“Representation,” the historian Wim Blockmans wrote, “appears when­ever a government finds itself forced by the concentration of power in the hands of its subjects to share power with them through institutionalized consultation.”[100]

In this perspective, the main agent of progress was typic­ally the “third estate.” The assumption stems from liberal and Marxist historiography, drawing from Adam Smith to Augustin Thierry, Karl Marx, and others, who emphasized either the middle or the working classes.^[101] Increasing prosperity, in such accounts, endowed these groups with greater material powers, thereby strengthening their bargaining position and capacity for collective action and leading them to demand greater political powers.^[102] Only with the participation of the third estate will some scholars assert that we have a “fully developed parliament.”⁴ Constitutionalism failed where “overstrong” rulers suppressed rights and trade and engaged in confiscatory taxation.⁵ While such changes did occur, the central question is whether they adequately explain represen­tative institutions.

A central theme of this book is that the emergence and consolidation of regular institutions that structured governance inclusively cannot be deduced from material change alone. This is especially so because the process that generated a regular institution (the subject of Part I) must be distinguished from that which generated representative practices per se (the subject of Part II). The former depends on the most powerful social actors, as argued in this book, whereas the latter involve broader social groups. The two processes are routinely conflated. Distinguishing between them allows us to avoid the functionalism that besets many explanations. But it also allows us to highlight how much harder the process of representative emergence is. By not assuming that a single dynamic explains all aspects of institutional development, this analysis reveals multiple dynamics that often do not co-evolve and can be in tension with each other.^[103] Nonetheless, they all depend on the same necessary condition, as is shown in the next chapter: the crown’s capacity to overpower its most powerful competitors in crucial ways and over time.

To analyze this complex process, this chapter first defines the key necessary condition of the argument, state power based on land, and the dependent variable, polity-wide representative institutions. It then explains how existing theoretical perspectives do not adequately account for the three main dynamics of the emergence of representative institu­tions outlined in the Introduction: how they became regular, how they solved the collective action problem of attending groups, and how they succeeded in including all social groups, not just the third estate or merchants. The chapter then explains the first of these dynamics, regu­larization, through a theory of functional layering and institutional fusion, before addressing the other two dynamics in Chapter 3.

2.1