Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the main outcome of a research project on Cultures of Voting in Pre-Modern Europe, funded by the British Academy in 2014. It presents some debates from a historical perspective and a long-term view of European history from Antiquity to the late eighteenth century. The book provides the pervasiveness of voting emerges. It shows that collective rule and the cultural prominence of voting has long been a feature of aristocratic and monarchic constitutions founded on the legal exclusion of the vast majority of people from government. The book shows how a republic like Genoa found ways of institutionalizing partisan affiliation in electoral procedures by prescribing parity of representation of certain socio-political groups, thus making the reviled notion of party a quasi-normal aspect of government.