Introduction: parliamentarism in the age of absolutism / Comparing Representative Institutions: the historiography and the challenges / Chapter 1: The peasant estate of Sweden: its rise and early modern evolution / Chapter 2: The ‘common good’ or the particularism of the nobility? The political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the first half of the eighteenth century / Chapter 3: Instruments of Conviction in the Political Culture of eighteenth-century Hungary / Chapter 4: The Estates in the middle: populist absolutism and constitutionalism in early modern Swedish politics / Chapter 5: From confession to constitution: the motivation of the Hungarian political elite in the middle of the eighteenth century / Chapter 6: Maria Theresa’s Monarchy: between inheritable merits and remunerable loyalty / Chapter 7: Political ambition: The concept in Montesquieu and in his Hungarian reception, 1748–1848 / Chapter 8: Domicilium libertatis or a threat to liberty? Eighteenth-century discussions on the role and place of the Sejm within the system of government of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth / Chapter 9: The growth of political instability and the royal coup in Sweden, c. 1760-1780 / Chapter 10: Pragmatism triumphant: Hungary's political culture in the age of the French Revolution / Chapter 11: Role perception in the first modern Hungarian parliament, 1848–1849