Taxation and Voting Rights in Medieval England and France

Yoram Barzel and Edgar Kiser
Additional contact information
Edgar Kiser: Department of Sociology, Box 353340, Seattle, WA 98195-3340, USA kiser@u.washington.edu

Rationality and Society, 2002, vol. 14, issue 4, 473-507

Abstract: We explore the relationship between voting rights and taxation in medieval England and France. We hypothesize that voting was a wealth-enhancing institution formed by the ruler in order to facilitate profitable joint projects with subjects. We predict when voting rights and tax payments will be linked to each other, as well as to the projects inducing them, and when they will become separated. We classify taxes into three types: customary, consensual and arbitrary. Customary taxes that did not require voting were dominant in both countries in the early medieval period. These payments, fixed for specific purposes, were not well suited for funding new, large-scale projects. Consensual taxation, in which voting rights and tax payments were tightly linked, was used to finance new, large-scale collective projects in both England and France. Strong rule-of-law institutions are necessary to produce such taxes. In England, where security of rule remained high, the relationship between tax payments and voting rights was maintained. In France, an increase in the insecurity of rule, and the accompanying weakening of voting institutions, produced a shift to arbitrary taxation and a disjunction between tax payments and voting rights. These observations, as well as many of the details we consider, are substantially in conformity with the predictions of our model.

Keywords: medieval history; taxation; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463102014004003 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:14:y:2002:i:4:p:473-507

DOI: 10.1177/1043463102014004003

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().