Conclusion

This chapter has suggested we rethink the preconditions for the emer­gence of representative practices. In particular, it has questioned the widely accepted notion that bargaining over taxation with weak rulers was what distinguished effective representation.

The notion of a bargain between state and society is an appealing one for modern liberals, but it should not be confused with an account of origins. The distinction matters greatly today. If citizens do not appreci­ate that government accountability requires that they pursue it assidu­ously - which they will typically do only if they have already contributed heftily to the public purse - the vicious cycle afflicting so many countries is unlikely to be escaped.^[549] No representation without heavy or at least unavoidable taxation is a better descriptor of the dynamic that generated polity-wide participatory institutions.

Yet social science has displayed what may be called a “fiscal fixation,” a conviction that taxation is “the skeleton of the state,” usually traced back to Joseph Schumpeter’s canonical 1918 essay, “The Crisis of the Tax State.”^[550] The claim has received compelling confirmation across a number of domains.⁹⁹ But Schumpeter drew on the experience of Germany and Austria, where, indeed, extreme fragmentation placed estates on a bargaining par with a weak emperor, as discussed in Chapter 10. However, although the Holy Roman Empire was rife with local assemblies, it did not produce polity-wide representative institu­tions, ones that genuinely governed, until the nineteenth century, if then, and after great turbulence. It is accordingly perhaps not the best model from which to derive a theory of representation, however useful it is for other domains. The next chapter examines two cases with stronger insti­tutions, which, however, also did not succeed in generating a representative regime, France and Castile. The key variation was again in initial state capacity.