Stacking the Senate, Changing the Nation: Republican Rotten Boroughs, Statehood Politics, and American Political Development

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 6, Issue 2, 1992, Pages 223-271

  Weingast, Barry R ^a   Charles, Stewart ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84959601731     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X00000985     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Walter Dean Burnham, “Party Systems and the Political Process,” in William N. Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 297.
2. Stephen Skowronek, Building the New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
3. Richard Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
4. Ann S. Orloff and Theda Skocpol, “Why Not Equal Protection?” American Sociological Review, 49 (1984): 726—750; Margaret Weir, Ann S. Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Christopher Howard et al., “Government Institutions, Women's Associations, and the Enactment of Mothers” Pensions in the United States, 1910-1935” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.).
5. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
6. Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951); Richard D. McKelvey, “Intransitivities in Multidimensional Voting Models and Some Implications for Agenda Control,” Journal of Economic Theory, 16 (1976): 472–482.
7. Barry R. Weingast and William J. Marshall, “The Industrial Organization of Congress,” Journal of Political Economy, 96 (1988): 132-163; McNollgast, “Structure and Process. Politics and Policy,” Virginia Law Review, 75 (1989): 431–482.
8. Kenneth Shepsle and Barry Weingast, “Structure-Induced Equilibrium and Legislative Choice,” Public Choice, 37 (1981): 503-519; cf. Keith Krehbiel, “Spatial Models of Legislative Choice,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, 13 (1988): 259–320.
9. Weingast and Marshall, “The Industrial Organization of Congress.”
10. Murray Horn, “Political Economy of Public Administration” (Ph.D. dissertation, 1990); McNollgast, “Structure and Process, Politics and Policy”; Moe, “Political Uncertainty.”
11. Roy F. Nichols, Blueprints for Leviathan (New York: Atheneum, 1963).
12. David Potter, The Impending Crisis (New York: Harper, 1976); Barry R. Weingast, “Political Economy of Slavery,” (unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, 1991).
13. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 88.
14. On strategies adopted in the House to overcome this Republican “executive cartel,” see Charles Stewart III, “Lessons from the Post-Civil War Era,” In Gary Cox and Sam Kernell, eds., The Politics of Divided Government (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991).
15. For a discussion of related issues during the period immediately following that covered in this paper, see Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, pp. 88–101.
16. We also focus on statehood politics, understanding full well that there are other questions about the American electoral universe that we don't explore. The most obvious are black voting rights and matters such as the Force Bill. (See Bensel, Sectionalism.) We so proceed both because others have tackled black voting rights (Richard Valelly, “Party, Coercion, and Inclusion: The Two Reconstructions and the South's Electoral Politics,” Politics and Society [forthcoming 1993]) and because the statehood debate was a persistent matter whose affects on one important institutions, the Senate, can be traced fairly precisely.
17. Charles Oscar Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1932), plates 77 and 78.
18. “[Nevada's] population is obviously unworthy of the privilege of sending two men to the Senate, and has in fact allowed itself to sink, for all practical purposes, into sort of a rotten borough, which can be controlled or purchased by leaders of the Silver Ring.” (James Bryce, American Commonwealth [New York, Macmillan, 1888], Vol. II, p. 219
19. Mormon historiography refers to this as the “Utah War.”
20. See Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, pp. 89–91.
21. The original Nevada Territory was roughly 60 percent its current size. It was extended to its current eastern borders in 1866, following the discovery of silver in the westernmost reaches of the Utah Territory, now the easternmost reaches of Nevada. At the same time the Nevada Territory was organized, the Colorado Territory was organized from land taken from the easternmost section of Utah and from Nebraska. On the creation of Nevada and its push to statehood, see Russel R. Elliott, History of Nevada (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973); Thomas Wren, A History of the State of Nevada (New York: Lewis, 1904); and Robert Laxalt, Nevada: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1977).
22. Marshall Sprague, Colorado: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1976).
23. Statements to the effect that the only reason Nevada was admitted was to provide one of these benefits to Republicans appear in Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956 [18851); Bryce, American Commonwealth; and Elliott, History of Nevada.
24. Nevada had a population of 6,857 in the 1860 census and 42,491 in the 1870 census. No reliable census was taken between the decennial years. Based on a linear interpolation between 1860 and 1870, Nevada's population would have been 21,111 in a polynomial interpolation of the census returns for 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1890 would have the population at 26,254 in 1864.
25. An additional motivation for the early admission of Nevada may also been at work: the potential threat of secession by California and Nevada during the Civil War may have led to the latter's early admission as a concession to both.
26. At this time seats in the House of Representatives were apportioned using a method called the “Vinton method.” Under this method, the total population of the country was divided by the size of the House as determined in the reapportionment bill. The resulting “ratio of representation” was essentially the number of inhabitants needed for each seat in the House of Representatives. The ratio of representation was then divided into the population of each state to determine how many representatives they would be entitled to; fractions were discarded at this step. Then, any remaining representatives needing to be allocated were assigned to the states having the largest remainders from the prior step (Congressional Quarterly, Guide to Congress, 2nd ed. [Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1983], p. 565). Under the reapportionment that followed the 1860 census, the “ratio of representation” was 127,381.
