Legislative Parties and Voting Behavior in the Antebellum Congress

Members of Congress turned to partisan organization as a solution to social choice and collective action problems despite the Founders’ warnings against parties. Virtually all research on partisanship and legislative behavior studies the period well after the modern twoparty system was established. We study the period from 1789 to 1861 and argue that the relationship between partisanship and legislative behavior varied in systematic ways across chambers and time. We further argue that the emergence of early parties helped manage regional con icts. Using data on all recorded roll call votes cast in the antebellum Congress, we nd support for our arguments. Partisanship was more strongly associated with voting behavior in the House than the Senate, varied in importance over time, and generally exhibited an inverse relationship with the salience of regional considerations. Our results have important implications for understanding how legislators’ principals, mass party organizations, and partisan institutions a ected congressional behavior. Political parties occupy a central place in scholarship on the U.S. Congress. Legislative parties are posited to exercise agenda control (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 2005), distribute particularistic goods (e.g., Balla et al. 2002; Levitt and Snyder 1995), control committee assignments (e.g., Shepsle 1978), devise rules and procedures (e.g., Binder 1997; Huber 1992), and in uence presidential nominations to judicial (e.g., Moraski and Shipan 1999) and executive branch appointments (e.g., McCarty and Razaghian 1999). Few questions have received as much attention in congressional scholarship, however, as the importance of partisanship for legislative voting behavior (e.g., Brady, Cooper, and Hurley 1979; Clausen 1973; Cox and Poole 2002; Snyder and Groseclose 2000; Jenkins and Weidenmier 1999; Patterson and Caldeira 1988; Smith 2007). Despite the importance of parties for organizing legislative politics for most of the country’s history, political parties were conspicuously absent from the nation’s rst congresses. It is wellknown that the Founders opposed political parties, with George Washington famously warning in his presidential farewell address that “the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are su cient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. ”1 Washington’s sentiments notwithstanding, early members of Congress turned to partisan organization as a solution to social choice and collective action problems that initially impeded progress on a range of pressing issues (Aldrich 1995). A century and a half later, scholars of the “textbook Congress” observed that party membership is “the single most important factor in roll-call voting. No other measurable dichotomy better predicts voting behavior” (Turner and Schneier 1970, 239). In more recent congressional scholarship, the strong correlation between party membership and roll call votes has animated vigorous debates over the identi cation and interpretation of party e ects on legislative voting behavior (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005; Cox and Poole 2002; Krehbiel 1993, 1998; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001; Snyder and Groseclose 2000). 1See h ps://www.gpo. gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21/pdf/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21. pdf.