also lacking on the values of key independent or intervening variables,
such as land control and distribution of taxation. As more such evidence transpires, these cases
can offer additional tests of the claims presented here, as can non-Western polities like
Byzantium, China, and Japan.
The book is divided in four parts. The first presents the institutional theory of the
argument, by showing the importance of courts. Chapters 2 and 3 set out the connection between
power, courts, and parliaments by engaging in a comparison of the English Parliament and the
Paris Parlement, two institutions that are typically contrasted as political and judicial
respectively, but which in fact have the same origin. England developed a central parliament, but
France did not, with the Estates General having an intermittent life, before being eclipsed—an
institutional pattern that labeled France absolutist. The purpose of the comparison is to explain
this divergent trajectory by looking first at the institutional history. I show how the regularity of
the institution can only be explained by the judicial function: taxation demands were too
intermittent to generate a regular practice. I introduce the concept of functional layering and
explain how it avoids the functionalism of most current explanations of divergence.
In the next section, I examine alternative explanations for this divergence and conclude
that the critical factor was the greater capacity of the English crown to compel the nobility into
both judicial service and fiscal contributions. I do this by presenting evidence on the remarkable
capacity of the English state to organize such service across administrative divisions. Two
99
Mahoney 2000, 408-9 advises against combining ordinal and nominal comparisons, but
only because of the problems in affirming necessary and sufficient conditions jointly; the latter
combination is not linear, but ordinal comparison is. Given the focus on necessary conditions, this
analysis is not bound by this restriction.
26
pairwise comparisons follow, Italy and Flanders and Catalonia and Hungary (chapters 4 and 5).
The first two are “hard cases,” regimes commonly ascribed to bottom-up practices, which I show
to depend on prior political centralization. The latter two offer closer comparisons to England,
combining territorial extent with concentration of land at the time of institutional emergence.
In Part Two (chapters 6-10), I show how representation emerged, by focusing on the role
of power and obligation. In chapters 6 and 7, I show how representation as a practice is a
function of obligation and power. I first present the existing bargaining hypothesis which is
claimed to explain the emergence of representation and identify its weaknesses, before
presenting the alternative of this account, compellence. I show how effective central
representative practice only emerged where rulers had the capacity to enforce the legal system of
agents with plenipotentiary powers on local representatives. I next look at the English
institutional history in detail, to trace the separate dynamics that led to the emergence of the
institution. These dynamics involved compellence of the most powerful actors to attend and
participate, on the one hand, and the imposition of plenipotentiary powers on representatives of
local communities that generated the practice of representation itself. Chapter 8 compares France
and Castile, showing how state weakness early on undermined the creation of such central
institutions, with the extractive burden omitting the nobility and falling disproportionately on the
poor.
Chapters 9 and 10 examine the political economy of the origins of representation.
Chapter 9 establishes the remarkable fiscal extraction achieved by the English crown already
from the beginning of state and institutional formation, especially on the upper ranks of the
nobility. It shows how the fiscal ties of dependence, however, were bi-directional, with high
nobility lending extensively to the crown. Such loans to the crown generated further incentives to
the nobility to support parliament, through which such debt would be returned (this is called the
Eumenes paradox). It combines micro-evidence on individual members of the nobility with a
new dataset on all known members between 1200 and 1350 recording the remarkable amounts of
service, whether military, judicial, or administrative that was enforced on the nobility. This is in
striking contrast to the case of France, also examined in this chapter, where extraction and
service were severely curtailed, especially because as a rule they were not imposed on the
nobility. Chapter 10 compares the Spanish and English wool trades to show the endogeneity of
trade effects to political institutions.
In Part Three (chapters 11-12), I consider the role of property rights, showing the
importance of conditionality. Chapter 11 makes a theoretical case for shifting the focus on
security of property rights to their conditionality on central authority. Chapter 12 offers the first
pairwise analysis of the English and the Ottoman Land Law, only to show the remarkable
similarities between them, both predicated on ruler control of land and both instituting
effectively a system of conditional tenures. In fact, on a number of counts, the Ottoman law
appears even more bureaucratic than the English one. This comparison first of all undercuts neoinstitutionalist arguments that property rights were the critical factor explaining the rise of the
West.
In Part Four, finally (chapters 13 and conclusion), I develop the argument on
representation more fully and in a manner that allows me to compare the development of the
27
West with non-Western regions. Together with the previous chapters, the analysis in chapter 13
allows me to further specify a set of conditions that are critical to institutional emergence. I
introduce medieval and early modern Russia in the comparison to show that variation in
outcomes with the West cannot be ascribed to the commonly assumed reasons. Even the concept
of legal representation was not unknown in Russia, as it was not in the Ottoman Empire either, as
I show. Nor were petitions to the ruler, for justice, discretion, or special consideration; these
were a universal medium of grievance. I show instead that the difference lies in the mode of
collective organization and the way in which collective responsibility was administered and
enforced by the state, with England achieving the highest degree of supra-local (county)
organization.
The chapter also includes an excursus into Russian history that shows that even in a
culturally and economically diverse context, when concentration of land and conditional rights
structure relations between the ruler and social groups, constitutional outcomes emerge: this
pattern explains the unexpected phase of assembly meetings in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries under an ostensibly ‘tyrannical’ rule. Finally, the chapter concludes with
an assessment of the role of corporations, as highly formalized instruments of collective
responsibility, in political institutionalization and representative practice. I show that, counter to
common assumptions, the more highly formalized the corporate rights, the weaker the
representative outcomes. This is not unexpected from the perspective of this theory, however:
formalized rights imply autonomy vis-à-vis authority and this is the condition under which, as I
have argued throughout the book, one should least expect representation and effective local
organization to take place.
In the conclusion, I summarize the findings of the book and then draw attention to a
systematic pattern that emerges from them: the normative-empirical inversion. Some of the core
concepts in state and regime formation, such as absolutism, the “limited” state, separation of
powers, individual rights, and bureaucratic rationalism, emerge from this analysis either as
normative projections over an empirical reality that is inversely related to them or as mistaking a
consequent with a cause.
I conclude with some thoughts about what transpires as the fundamental underlying
difference among all these cases and the dimension on which England distinguished itself:
greater state capacity. Where this originates, the conditions that enable it to emerge, is
undoubtedly the most important, and yet still intractable, question in political science today. I
present the insights that this analysis may contribute to this enduring question.
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29