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48 results

Page 1 of 3

  • New Perspectives on State Formation

  • Mark Dincecco
  • Journal:
    Perspectives on Politics / Volume 21 / Issue 4 / December 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 December 2023, pp. 1447-1452
    Print publication:
    December 2023
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  • Governments in developed nations today collect high tax revenues and spend vast amounts on security, regulation, infrastructure, and social programs. Yet developed nations were in no way born with effective state institutions. What explains the emergence of the modern state? And, why did capable states first form historically in Western Europe? Proper answers to these questions are key to our understanding of modern forms of governance, including parliamentary democracy.

  • Window of Opportunity: War and the Origins of Parliament

  • Gary W. Cox, Mark Dincecco, Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato
  • Journal:
    British Journal of Political Science / Volume 54 / Issue 2 / April 2024
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 May 2023, pp. 405-421
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  • Two important puzzles characterize the development of pre-modern Eurasian polities. First, most rulers convened councils of nobles, but only European monarchs expanded them to create parliaments. Second, war was common throughout Eurasia, but only in Europe did it correlate with the formation of parliaments. We advance a new argument about the emergence of parliaments that accounts for both stylized facts while integrating the literature highlighting the rulers' need to finance wars with that emphasizing the importance of the medieval communal revolution. Using novel data, we document a ‘no communes, no parliaments’ rule: monarchs established parliaments only after they had fostered the creation of self-governing towns (aka communes). We also show that war was a significant predictor of parliamentary births across medieval Europe – but only during a window of opportunity that opened after a polity had experienced the communal revolution.

From Warfare to Wealth
  • The Military Origins of Urban Prosperity in Europe
  • Mark Dincecco, Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato
  • Published online:
    28 December 2017
    Print publication:
    14 December 2017
  • The economic rise of Europe over the past millennium represents a major human breakthrough. To explain this phenomenon, this book highlights a counterintuitive yet central feature of Europe's historical landscape: warfare. Historical warfare inflicted numerous costs on rural populations. Security was a traditional function of the city. To mitigate the high costs of conflict in the countryside, rural populations migrated to urban centers. Over time, the city's historical role as a safe harbor translated into local economic development through several channels, including urban political freedoms and human capital accumulation. To make this argument, the book performs a wide-ranging analysis of a novel quantitative database that spans more than one thousand years, from the fall of the Carolingian Empire to today. The book's study of urban Europe's historical path from warfare to wealth provides a new way to think about the process of long-run economic and political development.

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