ABSTRACT
The point of departure for Part V of this book is that a logical next step for the literature on the ‘institutions of constraints’, which scholars have singled out as a key factor in explaining global disparities in wealth and democracy levels into the present, is to analyse the origins of medieval representative institutions. This can be seen as a way of pushing the causal chain of the work on the institutionalist origins of comparative development one step further back. A new research agenda centred on representative institutions has indeed gotten off the ground in recent years, and it seems a safe bet that these endeavours will be intensified in the future (Stasavage 2016).
