ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the characteristics of political decision-making in the Republic of Ragusa in the second half of the fourteenth century and during the fifteenth. It describes voting and election procedures, stressing the various methods through which the government sought to ensure the solemnity and discipline of patrician voters. The chapter analyses the various mechanisms which prevented individuals concentrating power in their own hands and ensured that all the important political decisions were made by collective magistracies. It outlines the other key characteristic of decision-making, which was secrecy. The chapter addresses various practices which obscured the details of decision-making, thereby ensuring that the councillors enjoyed sufficient anonymity for independent action, but also mitigating conflicts that arose from dissenting political opinions. It concludes many of the mechanisms addressed in the text to the specific values of Ragusan political culture, such as public-spiritedness, patrician egalitarianism, and the ideal of unanimity.
