Person:

Resch, Tobias

Committee formation in early American legislatures happened when those assemblies were inundated with petitions, a relationship unexamined in institutional political science. We develop a model where a floor creates committees to respond to topic-specific petitions, predicting committee creation when petitions (1) are topically specific, (2) are spread across constituencies, and (3) have complex subject matter, and predicting committee appointments from petition-heavy constituencies. Analysis of case studies and with two original datasets – petitions sent to the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1766 to 1769, and over 100,000 petitions sent to Congress and recorded in the House Journal (1789-1875) – shows petitions, their complexity and their geographic dispersion predict committee creation. Our theoretical argument embeds asset specificity in legislative institutions, and helps reinterpret the entropy of political agendas and the origins of standing committees in American legislatures.

For much of American political history, the electoral franchise was restricted to only a portion of the population. By contrast, the right to petition was considered universal and enshrined in the First Amendment, giving voice to the voteless. Petitioning thus served as a fundamental mechanism of representation. Still, fundamental questions remain: How was petitioning used, how did Congress respond to petitions, and did the petition allow for partial representation of the marginalized and unenfranchised? We address these questions by analyzing the Congressional Petitions Database (CPD), an original endeavor tracking virtually every petition introduced to Congress from 1789 to 1949. Our analyses document how (1) two important groups of unenfranchised constituents – Native Americans and women – petitioned regularly and (2) Congress’s initial treatment of Natives’ and women’s petitions was similar to that of all others, thus offering systematic evidence highlighting the petition’s role as a mechanism for representation among otherwise unenfranchised groups.

The American woman suffrage movement remade the U.S. Constitution and effected the broadest expansion of voting eligibility in the nation’s history. Yet it did more than change laws and citizenship. It also plausibly shaped participatory patterns before and after the winning of voting rights for women. Drawing upon the idea of formative practice and reporting on a range of historical materials – including an original dataset of 2,157 petitions sent to the U.S. Congress from 1874 to 1920 concerning women’s voting rights – we focus on woman suffrage petitioning as both presaging the practice of voting and, in a sense, preparing tens of thousands of women for that activity. Our analyses reveal that, before 1920, suffrage petitioning activity was heightened in general and midterm election years (especially among Republican-leaning constituencies), that suffrage petitioning both enabled and reflected organization in critical western states, and that post-suffrage women’s turnout was immediately and significantly higher in states with greater pre-suffrage petitioning (controlling for a range of political, organizational and demographic variables). In its claims, its symbolism, its habits and its temporality, suffrage petitioning differed from other petitioning in American political development, and marked a formative practice for women on their way to voting.

What shapes whether civil-society organizations influence policy? We study this question through German-American counter-mobilization to national Prohibition, before and after the state-sponsored suppression that followed U.S. entry into World War I. Combining new district-level measures of German-American civil society with a measure of pre-WWI prohibition preferences, we compare two near-identical House votes: the defeated 1914 Hobson Amendment and the successful 1917 Eighteenth Amendment. Holding district preferences fixed, German-American civil society explains member votes on Prohibition in 1914 - most strongly in districts where constituents were evenly divided, not in districts that overwhelmingly favored or opposed Prohibition. By 1917, after suppression had hollowed out German-American organizations, that relationship had weakened, and districts with the strongest pre-WWI civil society shifted the most toward Prohibition. We estimate that the observed decline in German-American civil society accounts for somewhere between 16 and 37 percent of the votes Prohibition gained between 1914 and 1917. Our findings add to the understanding of when groups and organizations successfully influence public policy.