Warfare and the Rise and Fall of Representative Institutions

• In Event: Religion and Social Institutions in Historical State Building in Europe

Abstract

Warfare has been used to explain the advent of medieval parliaments or representative institutions in Europe. However, across broad swatches of Continental Europe, early modern monarchs stopped calling parliaments at the very moment the cost and intensity of warfare increased. In this paper, we enlist new data for both warfare and assemblies in the period 1000-1600 to carry out a first large-N statistical test of the notion that warfare has had disparate effects on representative institutions in medieval and early modern Europe. The results corroborate that warfare and convocations of parliaments first went hand in hand but that prolonged periods of warfare had a negative effect on parliamentary activity. The analysis also shows that in a long-term perspective the negative association between warfare and representative institutions trumped the positive association.

Authors

• Andrej Kokkonen, University of Gothenburg

• Jorgen Moller, University of Aarhus

• Anders Sundell, University of Gothenburg