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Electoral Bases of Policy Innovation in the Progressive Era: The Impact of Grass-Root Opinion on Roll-Call Voting in the House of Representatives, Sixty-third Congress, 1913–1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Eileen Lorenzi McDonagh
Eileen Lorenzi McDonagh
Affiliation:
Northeastern University and Murray Research Center, Radcliffe College
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Extract

The 1900–1920 decades of the Progressive Era constitute a seminal period in American political history, evinced by successful invocation of government authority to contend with consequences of life in an urban, industrial, multicultural society. Legislative precedents established at the state and national level used public power to meet the needs of citizens unable individually to defend themselves against social and economic problems stemming from the brutal, take-off stage of industrial capitalism in the United States. Many scholars view the political transition marking these decades as profoundly significant for the development of public policies, if not for the very creation of the modern American state. This research investigates the electoral bases of national policy innovation in the Progressive Era.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , April 1992 , pp. 162 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1992

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References

Notes

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8. Only moderate party realignment occurred in some states, such as California, between 1910 and 1920, and third-party candidates, though attracting considerable attention, made no major inroads into the two-party system; Allen, Howard W. and Clubb, Jerome, “Progressive Reform and the Political System,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 65 (July 1974): 130–45Google Scholar. For example, in 1912 only one Progressive was elected governor and none was elected to the Senate. Seventeen (4 percent) minor-party candidates were elected to the House of Representatives in 1912, and the socialist presidential candidate received 6 percent of the popular vote. However, by 1916 the socialist percent of the popular presidential vote dropped to only 3.2 percent. Electoral margins of popular support for the Democratic presidential candidate in 1912 and 1916, Woodrow Wilson, failed to reach 50 percent, marking the elections of those years as “deviating” rather than as “critical or realigning” elections; Allen and Clubb, “Progressive Reform,”

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10. Bensel's use of economic sections in lieu of direct measures of constituency-issue preferences derives most likely from his assumption that sectional conflict “driven by the conflicting economic imperatives of the industrial core and agrarian periphery” has “clearly influenced, and, at some points in [American] history, completely remolded” such secondary structures as the party system, ideological belief-systems, and the central state; Bensel, Sectionalism, 23–24.

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21. A recent exception is the work by L. Marvin Overby, who uses state-level referenda as a measure of constituency opinion in relation to House roll-call voting on nuclear-freeze policies in 1981 and 1983. However, he does not aggregate to the district level, using instead state-level totals; “Assessing Constituency Influence: Congressional Voting on the Nuclear Freeze, 1982–93,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 16 (1991): 297–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Generally, all state constitutional amendments must be referred to the people for approval, resulting in many referenda votes, particularly during reform periods that generate many constitutional conventions, such as the Progressive Era. In addition, it is in this period that new instruments for returning political power to the people are invented, such as the referendum and the initiative, thereby augmenting the number of grass-root votes that can be analyzed for local legislative policy preferences. Though referenda and initiative votes are especially valuable as an indication of citizen opinion for pre-public-opinion polling periods, they have utility as a direct measure of constituency-issue position for contemporary periods as well. State-level initiatives and referenda increased 600 percent between 1968 and 1982, a phenomenon termed the “Ballot Initiative Revolution” by Schmidt, David, Citizen Lawmakers: The Ballot Initiative Revolution (Philadelphia, 1989), viiGoogle Scholar. Consequently, since 1968 an average of 300 referenda and/or initiative measures have been voted on each year, all of which are coded by the Inter-University Consortium for Social and Political Studies, University of Michigan, from whom they are available.

23. Hurley, Patricia, Brady, David, and Cooper, Joseph, “Measuring Legislative Potential for Policy Change,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 2 (1977): 390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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26. Quoted in Link, Arthur S., Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton, 1956), 432Google Scholar. Though some view the Clayton Act as inadequate to contain big business and as evidence more of Wilson's interest in his political future than in political reform (see Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 [New York, 1963], 255–56)Google Scholar, others view its passage as a milestone not only in the development of antitrust policies but more specifically for gaining the right to strike for labor.

27. As a result of replacement, some congressional districts are represented by more than one House member in the 63d Congress; see Appendixes A, B, and C.

28. All referenda and initiative votes used in this study were reported in state yearbooks by county voting returns. The lack of gerrymandering in the Progressive Era makes for a fairly easy reorganization of county voting returns into district-level votes. The one exception is the case of major cities comprising only part of one county. In the absence of subcounty information, a city is assigned its county level. State legislature Lower Assembly roll-call votes are recoded to represent districts by coding the county and roll-call votes of each state legislator and then aggregating to the district-level.

29. A factor analysis done within states on all votes used in this study confirms that labor, woman suffrage, and prohibition votes fall on issue dimensions consistent with their substantive content. Also, probit analysis was done for each issue area, which each state entered as a dummy variable along with the composite, pooled issue-votes, to determine whether there might be independent effects stemming from a particular state on roll-call votes. However, no independent state effects were evident with the measure of constituency-issue opinion in the equation. Therefore, analysis proceeded with the pooled measures of constituency-issue positions.

30. Quartiles of support are based upon scholarly conventions defining marginality, such as competitive districts defined as those in which there is only marginal support for the candidate, measured as a winning margin of only 5 percent or less, Fiorina, Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies, 112. Thus, marginal district support for a legislative policy is 50–55 percent and marginal district opposition is 45–49 percent.

31. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act came before the House twice. The first vote is analzyed here, since it is generally considered to be the one most favored by labor interests compared to the second vote on the conference report, which had modified labor features of the initial bill.

32. Bensel, Sectionalism; Sanders, “Industrial Concentration.”

33. I am indebted to Elizabeth Sanders for making trade-area industrialization classifications available for use in this study.

34. Ecological correlation problems limit the certainty of inferences that can be drawn about individual behavior from district-level data. However, the findings reported are suggestive of a possible underlying relationship.

35. Flexner, Eleanor, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 162.Google Scholar

36. Some point to the distinctly different bases of suffrage and prohibition; Kyvig, David E., “Women Against Prohibition,” American Quarterly 28 (Fall 1976): 465–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDonagh, Eileen L. and Price, H. Douglas, “Woman Suffrage in the Progressive Era: Sources of Opposition and Support in Referenda Voting, 1910–1918,” American Political Science Review 79:2 (June 1985): 415–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDonagh, Eileen L., “Issues and Constituencies in the Progressive Era: House Roll-Call Voting on the Nineteenth Amendment, 1913–1919,” Journal of Politics 51:1 (February 1989): 119–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though the rationale for woman suffrage shifted after 1910 to more utilitarian claims that women's enfranchisement would foster social welfare policies associated with women's informal maternal, nurturing roles, the suffrage issue also retained its link with civil rights arguments stressing the normative imperative to extend to women the rights of citizenship on an equal basis with men; Cott, Nancy, The Grounding of Modem Feminism (New Haven, 1987), 30.Google Scholar

37. A negative sign indicates greater support by Democrats, while a positive sign indicates greater support by Republicans.

38. Link, Wilson, 430.

39. Tobin, Organise or Perish, 43–65.

40. Jones, Charles O., The Minority Party in Congress (Boston, 1970)Google Scholar; Sundquist, James L., The Decline and Resurgence of Congress (Washington, D.C., 1981), 168–76Google Scholar; Holt, James, Congressional Insurgents and the Party System, 1909–1916 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar. An important exception is Elizabeth Sanders's use of economic sectional interests to account for passage of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act; Sanders, “Industrial Concentration.”

41. Kleppner, Paul, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

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43. Brandeis, Justice Louis, New State Ice Co. v. Liebman, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (dissenting), (1932).Google Scholar