Legacies of Participation: How Civil Society and Petitions Shape Legislative Institutions, Public Policy, and Representation

Abstract

This dissertation explores how mass civil society and political activism have helped shape legislative institutions, public policy, and representation. In each chapter, my co-authors and I leverage newly created datasets to investigate the historical links between mass political behavior, particularly by exercise of the right to petition enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Congress. The first essay, co-authored with Benjamin Schneer (Harvard Kennedy School), examines the link between mass civil society groups and policy outcomes by analyzing the opposition to national prohibition by German-American associations in the early twentieth century. Using historical club directories, petitioning activity, and newspaper directories to measure German-American civil society across time and geography, we find a rapid decline in organizational strength that coincided with anti-German hysteria and state-sponsored suppression efforts related to U.S. entry to World War I. We then compare two crucial votes on near-identical proposed constitutional amendments in the U.S. House of Representatives---the narrow defeat of the 1914 Hobson Prohibition amendment and the successful passage of the eventual Eighteenth Amendment in 1917---and find that efforts at suppression mattered most in districts where German-American organizational strength had previously been pivotal. We estimate that, without the suppression of German-American organizations, the Prohibition Amendment would not have passed the House of Representatives. Our findings add to an understanding of when and under what circumstances groups and organizations successfully influence public policy and provide a new explanation for the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. The second essay, co-authored with Benjamin Schneer, Maggie Blackhawk (NYU School of Law), and Daniel Carpenter (Harvard University), investigates committee formation in early American legislatures, which occurred at the same time as those assemblies were inundated with petitions. We present case studies and analyze original datasets of petitions sent to the Virginia House of Burgesses (1766--1769) and of petitions sent to the House of Representatives (1789--1875) to support our model-derived claims that petitions, complexity of their subject matter, and their geographic dispersion predict committee creation. Our theoretical argument helps reinterpret the entropy of political agendas and the origins of standing committees in American legislatures. In the third essay, also co-authored with Benjamin Schneer, Maggie Blackhawk, and Daniel Carpenter, we introduce and analyze the Congressional Petitions Database (CPD), which tracks virtually every petition introduced to Congress from 1789 to 1949. We present analyses to show that Native Americans and women not only petitioned regularly, but also that the initial treatment of their respective petitions was similar to that of all others, thus offering systematic evidence of the petition serving as a mechanism for representation among otherwise unenfranchised groups.