Political Elites, Urban Institutions and Long-Run Persistence : The King-Owned Towns

We explore the long run socio-economic impact of a medieval urban governance setting , the king-owned towns (KOTs). For a town the KOT status implies special fiscal, commercial and administrative prerogatives between the community and the Crown, where such as status could be renovated, modified or suspended. Researchers have tested the persistence effect of urban governance by comparing free city-states (communes) and feudal towns in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. This paper explores the KOTs as a third and novel category. The KOTs case is analysed using the southern Italy case, where the Kingdom of Naples delegated jurisdictional and fiscal powers to towns’ ruling classes – nobles and commoners - thereby creating a self-governance setting in which community representatives took collective decisions, including the systematic implementation of rights negotiations with the Crown, that shaped the evolution of their towns’ municipal statutes. This peculiar collective action can strengthen the persistence effect. Empirically, we find that a town’s past king-owned experience is correlated with five centuries later outcomes, in terms of both economic performance and civil capital. Our results suggest that KOT status is more similar to commune experience than to fief experience, being a device to develop collective decision skills; at the same time, the unstable nature of the KOT status inhibited the strengthening of these capacities in the local communities