Short description:

This volume investigates the history of the parliamentary assemblies of Sweden, Poland and Hungary in the final period of the ancien régime, offering an analysis of these three representative assemblies in a systematic comparative framework for the first time.

Long description:

This volume investigates the history of the parliamentary assemblies of Sweden, Poland and Hungary in the final period of the ancien régime, offering an analysis of these three representative assemblies in a systematic comparative framework for the first time.

The book studies the Polish sejm, the Swedish riksdag and the Hungarian diaeta, focusing on the eighteenth century with retrospective consideration of developments in the previous century and a forward-looking gaze at the events of the following era. While Volume I of this series mapped the institutional framework and focused on the MPs? motivation, this book concentrates on the forms and practices that characterized these three representative institutions, with special attention paid to the questions of free mandate and majority voting. The freedom of mandates and the emergence of majority voting are explored in comparative studies (England and Poland) or parallel chapters (Sweden and Hungary), and the most important prerogative of these representative assemblies, a control on extraordinary taxes, is explored in parallel for Sweden and Hungary.

Intended for specialist readers, postgraduate students and scholars, this research will be of particular interest to those studying early modern European history and political history.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: ?The sweet fruits of liberty?  1. The variety of political systems in eighteenth-century Europe: conditions, institutions, interests  Part I: Finances and representation  2. The political economy of taxation: bargaining at the meetings of the Swedish riksdag, 1789?1812  3. Contributions, subsidies, and the estates of Hungary, 1790?1812  4. The representation of the Byzantine rite clergy at the Hungarian diet  5. Princeps inter pares: Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł?s electoral machine and the Polish-Lithuanian parliament in the late eighteenth century  Part II: Mandates and voting  6. From delegation to representation: Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary reform and the British example  7. The struggle for the majority rule in the Polish-Lithuanian sejm of the eighteenth century  8. Making parliamentary rule work: the introduction of the free mandate and majority voting in the Swedish riksdag (1719?1723)  9. Forms of modern parliamentarism in eighteenth-century Hungary  10. ?Instructiones ablegatum?: parliamentary decisions, members of parliament, and their constituencies in Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century