The Early Modern Origins of Political Contestation

Abstract

The study of the selection of political representatives often assumes contested elections; and yet, historically, contestation has not always been coincident with either parliaments or representation. In this paper, I consider the origin of contests in electoral institutions in early modern England, providing the first systematic evidence of the growth of contests from the 16th to 19th centuries. I argue that the early modern rise in contestation reflected the emergence of a new social cleavage of economic autonomy from the Crown that increased the value of parliament and precluded the resolution of societal disputes with pre-electoral bargains. To evaluate this claim, I collect new data on the universe of candidate selections, including their location and the characteristics of both returned MPs and their so-called challengers. I find that contests emerged in counties where capitalist agriculture was more prevalent, in boroughs oriented toward overseas trade, and involved challengers with divergent orientations to Crown patronage, not elite candidates on either side of a land-capital divide. These results indicate that early modern political cleavages did not simply reflect the opposition of economic factors of production, as is often assumed, but rather that conflict over personalistic politics and institutional control of rents was critical in producing democratic institutions that today we take for granted.