Person:

Carpenter, Daniel P.

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.

Petition canvassers are political recruiters. Building upon the rational prospector model, we theorize that rational recruiting strategies are dynamic (Bayesian and time-conscious), spatial (constrained by geography) and social (conditioned on relations between canvasser and prospect). Our theory predicts that canvassers will exhibit homophily in their canvassing preferences and will alternate between “door-to-door” and “attractor” (working in a central location) strategies based upon systematic geographical variation. They will adjust their strategies midstream (mid-petition) based upon experience. Introducing methods to analyze canvassing data, we test these hypotheses on geocoded signatory lists from two petition drives—a 2005-2006 anti-Iraq War initiative in Wisconsin and an 1839 antislavery campaign in New York City. Canvassers in these campaigns exhibited homophily to the point of following geographically and politically “inefficient” paths. In the aggregate, these patterns may exacerbate political inequality, limiting political involvement of the poorer and less educated.

When President Andrew Jackson removed the public deposits from the Bank of the United States, he set off an economic and political crisis from which, scholars agree, the Whig Party emerged. We argue that petitioning in response to removal of the deposits shaped the emergence of the Whig Party, crystallizing a new line of Jacksonian opposition and dispensing with older lines of National Republican rhetoric and organization. Where petitioning against removal of the deposits was higher, the Whigs were more likely to emerge with organization and votes in the coming years. We test this implication empirically by using a new database of petitions sent to Congress during the banking crisis. We find that petitioning activity in 1834 is predictive of increased support for Whig Party candidates in subsequent Presidential elections as well as stronger state Whig party organization.

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.