Brendan McElroy

I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a faculty affiliate of the Munk School’s Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. My research explores the complementary processes of state formation and elite transformation in early modern Europe, with particular emphasis on the genesis of representative institutions, their evolution, and their long-term consequences for state building and economic development.

I am currently preparing a book manuscript under the provisional title Peasants and Parliaments. The book project examines the politics of agrarian reform—here meaning state intervention in the relationship between manorial lords and their subject farmers—in Central and Eastern Europe during the late eighteenth century, seeking to explain why some states were so much more successful than others in enlisting the support of established elites and corporate groups for agricultural “modernization” and other development goals. My findings, based on archival research carried out in four countries, challenge prevailing theories of European state formation and the relationship of representative institutions to development.