Case Selection and Plan of the Book

The principle of organization of this book is mostly analytical. Masterful accounts on premodern regime formation, by Brian Downing, Thomas Ertman, and many eminent historians, already offer a chronological pres­entation of institutional development.

A specification of necessary conditions omits factors that were historic­ally important but causally secondary to the question. For instance, the Church is not treated separately here but as another landowner, though for many related questions its contribution was fundamental. Church strength seems to have varied inversely with that of the state; cases identified here as weak typically had strong Churches. This is historically important but not theoretically central. It does not alter the main claims advanced here; it supplements them.

The cases examined are England, France, Castile, Catalonia, Hungary, Flanders, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia, with brief consider­ation of additional cases (Holland, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, the Swiss Cantons, and the Holy Roman Empire). The concept of a case is prob­lematic: temporal variation exists within cases (which is leveraged to increase confidence in the conclusions, as in Hungary) and some cases consist of multiple separate units (e.g. Flanders and Italy). However, the focus here is on polity-wide governance; further studies can test the hypotheses at the more micro level.

Cases were selected on two main criteria. The first is sufficiency in establishing necessary conditions; the second is availability of evidence on critical variables in the very early period, before the institution first appears.

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account.^[122]

This is then confirmed through the method of congruence in further cases, to assess whether the values of the necessary condition and out­come co-vary in the expected direction.^[123] Early Castile, Catalonia, and Hungary offer confirmation, as do periods of Flemish and Dutch history, with indications on other cases. The logic is also observed in cases where ruler power was weaker and only sufficient to control a lower nobility, the pattern I call second-best constitutionalism.^[124] This also explains histor­ical “anomalies,” such as the brief representative activity in seventeenth­century Russia, as well as periods of Hungarian and Polish history. The argument is strengthened by considering cases thought to prove the conventional logic: city-states, where participation appears to occur without strong rulers. I show how these are cases of omitted variable bias due to a truncated temporal frame.

Cases where ruler power was low and the outcome is not observed only indirectly support a claim about necessity.^[125] Still, France and Spain had weak representative regimes and I show their kings were generally too weak to enforce conditionality. Moreover, variation in the degree and type of control across time shaped outcomes in the predicted direction: representative institutions were phased out at the central level in France, but not in Castile where original powers were higher.

The necessary condition of power preponderance is measured through different observable implications. The conventional measure is taxation.^[126] It will be shown to be initially exogenous, as some taxing capacity precedes representation. Further indicators of this capacity - land control, the granting and enforcement of conditional rights to land, the creation of a uniform court system, the fusion of judicial with political and fiscal functions, the imposition of judicial service, especially on the most powerful groups, and of the obligation of representation - are examined through structured, focused comparisons across Western European cases, though data are highly unsystematic. Clearly separating cause and effect is hard, as many of the effects reinforce the cause (judicial centralization increases royal power) but some ruler capacity must be already present.

England is then set against two prototypical contrasts, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, which did not develop polity-wide representative insti­tutions, even though their rulers are claimed to have controlled all the land, as English kings did. Unlike arguments on sufficiency, ones on necessary conditions are unaffected by cases that have the condition but not the outcome. Nonetheless, such cases help identify what distin­guished the “West” from regions without a representative tradition. Although they appear to be very different cases compared to England, they are remarkably similar across many key dimensions.

Cases with some representative activity but limited evidence on the early period of origins cannot be assessed, since later periods often display inverse dynamics. England after the fourteenth century seemed like a case where “rights” led to “constraints” on royal authority, but this outcome cannot inform us about conditions of emergence. Accordingly, some well-known cases cannot be treated here and await more detailed infor­mation on the early period (Norway, Iceland, Norman Sicily, many small central European kingdoms, Portugal, Austria).¹²⁷ The early United States, by contrast, has rich records that promise an intriguing compari­son.

The structure of the book is as follows. Part I explains how regularity was achieved through a layering of judicial and fiscal functions and institutional fusion by comparing the English and French institutions (Chapter 2). It shows how this fusion results from nobles being compelled to perform service, including attending the royal court, which solved their collective action problem. It thus shows how, when rulers effectively controlled nobles and local judicial structures, they could achieve “terri­torial anchoring” (Chapter 3).

Part II explains how representative practice was originally an obligation that was more effectively imposed where compellence powers were already higher, as in England (Chapter 4), further comparing with France and Castile (Chapter 5). The English extractive advantage is supported by comparing rates of military extraction and both micro- and aggregate-level data on taxation (Chapter 6).

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Marongiu 1968.

Part III addresses a major alternative hypothesis ascribing representa­tion to trade growth by examining Italian city-states and the Low Countries (Chapter 7) and Catalonia (Chapter 8). It also shows how the institutional effects of trade were endogenous to strong central authority by comparing two classic cases, the English and Spanish wool trades (Chapter 9).

Part IV examines the hypothesis posited, the role of land control and conditionality, in a comparative framework. It shows how faced with a strong nobility, rulers would often develop the second-best constitu­tionalism exhibited in the Hungarian, Polish, Swedish (Chapter 10), and Russian (Chapter 12) cases. That conditionality was not sufficient for representation to emerge, however, is shown by comparing English and Ottoman land law (Chapter 11).

Part V brings all these strands together to attribute the emergence of polity-wide representative regimes to the supra-local organization of col­lective responsibility by the state, by comparing the role of petitions and collective responsibility in England, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire (Chapter 13). The conclusion examines some implications of the argu­ment, primarily on the intractable question of the origins of power.