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Timing and Sequence in Congressional Elections: Interstate Contagion and America's Nineteenth-Century Scheduling Regime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2007

Scott C. James
Scott C. James
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

“The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November”—by this simple rule, Americans organize 435 congressional election contests into one simultaneous collective event. Many—including not a few political scientists—treat this scheduling requirement as though it were an enduring feature of American political history, perhaps even one of the Framers' constitutional stipulations. In fact, the historical pattern is richer and more variegated. For much of the country's first hundred years, diversity, not uniformity, was a defining feature of the congressional election schedule. The non-synchronous character of this first American scheduling regime manifested itself in two especially critical ways. First, non-synchronicity within states separated congressional and presidential elections in time, creating a host of problems for political parties, from the challenges of multiple mobilization efforts, to the difficulties of ensuring a unified party vote across federal elections that could be separated by several months. Second, non-synchronicity across states in congressional elections meant that legislative races unfolded sequentially over time, exposing these predominantly local contests to distinctive interstate contagions—not unlike contemporary presidential primaries—with unexpected partisan showings in early state races helping to shape outcomes in subsequent state contests.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Fall 2007 , pp. 181 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1. New York Times, 3 Nov. 1878, 6.

2. The Mississippi elections lasted two days. Actually, California went last in this congressional cycle, holding its elections on 13 Nov. 1849. However, this late date had more to do with the timing of its recent admission to statehood than it did anything else.

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9. In the cases of both New York and Michigan, the application of the 1T/1M rule to their 1848 congressional contests was a continuation of standing law, each state having had scheduled its 1844 and 1846 House elections in accordance with the same rule.

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“What,” said the writer, “do you suppose will be the effect [of the Sept. races] on the Oct. States?”

“It must be very great … . Our people will plunge into the campaign in Ohio and Indiana with that confidence which belongs to victory. Every man now will be sure that the tide is with them, while the office holders [i.e., Republicans] will be correspondingly depressed. Indiana is, of course, sure to the Democrats, and I think that Ohio will now, in Oct., be counted upon the side of good government and Democracy. The skies are very bright.” (The Brooklyn Eagle, 14 Sept. 1880, 4).

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And however desirable it might be to have an eminent civilian-statesman for President, these same practical politicians know very well that such a man nominated by either party could not carry more than a party vote. . . . They know there is a large floating vote that belongs permanently to neither this nor that party, that is attracted by the personal popularity of the candidate.

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41. I have run the analysis that follows on 1828 though 1884 with few alterations in my principal conclusions.

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45. I have tested for the presence of high multicollinearity among these four variables, both because of the obvious interrelationship between competitiveness and turnout, and because turnout and competition in states k and i might be jointly responsive to some unidentified additional cause. Each variable was regressed on the remaining three variables and the R2 values were evaluated according to criteria set out in William, D. Berry and Stanley, Feldman, Multiple Regression in Practice, Sage University Paper Series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, Series No. 07-050. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1985)Google Scholar. The results of these additional tests indicate that the level of multicollinearity falls within acceptable bounds, with R2 values ranging from .14 to .27 for the national contagion model and .12 to .23 for the sectional contagion model.

46. Measures of nominal gross domestic product for the United States were obtained from http://www.eh.net/hmit/gdp/ (last accessed 1 Jul. 2007).

47. Each alternative imposes its own specific sequential ordering on the data. In the national model, unexpected changes in prior party performances in the North are assumed to have a similar impact on upcoming southern states in the unfolding election cycle as they do in upcoming northern contests. The sectional contagion model, by contrast, assumes that contagion is regionally contained, with the impact on later elections of unexpected outcomes in northern or southern state elections remaining confined to their respective sections.

48. I would like to acknowledge the reviewers for this journal, two of whom independently suggested this test.

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50. State presidential election dates for 1828 through 1844 were graciously provided by Philip Lampi of the American Antiquarian Society.

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57. While admittedly speculative, if political strategists routinely anticipated interstate political contagion in congressional elections, it seems plausible—even likely—that nineteenth-century party leaders might have tried to influence that dynamic directly, shaping the rhythms of the legislative calendar to accord with the rhythms of the electoral calendar, timing consideration of salient issues and key votes to exert maximum influence on the partisan direction of interstate momentum. This, for example, is one way to read the timing of Congress's vote to recharter the Second Bank of the United States, which occurred on 30 June 1832, only three days before the first scheduled set of elections to fill the 23rd Congress (1833–1835). Those elections, which were held in Louisiana, resulted in a victory for pro-Bank forces. Subsequently, on 10 July 1832, with Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi scheduled to hold their congressional elections early the following month, Andrew Jackson vetoed the congressional Bank recharter bill. Perhaps hoping to reverse the partisan momentum expected to come out of Louisiana, Jackson's veto message explicitly addressed the upcoming elections, asking voters to repudiate the sitting Congress by sending new representatives to Washington to sustain the president's course of action:

A general discussion will now take place, eliciting new light and settling important questions; and a new Congress, elected in the midst of such discussion … will bear to the Capitol the verdict of public opinion, and I doubt not, bring this important question to a satisfactory result. (William, MacDonald, ed., Selected Documents Illustrative of the History of the United States, 1776–1861 [New York: Macmillan Company, 1907], 266Google Scholar).

Needless to say, much more research would be required to sustain this interpretation. The only point to make here is that this particular episode of partisan political struggle coincided squarely with the opening of the congressional election season, unfolding in such a manner as to suggest elite recognition of the inter-temporal dynamics of this sequential electoral system.

58. Stephen, Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Scott C. James, “Building a New American Party: Patronage Discipline and the Emergence of Strong Party Government in the Nineteenth Century Congress,” mss. in author's possession (2003); Scott C. James, “Patronage Regimes and American Party Development from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era,” British Journal of Political Science 35 (2006).