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Visible States and Invisible Nation: Newspaper Coverage of Nineteenth-Century Lawmaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2019

Emily Pears
Emily Pears*
Affiliation:
Claremont McKenna College
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Abstract:

Researchers and the public alike have long recognized that in American politics visibility matters. To claim credit for policies, to recruit supporters, and to maintain democratic legitimacy, the lawmaking process must be visible to the American public. Yet little is known about how the public perceived the legislative process during the nineteenth century. This article uses systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis of newspapers in Baltimore, Maryland, Portland, Maine, and Charleston, South Carolina, to measure the comparative visibility of lawmaking at the state and federal levels between 1830 and 1880. The research demonstrates how analysis of newspaper coverage can be used to better understand public perceptions of state and federal lawmaking during time periods without polling data. The visibility of congressional lawmaking varied greatly from one state to the next, and competition for coverage between state legislatures and Congress remained strong across the country throughout the studied period.

Keywords

visibilitylawmakingCongressstate legislaturenineteenth-century newspapers
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 354 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

NOTES

1. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 27,” 25 December 1787.

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28. Ibid., 1016.

29. One could ask whether focusing on Democratic-leaning papers biases these results in favor of a focus on state rather than federal politics—and it may. For the purposes of comparison across the three states this bias shouldn’t matter, but future work should seek to compare papers from multiple political background within the same city or state to better understand how political leanings within the penny press impacted choices about coverage of political events.

30. This restriction also means that there are no dates for which all three newspapers were available and sampled.

31. Appendix 2 lists the number of issues sampled from each paper for the years studied.

32. Appendix 1 includes the complete coding strategy and rules for assigning articles to the state and federal level.

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36. Kernell’s findings vary greatly from these. While his data codes articles on the basis of their geographic location, his findings show a dramatic and early increase in national news, a decline in state news, and fairly static coverage of local news events.

37. Williams, Harold A., The Baltimore Sun, 1837–1987 (Baltimore, 1987), 43.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 52.

39. “Unsigned Editorial,” Charleston Courier, 8 December 1854 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

40. “North and South,” Charleston Courier, 17 December 1859 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

41. “The Welcome to the Republican Members of Congress,” Charleston Courier, 7 December 1866 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

42. J.A.B., “For the Argus,” Portland Eastern Argus, 9 February 1860 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

43. “Prospectus,” Portland Eastern Argus, 3 February 3, 1863 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

44. “Unsigned editorial,” Portland Eastern Argus, 11 January 1877 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).