Cabal, Intrigue, and Corruption: Trust in Electoral Politics

The MIT Press is proud to present From the Archive Friday (FTAF). Each Friday, we select an article from the depths of our online Journals archive and make it freely available for one week. Check back here each Friday for a new current events-related gem from our journals.
This week’s post was chosen in response to the current political climate in the United States as it examines citizen mistrust of politicians. This piece will be free to read on the MIT Press Journals site through September 14, 2018.
Trust in Renaissance Electoral Politics
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 34| Issue 4
Spring 2004
Author: Mark Jurdjevic
Abstract:
Medieval Italian political culture was founded on a general mistrust of the candidates for public office. Officials attempted to counteract what they perceived as a natural tendency toward corruption by instituting complex voting strategies designed to make chance the deciding factor in elections. This point has important ramifications for recent theories concerning the origins of social capital and civic society.
Excerpt:
“The centrality of public office as the most significant route to honor and status, and the potential for discord carried with it, increased during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as recognized by contemporaries and quantified by historians. In one of many unfavorable comparisons between the Venetian political habits of his day and those of ancient Rome, Machiavelli praises the Roman conception of honor. Whereas the Romans would dutifully accept low political offices without loss of status, Venetian politicians tied honor inextricably to particular offices. This persistent connection created the problem of patricians refusing to serve in any capacity lower than that to which they felt entitled. Finlay, examining many of the same themes as Machiavelli, concluded that “more than anything else, office seeking dominated and shaped Venetian political life.” His remark applies equally well to Florence. The pursuit of office and honor in Florence and Venice, and the social and political problems associated it, constitutes a recurring theme in the historiography of the late medieval and Renaissance Italian peninsula.
Such intense competition for a relatively limited arena of political action certainly threatened daily acts of violence and vengeance and the perpetual obstruction and corrosion of communal justice. It certainly resulted in chronic strains on the body politic; it was frequently a catalyst for some of the most tumultuous conflicts in Venetian and Florentine history; and it generated the networks of factions, clients, and alliances that translated into the political culture of mistrust and suspicion that Brucker emphasized as problematic for Putnam’s analysis. In one sense at least, all of those public institutions that Putnam celebrated as examples of the horizontal ties that produce social capital — consorterie, vicinanze, and confraternities — should not be seen as unproblematic reflections of the civic virtue celebrated by humanist republican rhetoric. Such groups were simply larger and more effective vehicles for political advancement than individual action” (p. 607).
“Trust in Renaissance Electoral Politics” is free to read on the MIT Press website through September 14, 2018.
