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29. Ibid. For similar sentiment, see also: “Convention Politics,” Sacramento Daily Union 7, no. 73, May 14, 1878.

30. We will continue to use the term “Nonpartisan” as a proper noun to refer to this slate of Democratic and Republican delegates. This is, of course, not how this word is used in modern political discourse.

31. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique.

32. Davis, History of Political Conventions in California, 383.

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36. Ibid., 107.

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40. Ibid., 32.

41. Ibid., 41.

42. These two were the least important—Miscellaneous Subjects and Schedule—committees. Vivian and Waldron, Biographical Sketches.

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45. Although a small number of delegates also served as legislators both before and after the convention, there was no session in which more than a small handful served together. In the absence of other “bridging” actors, such as interest groups, or highly restrictive assumptions about how individual behavior changes over time, it is thus not possible to jointly scale the votes taken in the legislature and the commission or compare delegate and legislative ideal points directly. See Kogan, Vladimir, “When Voters Pull the Trigger: Can Direct Democracy Restrain Legislative Excesses?” Legislative Studies Quarterly 41(2016): 297–325 Google Scholar.

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47. Note that, because Democrats and Republicans made up the majority of both slates, the Nonpartisan group was not simply a multiparty governing coalition similar to those found in many parliaments where members of parliament are elected using proportional representation.

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49. Party unity votes and scores for Congress were obtained from Keith Poole's website, voteview.com.

50. David Bateman and John Lapinski note that this approach has attracted a much smaller following among scholars of American Political Development but make a convincing case for why measures of legislator “ideal points” have a great deal to contribute to historical scholarship. Bateman, David A. and Lapinski, John, “Ideal Points and American Political Development: Beyond DW-Nominate,” Studies in American Political Development 30 (2016): 147–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Poole, Keith T., “Non-Parametric Unfolding of Binary Choice Data,” Political Analysis 8 (2000): 211–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Because there is no way to “bridge” the disjoint sets of votes taken at the convention and the legislative sessions immediately before and after it, we cannot estimate ideal points that are comparable over time. For this reason, the analysis in this section focuses only on the ideal points of delegates at the convention.

52. Ideally, we would also examine the dynamics of committee deliberations, where most of the substantive provisions were drafted before being adopted on the convention floor. Unfortunately, we were unable to locate any surviving records from the committees, largely because the convention chose not to hire stenographers to document their meetings.

53. “Codification versus Constitution-Making,” Sacramento Daily Union 7, no. 216, November 1, 1878 Google Scholar.

54. Although somewhat lower than is the case in the modern Congress, where a similar model correctly classifies about 92 percent of the votes (see Poole, Keith, “Changing Minds? Not in Congress!” Public Choice 131 [2007]: 435–51Google Scholar), this performance is almost identical to a one-dimensional model fitted on the legislative votes from the 1877 and 1880 California Assembly (78.9 and 81.9 percent correctly classified, respectively).

55. We use scaled ideal points rather than raw agreement or party unity scores as dependent variables in our models because the latter are much more sensitive to cutpoint censoring (see Hirsch, Alexander, “Theory Driven Bias in Ideal Point Estimates—A Monte Carlo Study,” Political Analysis 19 [2011]: 87–102)Google Scholar, which gives rise to artificial extremism. See Snyder, James Jr., “Artificial Extremism in Interest Group Ratings,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 17(1992): 319–45Google Scholar.

56. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique, provides a book-length discussion of the sharp policy conflicts within the Nonpartisan coalition.

57. Among the Republicans, the mean ideal point was 0.41, compared to the 0.27 for the Democrats. However, this difference was only borderline significant at conventional levels (p = 0.09, two-tailed test).

58. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique.

59. Ibid., 20.

60. Bawn, Kathleen, Cohen, Martin, Karol, David, Masket, Seth, Noel, Hans, and Zaller, John, “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nomination in American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (2012): 571–97Google Scholar.

61. Ooley, Inventory.

62. For delegates elected at-large, we use the statewide averages of these measures.

63. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique, 42.

64. This and subsequent models exclude Workingmen's Party delegates who were not previously members of the Democratic or Republican parties, resulting in seven fewer observations.

65. The results for the constituency-level variables do not change if we exclude the Nonpartisan delegates elected at-large.

66. Because no Nonpartisan delegates previously served in the state or federal Workingmen's Party, we omit this coefficient from Table 2. We also exclude the coefficient for running on the Workingmen's Party slate for the same reason.

67. Carl C. Plehn, “The Taxation of Mortgages in California, 1849–1899,” Yale Review (1899): 31–67.

68. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique, 85.

69. San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 13 Fed. 722 (1882). Another provision seen as a win for the Workingmen, denying many state rights and privileges to Chinese immigrants, was also struck down by a U.S. Circuit Court as a violation of the 14th Amendment shortly after the adoption of the new constitution. In re Tiburco Parrot, 1 F. 481, 500 C.C.D. Cal. (1880).

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71. S. E. Moffett, “The Railroad Commission of California: A Study of Irresponsible Government,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1895): 109–17.

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73. People v. Hibernia Bank (51 Cal. 243). See also “The Mortgage Taxes in California,” Banker's Magazine and Statistical Register 30 (1876): 857–62Google Scholar.

74. Willis and Stockton, Debates and Proceedings, 3: 1295.

75. p = 0.34 for the Railroad Commission amendment and p = 0.14 for the property taxation measure.

76. Interestingly, both of the amendments were ultimately defeated with the help of delegates elected on the separate Democratic and Republican slates, who overwhelmingly opposed them.

77. Candidate vote shares are frequently used as measures of voter preferences in the literature on legislative politics. For an example, see McCarty, Nolan, Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard, “Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?” American Journal of Political Science 53 (2009): 666–80Google Scholar.

78. Because multiple delegates were elected from most districts, the margin of victory is calculated as the number of votes cast for each winning delegate minus the votes won by the first runner-up, divided by the total number of votes cast in the district.

79. Several of these delegates were appointed after the election. However, the records provided to us by the state archives were missing the vote totals for all delegates elected from the second congressional district. In addition, the county-level vote totals located by the archive staff were missing a page that contained the results for about half a dozen senatorial districts.

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89. Given the differences documented in the previous paragraphs, one might conclude that the California convention provides few lessons that can help scholars understand legislative parties more generally. We would strongly challenge with this contention: The usefulness of this case is that it provides evidence of legislative discipline in the absence of the necessary conditions identified in the literature. Thus, it provides important variation on independent variables—presence of party brand names, length of time horizons—that are often cited to explain discipline in Congress, an institution where these variables do not vary significantly, even over time. If discipline can be found despite internal heterogeneity in preferences and in the absence of these preconditions, one may question whether existing theories do indeed provide satisfying and coherent explanations for the partisanship observed in modern U.S. legislatures.