Abstract
Explanations for the decline of partisanship in the early part of the twentieth century are at odds. The received wisdom holds that a set of electoral reforms led Congressmen to break their partisan ties, engaging in more familiar modes of personalistic behavior. This view has recently been challenged noting that the bulk of the reforms passed in the Populist and Progressive periods eliminated factional strife within parties and led to increased partisanship. This paper looks at a wide variety of reforms introduced in a 40 year period. While a set of early ballot reforms did result in increased levels of state delegation partisanship, subsequent reforms, combined with the passage of time, undermined partisan strength in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Notes
- 1.
This sweeping statement is not intended to shortchange the pioneering work by Cooper et al. (1977), among others, who noted the rise and fall of partisanship in the U.S. House of Representatives over time. Their approach produces a complex explanation that points to large-scale changes occurring in the general political environment as well as within the House. Given the discipline’s recent focus on electoral reforms, my focus reflects such concerns.
- 2.
This measure excludes third parties from the analysis. The focus here is with major party conflict.
- 3.
A probit was estimated for an individual’s party affiliation as a function of Poole and Rosenthal’s DIM1 and DIM2. The resulting coefficients were used to calculate a single, underlying partisan dimension. This is easily done with a simple rotation of the two-dimensional Poole and Rosenthal data by an angle given by the estimated coefficients. See the discussion in Posler and Rhodes (1997).
- 4.
The dates when states adopted the Australian ballot are widely available. Most recently those dates were published in Katz and Sala (1996, Table 1). With respect to the other variables coded in this study, the dates for implementing new reforms came from a variety of sources. These include U.S. Government documents like Senate (1897, 1917), Merriam and Overacker (1928), Harris (1929), Ludington (1911). These sources were supplemented and double checked using WestLaw Digest for each of the states. WestLaw produces a useful point of reference for a variety of election laws and is usually thorough in presenting the statutes and case law pertaining to elections.
- 5.
In analysis not reported here, estimates were run including only the 13 states that were members of the Confederacy. There, the Poll Tax variable was not significant for Party Voting and had a weaker, but significant effect on the Poole/Rosenthal party distance measure. Given that 10 of 13 Southern states imposed the Poll Tax, there is a high degree of intercorrelation between that variable and the dummy variable representing the South.
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Wilson, R.K. (2018). Partisanship and Electoral Reform: Change in Congressional Cohesion, 1877–1932. In: Hall, J., Witcher, M. (eds) Public Choice Analyses of American Economic History. Studies in Public Choice, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95819-4_6
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