Hospitalitas

Andrew Young ()

No 15-41, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: Good government requires a constitution that demarcates what political agents can and cannot do, and such a constitution must be self-enforcing. The medieval West was characterized by the estates system, where the political power of monarchs was roughly balanced by that of a landed and militarized nobility. This rough balance of power contributed to a Western tradition of limited government and constitutional bargaining. I argue that this balance has important roots in the fifth and sixth century barbarian settlements that occurred within the frontiers of the declining Western Roman Empire. These settlements provided barbarians with allotments consisting of lands or claims to taxes due from those lands. These allotments aligned the incentives of barbarian warriors and Roman landowners; they also realigned (or newly aligned) the incentives of barbarian warriors and leadership elite as their roving confederacies became stationary kingdoms. Barbarian military forces became decentralized and the warriors became political powerful shareholders of the realm.

Keywords: constitutional political economy; polycentric sovereignty; shareholder states; collective action problems; governance institutions; state emergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H10 N40 N43 P16 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent ... =econ_working-papers (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:wvu:wpaper:15-41

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Feng Yao ().