The Theoretical Landscape: Alternative Theories and their Limitations

As discussed in the Introduction, the bargaining logic that permeates most current explanations of representative institutions fails to explain the three major puzzles posed by representative emergence: institutional regularity, the collective action problem of different social orders, and the territorial anchoring of representative regimes.

2.2.1 Bargaining in Geopolitical and Bellicist Arguments

Perhaps the classic form of the geopolitical argument was articulated by Otto Hintze, who challenged economic and class-based theories, espe­cially of Marxist origin, by focusing on war intensity.^[151] According to him, “England, with her insular security, was not directly exposed to the danger of [Continental] wars. She needed no standing army... of Continental proportions, but only a navy... In consequence she devel­oped no absolutism. Absolutism and militarism go together on the Continent just as do self-government and militia in England.”^[152]

One could question the premise of insularity, as England was fre­quently invaded until 1066, by Romans, Danes, and others. Ifbeing separated by water provided security, England would not have been able to invade France repeatedly; its “insularity” after 1066 was due to its effective internal organization, which made invasion costly. Even if we accept Hintze’s premise of insularity, however, his logical conclusions do not follow, and regularity and collective action remain unexplained. Absent an external enemy and coercive state capacity, why would social actors collectively attend a central institution (parliament) and agree to taxation? When state coercion is weak, incentives are to free-ride and shirk even in modern, public-goods-providing states, making consent to taxation and representation even harder to explain in a premodern con­text.

Similar concerns affect theories explicitly predicated on this geopolit­ical logic, for instance Charles Tilly’s pivotal formulation on state forma­tion, that “war made the state and the state made war.”^[153] Within this logic, representative institutions are not a dependent variable, but emerge incidentally through either a balance of power with social actors or a weak bargaining position of the ruler. For Tilly, “Kings of England did not want a Parliament to form and assume ever-greater power; they conceded to barons, and then to clergy, gentry, and bourgeois, in the course of per­suading them to raise the money for warfare.”^[154] For Levi, it was “the relatively weaker bargaining position of English monarchs vis-a-vis their constituents [that] led to concessions that French monarchs did not have to make.”^[155] These foundational statements thus introduced a social con­tract to explain institutions as concessions flowing from royal weakness, challenging elitist theories predicated on coercion.^[156] The bargaining logic is also widely invoked by historians, who see English kings making “humiliating concessions” to obtain direct taxation.^[157] However, both bargaining parity and royal weakness suggest social actors would resist an institution becoming regular. They also can’t explain how actors coordinated to demand concessions in common.

To address such concerns, many scholars point to the Military Revolution. This was a “process whereby small, decentralized, self­equipped feudal hosts were replaced by increasingly large, centrally financed and supplied armies” that required increasingly “sophisticated and expensive weaponry.”^[158] It therefore increased the fiscal needs of rulers and also displaced cavalry, thus undermining the nobility.

For some scholars, this collective action problem is solved by Europe’s “rampant” political fragmentation: elites could trade taxes for represen­tation when threats were external and multidirectional and “exit” was easy.^[159] But this fragmentation remains unexplained, raising endogeneity concerns. It was not a natural given. It resulted from the political devel­opment that occurred in the centuries preceding the earliest starting point of most econometric studies, the fifteenth century. “Fragmentation” is the optical effect of multiple units achieving comparable internal organ­ization and cohesion, allowing them to withstand the attacks of neighbors. This organization, as we will see, was since the eleventh century typically predicated on assemblies and forms of governance that varied mainly in how they aggregated activities at the supra-local level; they were products not of trade but of Roman or other law and collective organization - the topics of this book. They ensured that power was centralized in each unit effectively enough.

Conversely, ancient China would not be described as highly centralized^[160] if all units had had the administrative efficiency of the Qin, for instance, that was impressively described by Hui.^[161] Moreover, Chinese centralization was more apparent than real in later eras: the Ming regime (1368-1644) suffered from “under-taxation” since its for­mative stage.^[162] Chinese bureaucracy was also highly fragmented and localized, even “impotent” at this time - suggesting that the characteriza­tion of China as centralized is misguided, as Hall emphasized long ago;^[163] instead, it echoes the normative/empirical inversion identified in this book.

Another type of geopolitical explanation addresses the problem of collective action by focusing on the transaction costs produced by dis­tance and geographic scale.^[165] Political scientist David Stasavage has shown in his cross-country study of European territorial states and city­republics between 1250 and 1750 that negotiation was simpler and representation more likely when all could assemble “around the bell of a church,”^[166] as republican theory emphasized.^[167] Indeed, England never integrated the conquered territories of Scotland, Ireland, or even Wales. French rulers acknowledged the drawbacks of the “grande distance” in establishing institutions^[168] while the logistics of large assemblies were daunting.^[169]

However, the effects of geography are underestimated in small territor­ies and overestimated in large ones. First, France’s overall size cannot explain why institutions were not formed over some sub-region. Brittany and Flanders were not further from Paris than the North or Cornwall were from London. Moreover, size problems could be mitigated through committee systems.^[170] Conversely, even the smallest units, city-republics, failed to retain participatory government over time or to extend beyond their borders, as Chapter 7 argues. The variation in how collective action was inhibited by similar distances in some cases but not in others remains unexplained.

