Built on Shifting Sands: States and Parliaments in Cross-Regional Perspective

• In Event: The Road to Representative Institutions

Abstract

Why did parliaments emerge when and where they did? A spate of recent political science scholarship addresses this question by highlighting various military, economic, geographic, and religious forces operant in pre-industrial Europe. Most theories of parliamentary origins are, broadly speaking, “top-down" insofar as monarchs and their councils are the focal point of institution-building. Yet recent social science scholarship also emphasizes the “bottom-up" impact of local participatory institutions on country-level political development in Europe and elsewhere. Germanic tribal assemblies scaled up to realm-wide consultative bodies in Western Europe owing to the absence of robust tax-collection apparatuses or standing military forces in monarchs’ repertoires. Yet each of these models rests on the premise that local and realm-level actors are engaged in regular interactions — e.g. “bargaining” – such that institutional links between the ruling and ruled are efficacious. Even when present, consultative practices at the apex and local levels did not blossom into robust, inclusive, bodies without a persistent realm. I argue that medieval and early modern political realms were rarely hospitable to such links — Inner Asian modes of warfare yielded transient states with ever-shifting political boundaries. Persistent, territorially stable, realms were more likely to emerge further from the shifting sands of Inner Asia. I test this proposition using a novel dataset of over 3000 sovereign or semi-sovereign political entities present in Eurasia between 1000 and 1800 CE.

Author

• Daniel Smith, Ohio State University