The Differences between City-States and Representative Regimes: Selectorate and Incentives
City-states are not systematically distinguished from representative polities in the literature. In studies focused on state emergence, city-states reflect a different path to the one of territorial states or empires.[763] However, studies with regime variation as the dependent variable posit unit homogeneity with territorial states.[764] They assume that since all types of regimes had similar functions to differing degrees (voting and administration of taxes) they are comparable.
As van Zanden, Buringh, and Bosker note, however, northern Italy “?missed’ the development of [the] institutional innovation” of a parliament.[765] City-states removed a central element of representative regimes: an executive power with some interests and resources separate from those of its subjects.[766] Cities became republican only when they became de facto independent of any overlord. The Holy Roman Emperor was juridically sovereign over north-central Italian cities, but this did not affect daily governance during periods of republican rule, a compromise sealed with the Peace of Constance in 1183.[767]
Self-governing communes were associations to preserve peace and good customs that emerged between 1080 and 1150.23 Most communes developed republican institutions by the thirteenth century. For “the first time since republican Rome,”[768] [769] the general body of citizens (not subjects), the universitas civium, “practiced their own foreign policy, were fiscally independent, could raise an army and enforce the death penalty, and could mint coins,” as well as “forge independent commercial policy.”[770] This was not a system “of representation, the subordinate, class-divided parliaments of a hierarchic Standestaat, but of common participation, government by all.”[771]
Republican government entailed many radical practices.
Citizens could be elected to office by nomination and/or lot. Officials were often rotated at two, three, six, or twelve months to counter corruption.[772] The Venetian doge was himself elected. When, for practical purposes, the universitas civium was replaced by general councils as elective bodies, these could often include 10 percent of the population, for instance, out of an adult male population of 11,000, as in Padua.[773] The English Parliament might have about 240 representatives in the House of Commons and a maximum of 110 nobles in the House of Lords, out of an adult male population of around 1 million in 1300.[774]9The more radical and democratic the political features, however, the more backsliding occurred. Communes suffered from elite factionalism from the 1200s.[775] As assemblies grew in size, the more specialized councils and committees formed “for speed and efficiency.”31 In Florence, for instance, in the 1300s, these powers belonged to the Signoria, a body composed of nine members; eligibility was restricted primarily to Guelph guild members, though selection was through a combination of lot and election.32 This radical republican system was mostly confined to Tuscany and did not shape the whole regime for too long. Despite the popular revolutions after 1343 that placed guilds in power, by the 1430s the regime had veered in a signorial direction.33 By 1532, it officially had a Medici Duke.
Republican institutions, in any case, made fiscal extraction very different: citizens, not a ruler, decided on policy and level of taxation, so incentives to attend an assembly were both different and higher. In territorial states, as we have seen, representatives initially had limited capacity to constrain the crown. In city-states, as the historian Anthony Molho has shown, those who voted on taxes were often dominated by those who had lent to the state and were expecting to be reimbursed through tax proceeds, even as oligarchies came to prevail.[776] Extraction was even more coercive in these polities; it actually mirrored the inversion dynamic identified throughout the book.
Those that originally had strong republican traditions, for instance Venice and Florence, were able to impose forced loans in the fourteenth century that later consolidated into long-term debts.[777] By contrast, “many of those ruled by signori (for example, Milan) relied instead on a floating debt of voluntary short-term loans,”[778] suggesting relative ruler weakness. That forced loans were more common in republican regimes echoes the strong connection between obligation and institutional outcomes observed in England: high levels of participation were possible where the capacity to impose obligation was overall high.[779] After all, civic office itself was an obligation and fines penalized non-compliance.[780] But it is also a paradox from the perspective of this account: how was this power achieved without an executive? The next section addresses this point.A further fundamental distinction is that representative institutions, where territorially anchored, integrated a composite society that included groups separated by occupation, geographical distance, social status, and other characteristics. By contrast, as historians have concluded, that citystates failed to effectively accommodate rural populations within the republican framework was a key reason why republican governments collapsed.39 Their republican structure reflected a failure to install representation. The economic historian Stephen Epstein has further argued that conflict between landed and commercial interests could not be resolved, not least because “extreme [institutional] openness created conditions of ?permanent revolution’ that threatened the city-state’s survival as a distinctive mode of organised power.”40
It is on these dimensions that most city-states also differ from cities with municipal governance, such as those in the Low Countries, also examined below. Although the latter were self-governing, they lacked the attributes of sovereignty that city-states had gained: Flanders and Holland were subject to counts, dukes, or kings. The “counts of Flanders always remained in place as the ruling power,”41 as did the Hollander count, as will be seen. This, however, also explains why their representative institutions were more long-lasting than those of city-states. Accordingly, municipalities are better placed on a continuum between the city-states of Italy and territorial states, such as England.
7.2