CULTURES OF VOTING IN PRE-MODERN EUROPE

STATE OF THE ART AND FURTHER PROSPECTS

Workshop
Friday, 23 March, 10-13
Kings College London, Old Committee room
OVERVIEW
Our project seeks to investigate those political practices and values that could be termed
cultures of voting. The term voting is used broadly to designate both elections and
methods of reaching collective political decisions. The expression cultures of voting also
aims to highlight that our interest is not only in a traditional Verfassungsgeschichte, but in the
perspective of social and cultural history, even the history of political thought.
A project on cultures of voting would excavate the influence of classical models in
medieval and early modern polities, reconstruct the extent to which they demonstrated a
common political heritage, and evaluate how far these late medieval and early modern
cultures anticipated and contributed to the institutional developments of voting in the
Enlightenment and the Modern Age.
This workshop is our first attempt to chart the field of research and determine the most
meaningful chronological and geographical scope for the project. Our own point of departure
are the Mediterranean urban milieus in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (ca. 13001600). We want to test the extent to which the chronological and geographical remit can be
expanded, on the basis of specific comparative research questions.
THE QUESTIONS
1.) Forms and procedures: What forms did the voting procedure take in different
contexts? Were there differences in the procedure depending on the issue it was meant
to resolve? How frequently was voting resorted to? How quickly were decisions
reached through it? Who were the members of the community eligible to vote and to
be elected? What differences were there between elections and voting in the narrow
sense? What was the relationship between the element of chance and choice in the
elections? When and by whom were the voting rules codified/changed? What were the
mechanisms against electoral manipulation and fraud? What role did secrecy play?
2.) Dietrologia (behindology) or contexts of voting: What was the relationship
between the voting procedures and the actual decision-making? In many cases voting
was a mere formality, confirmation of conclusions reached in less public contexts or
the culmination of decision-making processes that had begun long before. Why it was
felt that a formal (or informal) mechanism of voting was necessary in such cases?
How was the desired outcome of the vote ensured in such circumstances? What were
the informal mechanisms and techniques adopted (faction, buying of votes,
manipulation of rules, etc.) and what factors drove their development?
3.) Material culture: What gestures, clothing, artefacts, spaces, etc. were used to vote?
What was their symbolic value? What were the rituals of the voting procedure itself
(silence, order of sitting, speaking or voting, oaths)? How did they relate to the

purposes to which voting was put? How and where were objects related to voting
produced and kept?
4.) Representations: In what ways were governments trying to educate the members of
the enfranchised group to be responsible voters? What was the role of voting and
election procedures in the self-representation of the elite? On the other hand, how if
at all were they represented to the disenfranchised members of the community?
Were they part of the corpus of public rituals or governmental arcana to be hidden
from the excluded? Finally, how was the voting procedure recorded in the official
documents? Were the records trying to hide divisions by not noting the attitudes and
votes of individuals or were they reproducing the differences of opinion?
5.) Political theory: How far did a literature develop on this subject within the history of
political thought? What role did empirical observation and the influence of classical
models play in it? Did political writers recognise a correspondence between
constitutional forms and electoral practices? How did ideas of liberty, equality, justice,
peace inform the discourse and practice of voting?
Serena Ferente (Kings College London)
Lovro Kunevi (Institute of Historical Sciences, Dubrovnik)
Miles Pattenden (St. Hughs College, U. of Oxford)