Inclusion of the Rich: A Neglected Dimension of Representative Emergence

• In Event: Elites, Social Class, and State Building

Abstract

What lessons does history offer about the relationship between inclusive democratic institutions and the health of democracy? This question has informed in varied ways most studies of the emergence of democracy and representation. Yet most of them focus on the desired outcome: the inclusion of ever greater number of social groups into the democratic fabric, especially of the non-privileged orders. Attention is usually focused on some group that is considered central democratic inclusivity: this is typically either the middle or the working class. Recent works on the emergence of representation or political order more generally, for instance, have highlighted the role of trade, artisans, and other commercial activity to explain how representation first emerged (Abramson and Boix 2019; Boix 2015; Stasavage 2011). This follows on a long and venerable tradition dating back to Adam Smith, French nineteenth century liberal historiography, Marx and most modern social scientific classics on the topic, for instance Barrington Moore (1967).

Inclusion of non-privileged social orders is of course definitive of both representation and democracy, so understanding this process is fundamental. But conflating this process with an account of representative emergence especially is misleading. By allowing a functionalist logic to prevail, such accounts have retrojected onto an account of origins a logic that only became operative once institutions were already formed. A closer look at key European cases shows that the most important predictor of whether an inclusive representative institution emerged was the compelled inclusion (and therefore also taxation) of the nobility as the most economically and politically powerful actor. A comparison of England, France, Castile, Catalonia, Poland, and Hungary identifies the superior capacity of the ruler to compel the nobility as a critical factor. The less the crown could compel the nobility to service and taxation, as in France and Castile, the less inclusive its representative institutions turned out to be: the third estate was represented by towns only and the institution atrophied.

This does not mean that demands for inclusion were fewer in those cases; to the contrary, they were typically more radical. Yet a polity-wide representative institution emerged where the rich and powerful were taxed and compelled to serve the ruler. Radical demands were, by contrast, symptoms of societies where such capacity was absent. The paper presents key evidence in support of these claims, by comparing the tax regimes and patterns of inclusion of social groups in representative institutions in those cases, from the period origins (from the twelfth to the fifteenth century).

This insight has implications for contemporary concerns about democracy and especially the populism that has emerged in response to claims for greater inclusion. A conservative strain of thought following Samuel Huntington (1968) has assumed that political order under conditions of low or unstable institutionalization required suppressing political participation, even if only temporarily. If low institutionalization however flows from weak capacity to compel the most powerful actors in a society rather than unruly popular sentiments, then the necessary response to such conditions is not the restriction of participation, but greater control over the rich. From this perspective, taxing the rich is not simply an imperative of fairness, which Scheve and Stasavage (2016) have powerfully shown to have shaped tax policy in both the US and Europe in the modern period; it was a precondition of representative emergence and, I argue, of the health of representative institutions.

Abramson, Scott F., and Carles Boix. 2019. "Endogenous Parliaments: The Domestic and International Roots of Long-Term Economic Growth and Executive Constraints in Europe." International Organization 73 (4):793-837.
Boix, Carles. 2015. Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences for Human Welfare. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Moore, Barrington. 1967. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press.
Scheve, Kenneth F., and David Stasavage. 2016. Taxing the Rich : A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stasavage, David. 2011. States of Credit: Size, Power, and the Development of European Polities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Author

• Deborah A. Boucoyannis, George Washington University