Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
The 1900–1920 decades of the Progressive Era constitute a seminal period in American political history, evinced by successful invocation of government authority to contend with consequences of life in an urban, industrial, multicultural society. Legislative precedents established at the state and national level used public power to meet the needs of citizens unable individually to defend themselves against social and economic problems stemming from the brutal, take-off stage of industrial capitalism in the United States. Many scholars view the political transition marking these decades as profoundly significant for the development of public policies, if not for the very creation of the modern American state. This research investigates the electoral bases of national policy innovation in the Progressive Era.
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27. As a result of replacement, some congressional districts are represented by more than one House member in the 63d Congress; see Appendixes A, B, and C.
28. All referenda and initiative votes used in this study were reported in state yearbooks by county voting returns. The lack of gerrymandering in the Progressive Era makes for a fairly easy reorganization of county voting returns into district-level votes. The one exception is the case of major cities comprising only part of one county. In the absence of subcounty information, a city is assigned its county level. State legislature Lower Assembly roll-call votes are recoded to represent districts by coding the county and roll-call votes of each state legislator and then aggregating to the district-level.
29. A factor analysis done within states on all votes used in this study confirms that labor, woman suffrage, and prohibition votes fall on issue dimensions consistent with their substantive content. Also, probit analysis was done for each issue area, which each state entered as a dummy variable along with the composite, pooled issue-votes, to determine whether there might be independent effects stemming from a particular state on roll-call votes. However, no independent state effects were evident with the measure of constituency-issue opinion in the equation. Therefore, analysis proceeded with the pooled measures of constituency-issue positions.
30. Quartiles of support are based upon scholarly conventions defining marginality, such as competitive districts defined as those in which there is only marginal support for the candidate, measured as a winning margin of only 5 percent or less, Fiorina, Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies, 112. Thus, marginal district support for a legislative policy is 50–55 percent and marginal district opposition is 45–49 percent.
31. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act came before the House twice. The first vote is analzyed here, since it is generally considered to be the one most favored by labor interests compared to the second vote on the conference report, which had modified labor features of the initial bill.
32. Bensel, Sectionalism; Sanders, “Industrial Concentration.”
33. I am indebted to Elizabeth Sanders for making trade-area industrialization classifications available for use in this study.
34. Ecological correlation problems limit the certainty of inferences that can be drawn about individual behavior from district-level data. However, the findings reported are suggestive of a possible underlying relationship.
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