How does an institution expand to provide greater participation in central governance and decision-making to broader sections of the population, whilst still compelling the most powerful actors in the realm?

Both these conditions are necessary for a regime to be governing an entire polity rather than wielding authority over subsections of it. As we have seen, the intuitive logic adopted by most social scientists, including many histor­ians, is that the demands for taxation by a ruler who lacks autonomous resources trigger counter-demands for representation from those below.

“Why should [we] pay taxes, when the roads are in such disastrous condition?” This question, asked by participants in a tax experiment in the Congo recently,^[477] could be heard in any developing or low tax compli­ance country.^[478] It displays a compelling logic: each new generation called to contribute to taxation invokes the state’s poor service provision or corruption and concludes tax evasion is justified. If one points out that most developed countries have high tax burdens, the assumption is that this is because they are rich and they can afford it - wealth was amassed before heavy taxation was imposed. This folk contractarianism reflects the bargaining hypothesis, which, as we have seen, assumes that it is “citizens who control the tax base”⁴ and that groups have enough power to “inhibit the government’s operation” by withholding funds but not enough coercive capabilities to control it.^[479] So, at least in the first round of bargaining, the state needs to offer concessions, to strike a bargain before taxpayers release resources.

Similar questions about the mechanisms tying taxation to regime type have long been raised by scholars working on the “resource curse,” the propensity of states to display authoritarian traits when their main rev­enue consists of rents from a natural resource. This is typically explained by noting that dispensing with taxation obviates the need to respond to citizen demands.^[480] Though highly intuitive, scholars of the Middle East have noted that “[p]redatory taxation has produced revolts, especially in the countryside, but there has been no translation of tax burden into pressures for democratization.”^[481] The latest quantitative assessments of the theory also suggest that resources seem to be a curse only where prior institutions were already compromised.^[482]

Rather than seeing citizens of modern developing states as deficiently inclined towards ruler accountability compared to a small group of Europeans eight centuries ago, it might be more profitable to ask if we fully understand operating conditions in medieval Europe.^[483] Especially since, as we will see in subsequent chapters, these modern patterns are strikingly similar to the Continental cases where tax demands were resisted and constitutionalism failed.

Indeed, this chapter argues that a fundamental feature of medieval representation has been neglected: it was originally an obligation before it became a right. I first explain its links to the Roman law principle of plenipotentiary powers and how its successful application depended on strong ruler powers. I then show how strong capacity to impose obligation preceded even the first constitutional “moment” in English history, Magna Carta, typically conceived as a bargain between a strong baronage and a weak crown before Parliament emerged. Finally, I show how representation expanded to include non-noble groups by process­tracing developments between Magna Carta and the coagulation of Parliament by the early 1300s. The point is to demonstrate that the English Parliament consolidated precisely because the state was better able to override the common preference to hold tax payments hostage to a bargain than its Continental or some modern counterparts. Chapter 5 shows how both French and Castilian “absolutism” can be explained by weaker state capacity, while Chapter 6 offers a quantitative comparison of England and France that demonstrates the English advantage.

4.1