Contracting Among Elites

This dissertation consists of inquiries into the structure of quite different societies, in order to explain how the law came to rule in each. Although the cases span from contemporary Singapore to medieval Europe, I ask the same question: how do ruling elites structure their relations such that they are led to submit to law?

 

In the first chapter, I examine the modern state of Singapore—a single‐party autocracy that, despite its concentration of power, manages to sustain flourishing markets and low levels of corruption. By introducing the concept of the “shareholders state,” I argue that Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) unite elite interests with the nation’s long‐run economic growth. In effect, a small coalition of political elites becomes residual claimants over state assets, thereby internalizing the costs and benefits of their decisions and curbing the incentives for rent‐seeking behavior. We can think of the SWFs as securitizing and privatizing the Singaporean plunder commons: each member of the ruling party holds shares of ownership in every major Singaporean asset. Thus, rent-seeking is heavily penalized, and Singapore’s government becomes composed, at its highest levels, of “self-watching watchers.”

 

The second chapter shifts the focus to medieval Europe, where a radical change in ecclesiastical marriage policy—what I term the extreme marriage and family program (EMFP)—reconfigured the kinship networks of the aristocracy. By raising the bounds of prohibited kin marriages from third cousins to sixth, the church not only fostered unprecedented levels of intermarriage among noble families but also set in motion a process of alliance reformation that would have profound on European political order. This chapter employs a novel genealogical dataset spanning eight centuries to quantify how the EMFP increased interfamily connectedness and locked in patterns of alliance that reshaped elite politics.

 

The third chapter explores the implications of the second. As noble families intermarried, the direct or bilateral negotiation of disputes grew increasingly costly and unpredictable. The nobility thus demanded a new form of law: third-party legal institutions that could resolve conflicts impartially. This chapter theorizes and documents how the church, despite its limited capacity for coercion, capitalized on this demand to expand its jurisdiction, ultimately laying the groundwork for the rule of law in Western Europe.

 

In all cases, the rule of law develops because elites discover novel, incentive-compatible mechanisms for limiting the predation of other elites.