In the late nineteenth century, the United States underwent an extremely rapid industrial expansion that moved the nation into the front ranks of the world economy. At the same time, the nation maintained democratic institutions as the primary means of allocating political offices and power. The combination of robust democratic institutions and rapid industrialization is rare and this book explains how development and democracy coexisted in the United States during industrialization. Most literature focuses on either electoral politics or purely economic analyses of industrialization. This book synthesizes politics and economics by stressing the Republican party's role as a developmental agent in national politics, the primacy of the three great developmental policies (the gold standard, the protective tariff, and the national market) in state and local politics, and the impact of uneven regional development on the construction of national political coalitions in Congress and presidential elections.

During the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans voted in saloons in the most derelict sections of great cities, in hamlets swarming with Union soldiers, or in wooden cabins so isolated that even neighbors had difficulty finding them. Their votes have come down to us as election returns reporting tens of millions of officially sanctioned democratic acts. Neatly arrayed in columns by office, candidate, and party, these returns are routinely interpreted as reflections of the preferences of individual voters and thus seem to unambiguously document the existence of a robust democratic ethos. By carefully examining political activity in and around the polling place, this book suggests some important caveats which must attend this conclusion. These caveats, in turn, help to bridge the interpretive chasm now separating ethno-cultural descriptions of popular politics from political economic analyses of state and national policy-making.

No abstract

The Electoral College has a measurable effect on the propensity of the rational voter to vote for the candidate he most prefers. The 'slippage' between the individual's articulated preference ordering and his actual vote is analyzed (using 1968 data) with respect to the strategic position of the voter in his state.The direction of the findings support the theoretically-derived propositions. Nevertheless, the low overall incidence of shifts and the reluctance of voters to shift from nationally-viable candidates demonstrates the overwhelming influence of the national electoral environment.Public Choice 34 (1979) 69-85. All rights reserved.As a result of the rules governing presidential elections, third-party campaigns are viable on a national scale providing that they satisfy certain conditions regarding their probable vote distribution within the individual states and the stability of their support vis-d-vis changes in the distribution of candidate preferences at the national level. In this paper, we will investigate third-party ~,ote-slippage' (dropoff in the percentage of the vote from the percentage of articulated pre-election preferences). This slippage will be analyzed with regard to the strategic position, within the electoral rules, in which third party supporters find themselves (within the various states). In addition, the argument will be extended to include a brief discussion of certain campaign techniques designed specifically to stabilize third-party prefences. These techniques will be connected to the structure, in a three-candidate race, of certain preference orderings which are inherently stable (not subject to slippage). Finally, drawing implications from the results and argument presented, we discuss whether or not some types of third party campaigns are encouraged more than others by the rules of the electoral college.Axiomatic to this model of voting decisions is an assumption that the individual voter is instrumentally rational. In a two-candidate contest the decision of the individual voter requires no information as to the viability of the preferred candidate. The rational voter casts his ballot for the most preferred candidate. However, the rational voter who has a strong-order preference ranking for all candidates in a three-candidate race faces a more complicated calculus. 3 He must attempt to assess the preferences and predict the behavior of other voters and he has an option other than straightforward or sincere translation of his first preference. 4 In a plurality election with three candidates it may be to his advantage to shift his vote to his second preference if the expected outcome of an election in which all vote sincerely is victory for his least-preferred candidate.The "best" strategy for partisans of the two front-running candidates is sincere voting. For voters with weak-order schedules (involving indifference between two or more candidates), those with top-tied (henceforth labelled R1) schedules should select the candidate in the strongest position to defeat their last prefe...

Between 1850 and 1868, the United States struggled through a long and bloody Civil War, attempted to reconfigure southern class and economic relations, settled much of the western prairie, and began the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. During these two decades, Americans went to the polls, whether located in hamlets swarming with Union soldiers, rural churches set in the midst of the southern cotton belt, wooden cabins so isolated that even the nearest neighbors had difficulty finding them, or saloons in the most densely populated sections of great cities. Their votes have come down to us as election returns reporting tens of millions of officially sanctioned exercises in democratic participation. Neatly collated and arrayed in columns by office, candidate, and party, these returns are routinely interpreted as more or less accurate reflections of the popular preferences of the individuals within the communities in which they were made out. Seen this way, the returns themselves appear to constitute unambiguous and overwhelming evidence of the existence of a robust popular democratic system and ethos during the mid-nineteenth century. The purpose of this article is to suggest some important caveats that must attend this conclusion.