The Birth of Representative Institutions: The Case of the Crown of Aragon

Abstract

A new research agenda within political science and economics has been devoted to elucidating the development of medieval representative institutions. However, if we wish to get a clearer grasp of the birth of representative institutions, much more detailed data are needed. This paper introduces and interrogates a new data set on assemblies in one of the first instances where representative institutions arose: the Crown of Aragon. An analysis of these new data, which cover the period 1100–1327, supports several important conclusions. First, the development of representative institutions took place in a couple of brief “bursts” of activity. Second, factors pertaining to the establishment of public order (land peace and the regulation of succession) feature as more important than “geopolitical” factors (war and taxation) in the early part of the period, but the latter factors become more important after assemblies turn representative; indeed, they turn out to be crucial for understanding how assemblies eventually came to constrain rulers. A comparison with the only other early case of representative institutions on which there are good data, thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century England, supports a third finding: There is a striking, temporal parallelism in the development of representative institutions across the two realms.

Political Regime Type and Warfare: Evidence from 600 Years of European History

“…Recent research has shown that the establishment of representative assemblies may indeed have enabled monarchs to better shoulder the costs of war. Scholars have highlighted increased warfare among parliamentary "first movers," such as twelfth-century Aragon (Møller, 2016) and thirteenth-century England (Boucoyannis, 2015). Similarly, Stasavage (2016, p. 155) finds a significant statistical relationship between warfare and parliamentary activity across pre-modern Europe.…”

A framework for congruence analysis in comparative historical analysis of political change

“…Hence, by working backwards from large-scale developments we often miss surprising initial aspects of a given development, which are not on the radar of the social scientist with a preconceived explanation to test. The example that I use as a foil throughout the paperthe study of the origins of medieval representative institutionsis a good example of this (Møller 2016; but see Boucoyannis 2015). However, the fine-grained data used in the congruence analysis and the ability to interpret it in a qualitative way makes it much easier to identify surprising developments, which occurred relatively fast, in a forward-looking way.…”

“…Furthermore, this information also stipulates the groups partaking in assemblies, the reasons for convoking them, and the decisions arrived at. In this paper, I use the case of the Crown of Aragon to illustrate the congruence method but elsewhere I have analyzed the English development in a similar way (Møller 2016).…”

“…The second proposition is that monarchs called representative institutions to secure public order (Procter 1980;Kagay 1981;Møller 2016). In a nutshell, in anarchic realms plagued by "private wars" between nobles (and sometimes implicating clergy or townsmen), representative institutions were used to make two kinds of commitments that would preempt such violence.…”

“…This means that it does not rest on an explicit use of the logic of comparative control (Sartori 1991). To be sure, comparisons can be made between the cases that are included, say between the Crown of Aragon and England or between the constituent units of the Crown of Aragon (see Møller 2016). But the method makes the researcher look at the treatment without looking at control cases.…”