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Rulers of modern states consolidated control over territories that were previously complicated mosaics of private political jurisdictions. Systematic information about this process is sparse. This article analyzes village-level transition paths between jurisdictions—royal, seigneurial, and ecclesiastical—in northern Castile in the period 1352–1787. It quantifies how much power different types of lords preserved or lost to the Crown in the long run and also offers conjectural estimates showing that exposure to opportunities for trade led to more resilient and larger royal domains—at the expense of secular lords, but not of the Catholic Church.

Prominent scholars argue that Europe’s political fragmentation improved the security of property rights, thereby promoting growth. We explore a complementary mechanism: urban fragmentation—the proliferation of self-governing cities—helped emancipate labor, and freer labor promoted both faster and more correlated town growth. To test these hypotheses, we first show that polities with more self-governing cities offered more protection to runaway serfs against lordly recapture. We then show that more fragmented areas exhibited both faster and more correlated urban growth. While both the property rights and labor freedom mechanisms predict faster growth, only the latter predicts more highly correlated growth.

In this paper, I use a slightly modified version of the Becker–Stigler model of corrupt behavior to explain bureaucratic political involvement. Since bureaucrats prefer higher rewards and not to support losing candidates, we expect them to become politically involved near elections – when rewards are expected to be higher, and information more abundant. Taking advantage of a natural experiment, I employ differences-in-means and differences-in-differences techniques to estimate the effect of electoral proximity on the political involvement of justices of the peace in the city of Buenos Aires in 1904. I find a large, positive, and highly local effect of electoral proximity on their political involvement, with no appreciable impact in the months before or after elections. (author's abstract)