Reading Jonathan Healey's The Blazing World and Curtis Yarvin's recent article on the difficulty of reforming the US Government through the exercise of the executive power has got me thinking about the nature of the parliamentary power. The parliamentary power is commonly said to be "the purse strings," e.g. the power to, if a tax-funded organization such as a police department flagrantly violates the law or otherwise acts in ways intolerable to the parliament or those who it represents, cancel their budget, but while this has some descriptive merit, it fails to explain why, how, and under what circumstances such a power emerges. "Because the written constitution says so" is a triply bad explanation, first because it fails to explain why written constitutions tend to identify and separate some particular powers with some consistency across contexts, second because it fails to account for the existence of states with well-articulated constitutions that, while they may be described in writing, were not established through a formal written constitution, and third because it does not explain why, how, and under what circumstances people can be persuaded or compelled to obey a written constitution.
I prefer functional explanations; if there is a sufficiently strong use case for some expensive form of organization, then existing institutions that fill that role have some bargaining power when they can credibly threaten to withdraw their services. This is sufficient to establish distinct powers.
The military power is backed by the fact that a visible undefended surplus is likely to be captured by raiders, or aggressive stationary bandits (i.e. neighboring militaries). For this reason, anyone trying to organize their economic life out in the open, accessible to their neighbors (a necessity for trade and mating), will have some difficult doing without some form of military capacity. This is why armies can and do collect taxes from the territories they monopolize. The need for a military power is not uniform and invariant; people living in forested or mountainous areas can sometimes get by with decentralized ad hoc resistance to invaders. Island nations with strong navies that are not highly specialized in overseas trade, such as the early United Kingdom, have an advantage in restraining the military power, because a navy affords a relatively strong resistance to raids or conquest by outsiders, while possessing a relative weak capacity to tax the inhabitants of the island beyond their consent.
The judiciary power is backed by the need for intelligible and resolvable commitments. You might trust someone's word based on reputation. This works so long as enough people are cooperating to maintain accurate reputations, but without a legible dispute resolution process, this makes anyone with a strong reputation vulnerable to libel; anyone can threaten to claim they were cheated by them or otherwise observed them breaking a commitment. Small groups under strong performance pressure might resolve such disputes informally, but the larger a group, the easier it is for a circle of bad actors to engage in mutual validation and corrupt the accounting for the benefit of members of the circle. If there is a trusted central, public system for resolving contested claims, then it's easier to decide such questions; you can simply check whether the person making a disputed claim has sued, and if so, how the court decided. Libel laws offer an alternative resolution process that places the burden of prosecution on the maligned rather than on the cheated.
Who needs a parliament? The English parliament traditionally held the purse strings of government because the king was forced to create it to so that his vassals could engage in collective bargaining, so that they didn't have to actually rebel every time they wanted to credibly threaten to rebel. Instead, a combination of lords, towns, and representatives of groups of freeholders, with various independent military capacity to challenge the king, simply voted on the king's requests to levy new taxes. The English Civil War of the 16th Century took place after enough local armies had effectively been nationalized, that when the king found himself committed to maintaining a level of patronage intolerable to parliament (and also to related policies to centralize power that would threaten parliament's long-run capacity to rebel), parliament responded by creating the New Model Army. The New Model Army, not Parliament or its members as such, did the functional work of fighting the king, and recruiting (i.e. in the long run taxing) the resources needed to do so. So what was the function of parliament?
We can define a parliament functionally - and I'm aware this is somewhat different than the empirical usage of the term, but I think it's a natural functional definition - as an univocal public representative of those who are proximally taxed within a territory, whose function is to recognize which army is taxing them. This function is useful to both armies and the people they tax, because it allows them to recognize when someone has won a civil war or a war of conquest. For instance, even in the imperial period of Rome, after the formal Republican institutions of Rome had ceased to exercise meaningful year-to-year oversight over the army or courts or or administer the government, the Senate of Rome was still important, because whoever could compel the Senate to acknowledge him as Emperor was the Emperor. This well-established coordination point deterred people from starting civil wars if they didn't think they could take and hold the city of Rome, and created information that allowed people to switch to the winning side more quickly than they might otherwise have done if they had to rely on rumor or first-hand experience, which helped civil wars end more quickly.
Likewise, when the English Parliament authorized the New Model Army, it created common knowledge that the representatives of those formerly taxed by the king were sufficiently out of the old military institution's control to feel safe withdrawing recognition from him, and made one specific alternative military institution canonical.
Paradoxically, while vestigial ceremonial kings have lost functional control of the military power, they can be said to have acquired a measure of the parliamentary power. The ritual surrounding the crowning of the King or Queen of England makes him or her more canonical than any prime minister (whose title originally meant the king's top administrator), so that the recognition of the prime minister by the King or Queen is part of how the government recognizes itself and is recognized by the public, and if a potential alternative government were to emerge, the King or Queen could still tip the balance considerably by recognizing the alternative instead. This actually happened in Japan under the Shogunate. The Shogun was whichever military leader led a faction in physical possession of - or otherwise monopolizing the capacity to threaten - the Emperor. This is why Emperor Hirohito was able to end World War II, when the military government was split on the issue of surrender; carrying out the war without the emperor's recognition would have been much less feasible.
- A military monopolizes a territory by winning fights against raiders and rival territorial monopolizers. Its power comes from competition.
- A judiciary resolves disputes about whether a commitment has been kept. Its power comes from the need to defend reputational networks against bad actors.
- A parliament tells everyone which military taxes it. Its power comes from the need of the military power to make credible, i.e. widely recognized, threats in order to collect taxes and discourage rivals.
Previously on the English Civil War: Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency