The Popular Origins of Legislative Jurisdictions: Petitions and Standing Committee Formation in Colonial Virginia and the Early US House

Agenda Democracy

“…Restriction can occur mechanically or probabilistically. In American political development, for instance, neither the congressional agenda on slavery in the early nineteenth century nor the congressional agenda on civil rights in the early twentieth century reflected popular political activity at the time [Black newspapers in the Jim Crow era (Schickler 2016); antislavery petitions in the antebellum period (Sinha 2016, Carpenter 2021]. Beyond this, even the agenda of public political activity outside of governing institutions can be limited by constraints in social organization, lack of contestation over concepts, or constraints on common sense (Woodly 2015) or the horizon (Forrester 2022).…”

“…Many regimes contain express provisions permitting a dominant region or class of people to hold a veto over the entrance of an item onto the agenda. In the longue durée of US history, Southern US legislators were able to band together as a regional coalition in the US Congress and to restrict the agenda of slavery (Weingast 1998, Carpenter 2021) and other questions of racial inclusion and equality (Lieberman 1998, Katznelson 2013, Mickey 2015, Schickler 2016, Bateman et al 2018, using either the Senate or committee power to keep issues off agendas. These agendas often concerned American democratization itself (Mickey 2015).…”

“…The evolution of France's Third Republic was heavily shaped by the transformation of agendas in socialist and syndicalist organizations and their incorporation into emergent left parties (Ansell 2001). In a landmark study of the twentieth-century United States, Schickler (2016) shows how the local politicians functioned as intermediaries in shifting the ideology, preferences, and agendas of the Democratic Party from the New Deal to the early 1960s. A racial realignment that eventually transformed the Democratic Party "began with mass and midlevel party actors, and.…”

“…I discuss concepts of agendas in political science, review why agendas might not be democratic even in political systems that are plausibly characterized as democratic, and discuss recent research emphasizing nonelectoral and nonpartisan mechanisms by which agendas are reshaped in democratic regimes (and possibly some nondemocratic regimes). In so doing, I join a set of political theorists (Barber 1984, p. 267;Urbinati 2006;Disch 2011;Woodly 2015Woodly , 2021Mansbridge 2018;Forrester 2022) and empirical and historical scholars (Lee 2002, Schickler 2016, Gillion 2020, Carpenter 2021, Gause 2022 whose work points to the democratic necessity of local political intermediaries, protest campaigns, social organizations, advocacy campaigns, grievance mechanisms, and other agenda-democratizing processes and institutions.…”