So far, the account has explained fiscal dynamics in terms of ruler power and concerns about justice.
A major alternative derives parliaments from very different dynamics: political scientist Carles Boix, for instance, argues they are “a consequence of urban strength - and causally irrelevant to growth.”[752] A rich, empowered bourgeoisie defeated arbitrary government and absolutism, in such accounts, and its origins lay in the commercial and technological revolution that transformed the European economy after the year 1000.2 The Low Countries, especially, typify the “urban belt” of Europe, which ran from Italy and Spain to England.
Similarly, for some economic historians, the participatory government in European cities resulted from urban “independence” from the state - this even allowed European urban (and thus economic) development to outpace the Islamic world and the East more generally.[753]Trade was of course important for urban growth, as Henri Pirenne argued a century ago.[754] Many parameters of his thesis have been challenged, but the commercial growth after the millennium is undeniable.[755] Cities, moreover, dominate accounts of the agricultural and industrial revolutions,6 as well as the efflorescence of political participation. They were indeed innovative laboratories of electoral politics, bottom-up social organization, and market mechanisms.7 They systematized key features of modern democracy, not least the regulation of the economy, public works, the provision of welfare8 as well as state credit.9 Were they also an alternative path to representation?
If parliaments resulted from urban growth, the necessary condition for representative emergence posited here, namely ruler strength, would be either endogenous or not necessary. The following three chapters address different parts of this line of argument and of the challenge of equifinality it presents.
First, however, we need to ask if the institutions that emerged in these city-states are the same as the dependent variable in this book, the emergence of polity-wide representative regimes; unit homogeneity is typically assumed, not analytically derived. After all, if urban institutions were so fundamental, why did the most robust and long-lasting parliament emerge in the region, England, with the lowest rates of urbanization in Europe in the formative early period, 4.4 percent in 1300, compared to 20.8 percent in Italy and 22.4 percent in Belgium?[756]We also need to explain why the most highly urbanized regions, like Italy, Belgium, and Spain, devolved into principalities or absolutism by the early modern period (with the Netherlands as a partial outlier).[757] These small islands of advanced organization did not naturally scale up to integrated polities. Like Athenian democracy, they failed to solve the fundamental problem of inclusion of broader populations outside the city walls on an equal or at least sustainable basis. Was this a random historical outcome or an inherent feature of urban incapacity to stem the concentration of power and to include disparate groups, suggesting that urban republicanism was not as effective as a self-sustaining equilibrium? In fact, social scientists are echoing Weber’s insight about the oligarchic tendencies of mercantile polities.[758] Charles Tilly suggested a U-shaped relation between cities and state formation.[759] More radically, economic historian Bas van Bavel has even posited a “fundamental incompatibility of market economies with long-run prosperity, equity, and broad participation in decision making.”[760]
To establish urban primacy, finally, it is not enough to note that economic and urban growth preceded the emergence of parliaments. After all, as noted already, economic growth in China led neither to urban proliferation nor to representative institutions.[761] Unless one is able to show that urban groups initiated representative institutions which became politywide and governed surrounding territories, the correlation does not explain those institutions.
“If large-N studies make incorrect assumptions about causal paths, they will lack explanatory power.”16To address these concerns, this chapter focuses first on the classic examples of urban governance, Italy and the Low Countries. I claim citystates aren’t strictly speaking representative regimes, so they differ from the dependent variable in this study. Even if these differences are not deemed to be dispositive, however, we will see how the republican institutions that did emerge were not the spontaneous outcome of commercial efflorescence. Most studies focus on the period when urban participatory institutions were fully formed, yet communal forms emerged earlier, from the eleventh century, which is typically overlooked. Correcting this oversight reveals how judicial dynamics and power over the most powerful social actors - the key mechanisms in this account - were also critical in enabling urban participatory institutions. This chapter examines Italy and the Low Countries, whilst Chapter 8 tests these claims on the case of Catalonia. Lastly, Chapter 9 examines whether mercantile groups actually shaped representative institutions through the two classic cases in neo-institutional analysis, England and Spain, only for their role to emerge as endogenous to ruler power. Echoing Acemoglu and Robinson, I show how “the differences in the organization of trade... reflected the different political institutions of these countries.”[762]
7.1