Manufactured Responsiveness: The Impact of State Electoral Laws on Unified Party Control of the Presidency and House of Representatives, 1840–1940

The modern history of divided government in America suggests that the framers succeeded in creating a government unresponsive to popular passions. Yet in the nineteenth century the party winning the presidency almost always captured control of the House of Representatives. Why and how could nineteenth century national elections be so responsive that they resemble parliamentary outcomes? We identify electoral institutions present in the states that directly linked congressional elections to presidential coattails. Specifically, we estimate the impact of state ballot laws and the strategic design of congressional districts on presidential coattail voting from 1840 to 1940. We find that presidential elections, as mediated by state electoral laws, strongly account for unified party control of the House and the presidency throughout the nineteenth century. W orried that unified control of government would breed majority tyranny, the Constitution’s Framers created separate executive and legislative branches and provided each with the authority to check the excesses of the other. They also sought an electoral remedy by varying constituencies, term lengths, and modes of election across the branches and legislative chambers. The modern history of inconclusive national elections and divided party control of government suggests that they did their job well. From 1948 through 2000 only five of 13 presidential elections found the same party winning the presidency and both chambers of Congress. Equally revealing, only once (Democrats in 1952) did a governing party collapse and wholly surrender control of Congress and the presidency. Limiting comparison to control of the president and the House of Representatives, a pairing more likely to turn up unified outcomes, only seven of 13 presidential elections ended with the same party controlling both institutions.

[1]  Walter Dean Burnham,et al.  Critical Elections: And the Mainsprings of American Politics , 1970 .

[2]  William Safire.  Safire's Political Dictionary , 1978 .

[3]  Sadafumi Kawato.  Nationalization and Partisan Realignment in Congressional Elections , 1987, American Political Science Review.

[4]  M. Dubin.  United States Congressional elections, 1788-1994 : the official results of the elections of the 1st through 105th Congresses , 1998 .

[5]  Jonathan N. Katz,et al.  What To Do (and Not to Do) with Time-Series Cross-Section Data , 1995, American Political Science Review.

[6]  Fran Hazelton.  The Right to Vote , 1969 .

[7]  John F. Reynolds,et al.  Testing democracy : electoral behavior and progressive reform in New Jersey, 1880-1920 , 1989 .

[8]  D. Brady.  A Reevaluation of Realignments in American Politics: Evidence from the House of Representatives , 1985, American Political Science Review.

[9]  R. Katz.  The Attribution of Variance in Electoral Returns: An Alternative Measurement Technique , 1973, American Political Science Review.

[10]  G. King,et al.  Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference , 1989 .

[11]  P. H. Argersinger.  Structure, Process and Party:: Essays in American Political History , 1992 .

[12]  P. Nardulli.  The Concept of a Critical Realignment, Electoral Behavior, and Political Change , 1995, American Political Science Review.

[13]  E. Tufte.  The Relationship between Seats and Votes in Two-Party Systems , 1973, American Political Science Review.

[14]  Nathaniel Beck,et al.  Time‐series–cross‐section Data , 2001 .

[15]  Michael F. Holt.  The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War , 1999 .

[16]  Richard Franklin Bensel,et al.  The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century , 2004 .

[17]  William H. Flanigan,et al.  Nationalization of the American Electorate , 1984, American Political Science Review.

[18]  J. Ferejohn,et al.  Presidential Coattails in Historical Perspective , 1984 .

[19]  J. Rusk,et al.  A Statistical History of the American Electorate , 2001 .

[20]  Geoffrey T. Blodgett,et al.  The Australian Ballot: The Story of an American Reform , 1968 .

[21]  S. Kernell.  Toward Understanding 19th Century Congressional Careers. Ambition, Competition, and Rotation * , 1977 .

[22]  Jonathan N. Katz,et al.  Careerism, Committee Assignments, and the Electoral Connection , 1996, American Political Science Review.

[23]  Jamie L. Carson,et al.  The Impact of National Tides and District-Level Effects on Electoral Outcomes: The U.S. Congressional Elections of 1862-63 , 2001 .

[24]  Bernard Grofman,et al.  Optimal partisan gerrymandering , 1988 .

[25]  John F. Reynolds.  Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey , 1986 .

[26]  David C. Kimball,et al.  A New Approach to the Study of Ticket Splitting , 1998 .

[27]  N. Polsby.  17. Nelson W. Polsby. 1968. “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives.” American Political Science Review 62 (March): 144–68. Cited 287 times , 2006, American Political Science Review.

[28]  Iain McLean,et al.  Elbridge Gerry's salamander: the electoral consequences of the reapportionment revolution , 2002 .

[29]  R. Wiebe.  The Search for Order, 1877-1920 , 1966 .

[30]  S. Kernell.  Life Before Polls: Ohio Politicians Predict the 1828 Presidential Vote , 2000, PS: Political Science & Politics.

[31]  Joel H. Silbey,et al.  The American Political Nation, 1838-1893. , 1991 .

[32]  B. Reams,et al.  Sources and documents of United States constitutions , 1973 .

[33]  B. McNamara,et al.  The institutionalization of the good death. , 1994, Social science & medicine.

[34]  B. Grofman,et al.  Sectional Differences in Partisan Bias and Electoral Responsiveness in US House Elections, 1850–1980 , 1991, British Journal of Political Science.

[35]  R. McKelvey,et al.  Seniority in Legislatures , 1990, American Political Science Review.

[36]  Cecil J. Schneer,et al.  The Search for Order , 1960 .

[37]  Robert Browning,et al.  Democratic Representation and Partisan Bias in Congressional Elections , 1987, American Political Science Review.

[38]  Bruce E. Cain,et al.  The Reapportionment Puzzle , 1984 .

[39]  Nathaniel Beck,et al.  Nuisance vs. Substance: Specifying and Estimating Time-Series-Cross-Section Models , 1996, Political Analysis.

[40]  N. Polsby.  The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives , 1968, American Political Science Review.

[41]  G. Jacobson,et al.  Congress and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth Century , 1987, The Journal of Politics.

[42]  Robert D. Marcus,et al.  Grand Old Party : political structure in the gilded age, 1880-1896 , 1971 .

[43]  Angus Campbell,et al.  The Motivational Basis of Straight and Split Ticket Voting , 1957, American Political Science Review.

[44]  Jan F. Kiviet,et al.  On bias, inconsistency and efficiency of various estimators in dynamic panel data models , 1995 .

[45]  J. Rusk,et al.  The Effect of the Australian Ballot Reform on Split Ticket Voting: 1876–1908 , 1970, American Political Science Review.