27. Congressional Globe, 3 March 1863, 37th Cong., 3d sess., p. 1510.
28. Ibid. On the question of Nevada's true population, Wade argued:
29. Frederic L. Paxson, Recent History of the United States, rev. and enlarged ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), pp. 198–199.
30. Congressional Record, 9 April 1888, p. 2836.
31. Ibid., p. 3037.
32. Ibid., p. 3003.
33. Ibid., p. 948.
34. Calvin Roberts and Susan A. Roberts, New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), p. 154.
35. Congressional Record 14 February 1889, p. 1906.
36. Burnham, “Party Systems,” p. 297.
37. For instance, Stephen A. Douglas answered one of Lincoln's famous questions at Freeport by noting the following: “I hold it to be a sound rule of universal application to require a territory to contain the requisite population for a member of Congress, before it is admitted as a State into the Union.” (quoted in Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [new Bunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953], Vol. III, p. 50
38. See Nelson Polsby, “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 62(1968): 144-168; Bensel, Sectionalism.
39. Jerome M. Clubb and Santa A. Traugott, “Partisan Cleavage and Cohesion in the House of Representatives, 1861–1974,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (1977): 375-401; Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, “The Enduring 19th Century Battle for Economic Regulation: The Interstate Commerce Act Revisited” (unpublished manuscript, Carnegie Mellon University, 1991).
40. See Thomas M. Wolf, “Congressional Sea Change: Conflict and Organizational Accommodation in the House of Representatives, 1878-1921” (Ph.D. dissertation, M.I.T., 1981), chap. 2; Poole and Rosenthal, “The Enduring 19th Century Battle,” p. 8.
41. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957).
42. Cox, “Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives.”
43. This summary of tariff history is drawn from O. H. Perry, “Proposed Tariff Legislation since 1883,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 2 (1887): 69-79; F. W. Taussig, Tariff History of the United States, 8th ed. (New York: Putnam, 1931); Judith Goldstein, Ideas, Interests, and American Trade Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Sharyn O'Halloran, Politics, Process, and American Trade Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).
44. A new party is defined as gaining control of the government when the following three conditions are met: when (1) a single party controls both houses of Congress and the presidency following a congressional (or congressional/presidential) election, (2) this party did not control the entire federal government following the prior congressional election, and (3) the last time a single party controlled the entire federal government, it was a different party than the one currently controlling it.
45. In 1842 tariff rates had been undergoing a decade-long decline under the Compromise Tariff of 1833.
46. Paul Studenski and Herman E. Krooss, Financial History of the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952); Robert C. West, Banking Reform and the Federal Reserve, 1863–1923 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); Richard H. Timberlake, The Origins of Central Banking in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy, 6th ed. (San Diego: Harcourt, 1991).
47. Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).
48. While some have read this as a bill to protect shippers and others as a bill to bolster the railroads fragile cartels, these conclusions result from focusing solely on one of the two problems generated by railroads and ignoring the other. Both perspectives are needed to understand the 1887 Act and neither view alone provides an accurate picture. See Gilligan, Marshall, and Weingast, “Regulation and the Theory of Legislative Choice.”
49. “Regulation and the Theory of Legislative Choice”; “The Economic Incidence of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.”
50. As Fiorina (1986) notes, this is exactly the mechanism used three years later in the Sherman Antitrust Act.
51. R. Dewey, The Long and Short Haul Principle of Rate Regulation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1935); Gilligan, Marshall, and Weingast, “The Economic Incidence of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.”
52. While the post—New Deal experience with the Court prompts us to associate partisan labels with judicial ideology cautiously, prior to the New Deal, commentators did not have a problem in associating partisan labels with judicial philosophy. See, for instance, Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956 [1885]), p. 45.
53. This is based on the family of models developed in the following: Randall Calvert, Mathew D. McCubbins, and Barry R. Weingast, “A Theory of Political Control and Agency Discretion,” American Journal of Political Science 33 (1990): 588-611; Peter H. Lemieux and Charles Stewart III, “Advice? Yes. Consent? Maybe: Senate Confirmation of Surpreme Court Nominations” (presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.); Lemieux and Stewart, “Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominations from Washington to Reagan,” Hoover Institution Working Paper Series, P-90-3, 1990.
54. On the courts, see Lemieux and Stewart, “Advice? Yes. Consent? Maybe,” and “Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominations.” On the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), see Terry M. Moe, “Interests, Institutions, and Positive Theory: The Politics of the NLRB,” Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987): 236–299.
55. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45.
56. See Morton Keller, Affairs of State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).
57. While positive political theory remains a relative newcomer to the study of macropolitical events, it may well prove the most valuable tool for explaining the institutional foundations of such events. See William H. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982), Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, “Patterns of Congressional Voting,” American Journal of Political Science 35 (1991): 228–278, and Barry R. Weingast, “The Political Economy of Slavery” (unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, 1991).