Moreover, attendance was high even in large polities when actors found it in their interest. Cities were sending so many delegations to Paris on business (pro negociis ville) that an ordinance in 1262 limited their numbers.^[171] Further, French nobles were present in Paris. Manypowerful bishops and magnates had residences, hotels, there.

Further, smaller distances could still impede attendance. Travel was burdensome enough to require proctorial representation for English nobles and especially clergy.⁸⁸ True, the “poor safety of the roads from the multitudes of armed men... throughout the kingdom” exacerbated French conditions.⁸⁹ But conditions were also dangerous in England in times of crisis, as in the 1310s and 1340s, when the king had to offer safe conduct to parliamentarians.⁹⁰ Had these conditions been constant, the institution may never have consolidated. Moreover, the cost of sending representatives was high: stunningly, it was double the wage for military campaigns for knights, 4 shillings daily, and 2 shillings for burgesses.^[173] Such cost caused bitter debates within communities.^[174] Yet parliament still formed.

While geopolitical, bellicist, and distance-based accounts address the problem of collective action, they don’t resolve it. By taking the fiscal bargaining logic as sufficient, they also don’t broach the problem of regularity and territorial anchoring.

2.2.2 Historical Institutionalist Explanations

Historical institutionalist approaches avoid the perils of functionalism, as they draw on factors such as historical legacies and timing, as well as the pressures of war and geopolitics and the extent of commercial develop­ment.

In Downing’s account, parliaments were taken as given: where medi­eval representative institutions existed and escaped the pressures of the sixteenth-century Military Revolution and where rulers could raise finan­cial support externally through loans, rather than internally through coercion, constitutional regimes survived. Ertman described the variation in representative institutions through Otto Hintze’s classic distinction between bicameral and tricurial assemblies.^[177] He explained this variation by arguing that bicameral assemblies emerged where local, territorial ties were strong and estate divisions weak, as in England, Poland, and Hungary.^[178] Where the Carolingian legacy had created fragmentation, as in Latin Europe, the nobility, the clergy, and the burghers had deep divisions and weak territorial ties, so the tricurial system prevailed.^[179]

Did territorial ties generate bicameralism? And were they the historical legacy of the Anglo-Saxon period? Can these ties thus explain the crucial feature of the English Parliament Ertman also notes, that “members of the different orders were mixed together in both chambers”?^[180] In fact, nobles did not actually have strong territorial ties in the early period, especially as the crown ensured landed estates were typically spread across counties.^[181] Some historians even argue that the gentry’s ties were not territorial, to the county, but to the lords.^[182] Accordingly, I argue, boundaries between social orders were weak due to greater royal power.^[183] The “legal dividing line in English society [was set] between the free and the villeins, and not between noble and non-noble” by Henry I.^[184] Further, all tenants-in-chief had common fiscal burdens which created “the union of the prelacy and barony,” as the nineteenth­century historian William Stubbs noted.^[185] In any case, territorial ties would not explain why localities were integrated into a central Parliament, how the crown achieved territorial anchoring. The stronger the localities, the weaker their integration in the center should be.

In France, by contrast, social orders were defined by legal privilege, by “private” laws and customs.^[186] The French (and German) nobility was “a nobility of the blood,” unlike the English one.^[187] Moreover, local, terri­torial governance structures were not weak in France - they were just weakly subordinated to the center. From the 1300s, the three orders were summoned by bailiwick (“par bailliages et senechaussees”) and elected in local assemblies.^[188] Territorial attachments were strong across all orders in the medieval period, just as in the sixteenth century,¹⁰⁷ though perhaps somewhat less for the Church.¹⁰⁸ The third estate, as we will see, had only urban not rural representation, and was endowed with great independence.¹⁰⁹ This made French particularism a daunting obstacle to state expansion; local assemblies proliferated, even deciding on tax­ation, thus undercutting the Estates-General, as we will see in Chapter 5.

Accordingly, the bicameral structure of the English Parliament cannot be linked to territorial ties or to the mixture of orders per se. Bicameralism also cannot help us explain the origins of the institution, as the chambers separated late in England, in 1341, almost half a century after the institu­tion was fully fledged^[189] (similarly in Poland it was instituted in 1504, more than a century after assemblies begun).^[190] Furthermore, the English system was not technically bicameral - the clergy were convoked separ­ately by the archbishops after the 1330s.^[191]2 Separate convocation reflects church-state relations and state strength more than territorial ties. Though originally it reflected greater clergy independence,^[192] it eventu­ally weakened the Church. Church complaints from “1280 were still being presented twenty, thirty and forty years later... And always the royal response is guarded, evasive, or an uncompromising refusal.”^[193] Illustrating a common pattern observed in this book, “the side which rejected the union for the sake of independence fell into a state of subjec­tion”: the more independent a social group originally, the more it was weakened eventually.¹¹⁵ Accordingly, the parochial clergy was, like the towns, more heavily taxed than the counties and the barons (at least 10 versus 6.6 percent), suggesting greater subjection to the crown.¹¹⁶

Existing historical institutionalist accounts thus take either representa­tive institutions themselves or their territorial integration as given. As they are predicated on war, moreover, they also do not explain the regularity of institutions or how groups achieved collective action. Next I address the problem of regularity, by tying it to royal power.

2.3