Deborah Boucoyannis teaches Comparative Politics at George Washington University. This book is based on a dissertation that received the American Political Science Association's Ernst Haas Best Dissertation Award in European Politics and the Seymour Martin Lipset Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Comparative Research. She has published in Perspectives on Politics, Politics and Society, and other journals.

Preface and acknowledgments; Part I. The origins of Representative Institutions: Power, Land, and Courts: 1. Introduction; 2. A theory of institutional emergence: regularity, functional fusion, and the origins of parliament; 3. Explaining institutional layering and functional fusion: the role of power; Part II. Origins of Representative Rractice: Power, Obligation, and Taxation: 4. Taxation and representative practice: bargaining vs compellence; 5. Variations in representative practice: 'absolutist' France and Castile; 6. No taxation of elites, no representative institutions; Part III. Trade, Towns, and the Political Economy of Representation: 7. Courts, institutions, and cities: Low Countries and Italy; 8. Courts, institutions, and territory: Catalonia; 9. The endogeneity of trade: the English wool trade and the Castilian mesta; Part IV. Land, Conditionality, and Property Rights: 10. Power, land, and second-best constitutionalism: Central and Northern Europe; 11. Conditional land law, property rights, and 'Sultanism': premodern English and Ottoman land regimes; 12. Land, tenure, and assemblies: Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Part V. Why Representation in the West: Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Supra-Local Organization: 13. Petitions, collective responsibility, and representative practice: England, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.