" The story of political development from this point in European history is the story of the interaction between these centralizing states and the social groups resisting them. Absolutist governments arose where the resisting groups were either weak and poorly organized, or else were co-opted by the state to help in extracting resources from other social groups that weren’t co-opted. Weak absolutist governments arose where the resisting groups were so strongly organized that the central government couldn’t dominate them. And accountable government arose when the state and the resisting groups were better balanced. The resisting groups were able to impose on the state the principle of “no taxation without representation”: they would supply it with substantial resources, but only if they had a say in how those resources were used. "

― Francis Fukuyama , The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution