Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T06:04:29.613Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2016

Daniel Carpenter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Why do petitions flourish when they are often denied if not ignored by the sovereigns who receive them? When activists seek to build political organizations in network-rich but information-poor environments, petitioning as institutional technology facilitates recruitment. A petition’s signatory list identifies and locates individuals sympathetic to its prayer and expresses to other citizens who and how many agree with the prayer. Three historical moments—the explosion of antislavery petitioning in the antebellum United States, the emergence of Protestantism in sixteenth-century France, and England’s suppression of petitioning after the Restoration Settlement of 1660—provide vivid demonstrations of the theory. A recruitment-based theory implies that petition drives mobilize as much as they express, that well-established groups and parties petition less frequently, and that the most important readers of a petition are those asked to sign it. The petition’s recruitment function complements, but also transforms, its function of messaging the sovereign. Contemporary digital petitioning both routinizes and takes its force from the petition’s embedded recruitment technology.

Type
Articles
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 700 - 723
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acemoglu, Daron and Robinson, James. 2012. Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown.Google Scholar
Allen, Danielle. 2014. Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Amphoux, Henri. 1900. Michel de L’Hôpital de la liberté de conscience au XVIe siècle. Paris: Fischbacher.Google Scholar
Aymon, Jean. 1710. Tous les Synodes Nationaux des Églises Reformées de France, Tome 2. La Haye: Charles Delo.Google Scholar
Bennett, Lance and Segerberg, Alexandra. 2013. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bisson, Thomas. 2009. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship and the Origins of European Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blake, Robert R., Mouton, Jane S., and Hain, Jack D.. 1956. “Social Forces in Petition-Signing,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 36(4): 385–90.Google Scholar
Brady, Henry E., Lehman Schlozman, Kay, and Verba, Sidney. 1999. “Prospecting for Participants: Rational Expectations and the Recruitment of Political Activists,” American Political Science Review 93(1): 153–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burns, Nancy, Schlozman, Kay L., and Verba, Sidney. 2001. The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Inequality, and Political Participation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Craig. 2012. The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cameron, Christopher. 2014. To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caren, Neal, Andrew Ghoshal, Raj, and Ribas, Vanessa. 2011. “A Social Movement Generation: Cohort and Period Trends in Protest Attendance and Petition Signing.” American Sociological Review 76(1): 125–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, Daniel. 2016. “On the Origins of the Administrative Petition: Innovations in Nineteenth-Century Native America.” In Administrative Law from the Inside Out: Essays on Themes in the Work of Jerry Mashaw, ed. Parrillo, Nicholas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Daniel and Moore, Colin. 2014. “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women.” American Political Science Review 108(3): 479–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, Daniel and Schneer, Benjamin. 2015. “Party Formation through Petitions: The Whigs and the Bank War of 1832–1834.” Studies in American Political Development 29(2): 213–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, Daniel and Ting, Michael. 2007. “Regulatory Errors with Endogenous Agendas.” American Journal of Political Science 51(4): 835–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, Daniel and Topich, Nicole. 2014. “Contested Boundaries of Representation: Patterns of Transformation in Black Petitioning in Massachusetts, 1770–1850.” In Democracy, Participation and Contestation: Civil Society, Governance and the Future of Liberal Democracy, ed. Avril, Emmanuelle and Neem, Johann. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chou, Eileen. 2015. “What’s in a Name? The Toll E-signatures Take on Individual Honesty.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 61: 84–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clemens, Elisabeth. 1997. The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Collier, David. 1993. “The Comparative Method.” In Political Science: The State of the Discipline II, ed. Finifter, Ada W.. Washington, DC: American Political Science Association.Google Scholar
Condé, Louis. 1743. Memoires de Condé. Tome 2. La Haye: Pierre Dehont.Google Scholar
Cruickshank, Peter, Edelmann, Noella, and Smith, Colin F. 2010. “Signing an E-petition as a Transition from Lurking to Participation.” In Electronic Government and Electronic Participation, ed. Tambouris, E. et al. Linz, Austria: Trauner.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1975. Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. 2001. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Earl, Jennifer and Kimport, Katrina. 2011. Digitally Enabled Social Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feuerwerker, David. 1965. “Les Juifs en France: Anatomie de 207 cahiers de doléance.” Annales ESC 20: 45–61.Google Scholar
Feuerwerker, David. 1976. L’Émancipation des Juifs en France de l’Ancien Régime à la fin du Second Empire. Paris: Albin Michel.Google Scholar
Formisano, Ronald P. 1971. The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Foster, Elizabeth Read. 1977. “Petitions and the Petition of Right.” Journal of British Studies 14(1): 21–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrioch, David. 2014. The Huguenots of Paris and the Coming of Religious Freedom, 1685–1789. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geddes, Barbara. 1990. “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics.” Political Analysis 2(1): 131–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzales, David. 2002. “Cuban Dissidents Put Hope in a Petition and Jimmy Carter.” New York Times, May 14.Google Scholar
Grant-Costa, Paul. 2008. “The Last Indian War in New England.” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.Google Scholar
Hall, Peter. 2003. “Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Research.” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. Mahoney, James and Rueschemeyer, Dietrich. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Han, Hahrie. 2014. How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Han, Hahrie. 2016. “The Organizational Roots of Political Activism: Field Experiments on Creating a Relational Context.” American Political Science Review 110(2): forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hauken, Tor. 1998. Petition and Response: An Epigraphic Study of Petitions to Roman Emperors. Bergen: Norwegian Institute.Google Scholar
Hauptman, Laurence. 2011. The Tonawanda Senecas’ Heroic Battle against Removal: Conservative Activist Indians. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Heaney, Michael T. and Rojas, Fabio. 2015. Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Helson, Harry, Blake, Robert, and Mouton, Jane Srygly. 1958. “Petition Signing as Adjustment to Personal and Situational Factors.” Journal of Social Psychology 48(1): 3–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hersh, Eitan and Schaffner, Brian. 2015. “Post-Materialist Particularism: Why Redistribution Is Off the U.S. Policy Agenda” Working paper, Yale University.Google Scholar
Hirst, Derek. 1975. The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holt, Michael. 1999. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hounshell, Blake. 2008. “Charter 08.” Foreign Policy, October 8. http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/10/08/charter-08/, accessed February 13, 2016.Google Scholar
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Miguel, Edward, Ortega, Daniel, and Rodriguez, Francisco. 2011. “The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela’s Maisanta.” American Economic Journal—Applied Economics 3: 196–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Innes, Joanna. 2013. “People and Power in British Politics to 1850.” Re-Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolution, ed. Innes, J. and Philp, Mark. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, Scott C. 2006. “Patronage Regimes and American Party Development from ‘The Age of Jackson’ to the Progressive Era.” British Journal of Political Science 36(1) 39–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffrey, Julie Roy. 1998. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Jeffrey and Stewart, Charles III. 2012. Fighting for the Speakership: The House and the Rise of Party Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
John, Peter, Moseley, Alice, Wales, Corinne, Stoker, Gerry, Smith, Graham, Richardson, Liz, and Cotterill, Sarah. 2011. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour. London: Bloomsbury Academic.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Judge, David. 1978. “Public Petitions and the House of Commons.” Parliamentary Affairs 31(4): 391–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karpf, David. 2010. “Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective: Looking Beyond Clicktivism.” Policy & Internet 2(4): 7–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karpf, David. 2015a. “Look at the Man Behind the Curtain: Computational Management in ‘Spontaneous’ Citizen Political Campaigning.” In eds., Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data, ed. Langlois, G., Redden, J., and Elmer, G.. New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Karpf, David. 2015b. “Aiming High or Aiming Low? Strategic Decisions in Digital Petition-Based Advocacy Campaigns.” Working paper, George Washington University.Google Scholar
Kelly, Benjamin. 2011. Petitions, Litigation and Social Control in Roman Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koziol, Geoffrey. 1992. Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Medieval France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Knights, Mark. 1993. “London’s Monster Petition of 1680.” Historical Journal 36(1): 39–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kraditor, Aileen S. 1967. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850. Chicago, IL: Elephant Paperbacks.Google Scholar
Kuran, Timur. 1997. Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lee, Taeku. 2002. Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Levine, Daniel. 1981. Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Venezuela & Colombia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Kevin, Gray, Kurt, and Meierhenrich, Jens. 2014. “The Structure of Online Activism.” Sociological Science. https://www.sociologicalscience.com/structure-online-activism/, accessed June 10, 2016.Google Scholar
Leys, Colin. 1955. “Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Political Studies 31(1): 45–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lohmann, Suzanne. 1993. “A Signaling Model of Informative and Manipulative Political Action.” American Political Science Review 87(2): 319–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ludlom, Robert P. 1941. “The Antislavery ‘Gag-Rule’: History and Argument.” Journal of Negro History 26: 203–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Magdol, Edward. 1986. The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists’ Constituency. New York: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Major, J. Russell. 1980. Representative Government in Early-Modern France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Margetts, Helen, John, Peter, Escher, Tobias, and Reissfelder, Stéphane. 2011. “Social Information and Political Participation on the Internet: An Experiment.” European Political Science Review 3(3): 321–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayer, Henry. 1998. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin’s.Google Scholar
McAdam, Douglas, Tarrow, Sidney, and Tilly, Charles. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClendon, Gwyneth. 2014. “Social Esteem and Participation in Contentious Politics: A Field Experiment at an LGBT Pride Rally.” American Journal of Political Science 58(2): 279–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKinley, Maggie. 2016. “Lobbying and the Petition Clause.” Stanford Law Review 48: 1131–1205.Google Scholar
Meinke, Scott R. 2007. “Slavery, Partisanship and Procedures in the U.S. House: The Gage Rule, 1836–1845.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 32(1): 33–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ménard, Léon. 1753. Histoire Civile, Ecclésiastique et Littéraire de la Ville de Nîmes, Tome 4. Paris: Hugues-Daniel Chaubert et Daniel Hérissant.Google Scholar
Miles, Tiya. 2009. “‘Circular Reasoning’: Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns.” American Quarterly 61(2): 221–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, William Lee. 1995. Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Musante, Patricia. 2000. “The Progressive Catholic Church and the Refashioning of Hegemony in Mexico: An Illustration from Tetecingo” In The Church at the Grassroots in Latin America: Perspectives on Thirty Years of Activism, ed. Burdick, John and Hewitt, Warren Edward. Westport, CT: Praeger.Google Scholar
Perry, Jamie A., Smith, Daniel A., and Henry, Shayne. 2012. “The Impact of Petition Signing on Voter Turnout.” Political Behavior 34(1): 117–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, Paul A. 2001. “‘And Your Petitioners & c’: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics.” English Historical Review 116(466): 368–88.Google Scholar
Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard. 2000. Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Powell, Robert. 1988. “Nuclear Brinkmanship with Two-Sided Incomplete Information.” American Political Science Review 82(1): 155–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rawley, James A. 2008. “Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas–Nebraska Act.” In The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, ed. Wunder, John R. and Ross, Joann M.. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Raithby, John, ed. 1819. The Statutes of the Realm, Volume 5, 1628–1680. London: Great Britain Record Commission.Google Scholar
Richards, Leonard L. 1970. “Gentleman of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Robert, Penny. 2002. “Huguenot petitioning during the wars of religion,” in Mentzer, Raymond A. and Spicer, Andrew, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sawyer, Jeffrey K. 1990. Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Scheingate, Adam. 2003. “Political Entrepreneurship, Institutions and American Political Development.” Studies in American Political Development 17(2): 185–203.Google Scholar
Schwarzwald, Joseph, Bizman, Aharon and Raz, Moshe. 1983. “The Foot-in-the-Door Paradigm: Effects of Second Request Size on Donation Probability and Donor Generosity.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 9(3): 443–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sewell, Richard H. 1976. Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Sewell, William H. 1980. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinha, Manisha. 2016. The Slave’s Cause. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda, Ganz, Marshall, and Munson, Ziad. 2000. “A Nation of Organizers.” American Political Science Review 94(3): 527–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thelen, Kathleen. 1999. “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2: 369–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Traugott, Mark, ed. 1995. Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Tulchin, Allan. 2010. That Men Should Praise the Lord: The Rise of Protestantism in Nimes. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Broekhoven, Deborah Bingham. 2002. The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Van Broekhoven, Deborah Bingham. 1994. “’Let Your Names Be Enrolled’: Method and Ideology in Women’s Antislavery Petitioning.” In The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Fagan Yellin, Jean and Van Horne, John C. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Weschler, Lawrence. 1990. A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wilcox, Allen R. and Weinberg, Leonard B.. 1971. “Petition Signing in the 1968 Election,” Western Political Quarterly 24(4): 731–739.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zaeske, Susan. 2003. Signatures of Citizenship. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Zaret, David. 1996. “Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the English Revolution.” American Journal of Sociology 101(6): 1–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zaret, David. 2000. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar