The Inverse Logic OfRepresentative Origins

Assumptions about origins invariably affect - and can distort - causal arguments about later stages of institutional development, so they remain vital. Despite theorists calling for more attention to institutional origins,^{[40] [41] [42]} they remain overlooked.

A more general assumption is at play here, whereby the outcomes desired in modern liberal democratic representation - for instance limited executive authority, a separation of powers, and the protection of individ­ual rights - were also conditions that enabled their emergence. So, explaining why some polities developed representative institutions whilst others did not involves searching for cases where social groups could already limit state power or secure stronger property rights; it meant looking in the past for early instances of the same condition that is desired today. The medieval historian Marc Bloch warned about this kind of endeavor. He called it the “idol of origins,” the anachronistic fallacy of looking in the past for elements of the present.^[43]

By contrast, this account suggests that original conditions were often inversely related to the outcomes of concern today. This gives rise to what I call the “normative/empirical inversion,” whereby norms that are taken as constitutive of an institutional order are in fact inversely related to the empirical reality that generated them.

1.1.1 The Inverse Logic of Emergence: Central Power and the Social Foundations of Political Institutions

Since liberal governance is broadly identified with limiting central execu­tive power and protecting individual rights, it is natural that a central component of it, representative institutions, is assumed to serve those goals. This perception also permeates the historical state-building litera­ture, which emphasizes patterns of “local government,”^[44] and socio­logical studies that posit a balance of power between social actors, especially an “independent nobility.”^[45] Pluralism and political fragmen­tation thus undergird constitutional (and state-building) outcomes. This suggests a tension with the widely recognized, including now among economists, need for political centralization in both state-building and economic development.⁵⁴

However, for an entire regime to be deemed representative, disparate preferences and practices need to be homogenized - outcomes need to be observed at the polity, not just the local, level. For a unit to be politically integrated, laws must emanate from an institution that incorporates all those affected. Even in federal states, some political centralization must be present if the state is to be viable, as the American founders discovered.^[46] This reflects the conventional definition of state capacity as infrastructural power, follow­ing Michael Mann’s classic definition: the capacity “to penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm.”^[47] Power concentration, by contrast, is often perceived as a suboptimal form of political organization:^[48] it generally implies coercion and the suppression of local preferences, dynamics that are deemed inimical to constitutional (or democratic) regimes.

But as economic historian Stephan Epstein noted, this is an “assumption refuted by decades of research on pre-modern political practices that has shown how �absolutism’ was a largely propagandistic device devoid of much practical substance.”^[50] The assumed monopoly of power in absolutist regimes was rather an aspiration of rulers who resorted to violence and arbitrariness to handle intractable social groups. Even if military pressures led to increased capacity, unless this intractability was overcome, the out­come was not sustainable over time. This was the case with France under Louis XIV after the mid-seventeenth century: weakness in government control ended the regime a century later. The old insight of theorist Hannah Arendt, that violence can be a sign of weakness, is acutely relevant to this paradox.^[51] In some modern scholarship too, as political scientist Joel Migdal has pointed out, coercion is often misinterpreted as evidence of strength.^[52]

Further, the term “absolutism” usually implies that the ruler was acting without consent from the people, i.e. arbitrarily - again, in tension with representative premises. Indeed, in France, no central representative institution existed. The Estates-General were last called in 1614 and were very intermittent prior to that - hence the label “absolutist.” However, it is not as if France lacked any representative institutions. It still had at least twenty-five functioning local assemblies in 1789 that raised revenue and troops highly effectively.⁶² Many other Continental absolutist regimes like Castile or the Holy Roman Empire countries also had rich histories of local assemblies. However, as these assemblies were geographically and socially delimited, they did not define the regime as a whole.

The difference rather was that England had one central institution as the main organ of governance.^[53] Accordingly, although in England con­sent is assumed to define the regime, this is only the optical effect pro­duced when consent is negotiated centrally, in Parliament. Where consent was secured, coercion was latent, but control was higher.^[54] Consent was not absent in the other “absolutist” countries, as we will see; instead, it was exercised (and often denied) in an infinite number of local contestations. Historians of non-Western, so-called “despotic” regimes, like Russia and the Ottoman Empire, have often come to under­stand state-society relations in similar terms.^[55]

Explaining how representative institutions became effective organs of polity-level governance thus requires understanding why they became central institutions. This, I will argue, required strong and effective cen­tralizing powers.^[56] Central power was thus not only congruent with demands for consent; it was, I will argue, a necessary precondition for their effective institutionalization.

1.1.2 The Inverse Logic of Emergence: Separation of Powers

and Institutional Fusion

The importance of centralization also emerges from another important aspect in the history of representative institutions. A hallowed principle of Western constitutionalism since at least the eighteenth century has been the separation of powers, drawing on sources from classical antiquity. It has served as a bulwark against abuse and the corruption of the liberal democratic order, especially in the American political tradition but extending far beyond it.^[57] Yet the English political system ignored the principle since its inception.^[58] The House of Lords was the highest court of the land as well as the upper legislative chamber from the thirteenth century. Rather than separating powers, it fused them.

