Use of econometric and political economy methods to analyse the behaviour of the Reichstage of the Holy Roman Empire

My Master's research aims to use econometric and political economy methods to analyse the behaviour of the Reichstage (Imperial Diets; the highest legislative body) of the Holy Roman Empire in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Once I have completed this, I would aim to undertake doctoral research into the broader function of the Empire as a political entity in the early modern period. In particular, I am very interested in seeing how far the Empire was like a state in its behaviour.

Political economists have increasingly worked to understand modern states using rigorous quantitative and formal tools, but these have very rarely been applied in historical contexts.

The Empire has generally been portrayed as very unusual by early modern standards, and I would like to take it back into the realm of comparison with other states - early modern and contemporary alike.

This will involve not only econometric analysis of the Reichstage over a much longer period, but also analysis of other institutions in the Empire - judicial, administrative, military, and financial, all at both the "top" level (central Imperial institutions) and "medium" levels (such as regional associations and individual large princes).

I would aim to focus on the period between the rules of Maximilian I, who reformed the Empire's institutions in the 1490s and 1500s, and Charles VI, whose death in 1740 led to a brief interregnum.

I would combine an econometric study of the Reichstage over a much longer period - including after the Reichstag was made into a standing body in 1663 - with case studies of responses to stresses (and perhaps some game-theoretic modelling) to create a more rounded image of the early modern Empire.

This would include some data-gathering on voting patterns in the Reichstage over the long run and the administrative staffing of the Empire, plus potentially financial data.

I hope to contribute to a broader understanding of the Empire itself, state capacity, and state development in the early modern period.

Understanding the Empire better may help political economists and political scientists working with other weak, federative, and confederative states across time.

It will also hopefully help early modern historians come into real dialogue with the modern quantitative social sciences and inject social-scientific rigour into the field.

My Master's degree would ideally develop my quantitative skills with the econometrics and economics for historians courses.

The more specific courses on institutional economics in long-run perspective and seventeenth century France would allow my doctoral research to make use of a much broader and deeper set of comparands than might otherwise be possible.

I would also aim to maximize the amount of training I got in quantitative and formal methods, so that I can not only introduce historians to existing methods but synthesize some of my own - especially ones tailored to the unique problems faced in historical contexts.

The MSc thesis research itself would also be a springboard into the much broader research question I aim to address in my doctoral research.

By beginning with a case study of the period 1556-1613 in the Reichstag, I would get a good grasp both on potential methodologies for doctoral research as well as the empirical situation in one of the most transformative and chaotic periods in the Empire's history, which ended in the destructive Thirty Years' War.

It might add to the literature on legislative effectiveness and institutional durability on its own, but it would certainly contribute to a much broader project addressing how certain institutional setups can produce suboptimal outcomes.

This has generally not been done outside of a modern context in political science, even though interest in this area is growing among both social scientists and historians.