Representation, Distrust, and Exclusion: From Demands for Inclusion to Demands for Exclusion in the Fifteenth Century

Kerice Doten-Snitker, Santa Fe Institute

Why do states discriminate? Recent work emphasizes that exclusion is a direct outcome of competition and negotiation over authority. I offer an additional explanation: discrimination is brought on indirectly, where questions of loyalty and trust, brought up through civic conflict and contested authority, undermine the tenuous position of groups already marked as different. I study this mechanism at a key moment in political development, as fifteenth-century European polities experimented with representative institutions and constituents revolted against perceived untrustworthiness and misrepresentation. Using a sample of German cities where revolts did and did not occur, I give statistical and narrative evidence of how class-based conflict to “right-size” government spilled over into the persecution of Jews. Urban revolt shaped democratic development at the same time as spurring ethnoracial exclusion.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 158. Renaissance and Early Modern Europe