The English crown’s adjudicatory role was not exceptional in the premodern period, however. Rulers western and eastern dispensed justice in their courts, as did lords with more local powers. As we will see, tsars in Russia just as much as sultans in the Ottoman Empire were formally bound to dispense justice to their subjects. In fact, the fusion of judicial and administrative functions has been seen as characteristic of “ancient oriental monarchies.”^[59] However, it was a universal trait. The difference lay in that, in some European cases, especially England, judicial powers became fused with executive and legislative ones in a representative structure. The implications of this dynamic have been overlooked. Although much of social science would treat rare occurrences as outliers of less significance for any general theory, a deeper understanding of influential cases remains necessary, as some social scientists have argued.^[60] Explaining why the English Parliament displayed a fusion of functions whilst its French and most other Continental counterparts did not, offers valuable insights into institutional formation. For an account of origins, the English case poses a powerful challenge.^[61]

This is not to suggest that fusing judicial and executive or legislative functions is desirable today. After all, even the United Kingdom has established greater separation of powers by creating a Supreme Court in 2005. But it does suggest that the role of judicial processes in spearhead­ing political integration requires analysis, as studies of the European Union are also powerfully showing.^[62]

1.1.3 The Inverse Logic of Emergence: Security of Property Rights

and Levels of Extraction

Any account of parliamentary institutions also has to grapple with the pivotal contribution by North and Weingast on credible commitment, which linked the English Parliament to the provision of “secure property rights, protection of...

The assumption of more secure property rights has been challenged, however, by economic historians, who noted that rights did not change much after 1688.^[63] Moreover, the capacity to raise public debt seems more directly tied to a greater state capacity to tax and raise long-term debt,^[64] itself enabled by the role of Whig ideology,^[65] ministerial accountability,^[66] or a thriving commercial economy.^[67] Further, neo­institutionalist scholarship originally focused on “confiscatory government” as the main threat to property rights. It posited a zero-sum game between the ruler and subjects, following the intuitive premise that “the property rights structure that will maximize rents to the ruler (or ruling class) is in conflict with that that would produce economic growth.”^[68] Accordingly, if economic growth was to be assured, institu­tions would protect property by reducing rents to the ruler. Secure property rights do not necessarily imply a less extractive or less powerful state, and North later acknowledged the centrality of state institutions in securing such rights, albeit not in the early stages of development.^[69] However, the association of security with limits to extraction has persisted;^[70] “confiscatory taxation” is deemed a form of expropriation. North ascribed Spanish decline to a combination of war and excessive taxes and regulation.⁸² The logic is echoed in Acemoglu and Robinson’s distinction between “inclusive” and “extractive” economic institutions and in Carles Boix’s between “producers” and “looters.”⁸³ Critically, it survives in current politics.⁸⁴

Historical evidence shows the opposite to be the case. Economic his­torians in particular have argued that we need to move beyond “simplistic notions of predation and constitutional regimes.”⁸⁵ For instance, Spain has been the classic exemplar of a predatory state in the neo­institutionalist literature, assumed to extract at levels that undercut eco­nomic growth.⁸⁶ Yet Spain was raising a similar percentage of GDP from taxes in the late 1500s to England after 1698, less than 10 percent (or about a third, depending on the estimate used), as Drelichman and Voth noted,⁸⁷ and a smaller percentage in the late eighteenth century, as shown by Regina Grafe. She has also emphasized that Spain was not “predating” on its colonies: “95 percent of taxes raised in the Spanish Americas were spent in the Spanish Americas.”^[71] That more “predatory” states generally extracted less is a pattern that applies across European cases and was noted long ago, especially by P. K. O’Brien and Philip Hoffman.^[72] Recent econometric studies have confirmed the observation. Mark Dincecco found that centralized but “limited” government achieved around a 60 percent increase in per capita taxation compared to less constitu­tional regimes after 1660.^[73]

None of these ground-breaking accounts, however, test whether this capacity might predate parliaments. Instead, they assume that high extraction was endogenous to representation. Revenue increased, they posit, because as “more political control accrues to elites, it becomes more likely that new tax funds will be spent on items that will benefit them (versus the ruler only).”^{[74] [75]} However, data by Karaman and Pamuk on Prussia provocatively suggest that, once cost of living is controlled for, agricultural Prussia showed a similarly remarkable increase in capacity without a parliament between 1650 and 1790.92 High extraction may thus be independent of parliamentary structures.^[76] If we are to under­stand the origins (and effects) of such institutions, we thus need to specify the levels of extraction before parliaments emerged as coordinating devices. We also need to understand the distributive politics in this process, especially who was burdened by taxation. After all, the real distinction in Acemoglu and Robinson’s account is not between inclusive and extractive institutions, but inclusive and exclusive ones: as they note, colonial Spanish America did not lack secure property rights; it just restricted them to the colonists. It was the “mass of the people” who were subject to coercion and whose resources were expropriated.^[77]

This book argues that regimes are often classified as extractive, coer­cive, or absolutist when they can only tax the weaker social groups, while power-holders remain beyond state control - what Hoffman and Rosenthal described as taxes being “disastrous at the margin.”⁹⁵ Constitutional structures, by contrast, required strong state powers, as we will see. They were not more “limited”; their scope was typically broader while their strength was greater.⁹⁶ They were just more regulated and thus less arbitrary. The escalation of European wars after 1400, often seen as a cause, was predicated on this early institutional development.

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