Replication Data for: Legacies of Participation: How Civil Society and Petitions Shape Legislative Institutions, Public Policy, and Representation (doi:10.7910/DVN/Z550EO)

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Replication Data for: Legacies of Participation: How Civil Society and Petitions Shape Legislative Institutions, Public Policy, and Representation

doi:10.7910/DVN/Z550EO

Harvard Dataverse

2022-06-14

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Resch, Tobias, 2027, "Replication Data for: Legacies of Participation: How Civil Society and Petitions Shape Legislative Institutions, Public Policy, and Representation", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Z550EO, Harvard Dataverse, V1, UNF:6:QpHNKtBe5nqi4zpCe+Tu8Q== [fileUNF]

Replication Data for: Legacies of Participation: How Civil Society and Petitions Shape Legislative Institutions, Public Policy, and Representation

doi:10.7910/DVN/Z550EO

Resch, Tobias (Harvard University)

Department of Government

Harvard Dataverse

Department of Government

Wall, Thom

Resch, Tobias

2022-05-03

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Z550EO

Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Enter Keywords here, hit + button on right for additional keyword fields

Harvard University, Department of Government

This dissertation explores how mass civil society and political activism have helped shape legislative institutions, public policy, and representation. In each chapter, my coauthors and I leverage newly created datasets to investigate the historical links between mass political behavior, particularly by exercise of the right to petition enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Congress. The first essay, coauthored with Benjamin Schneer (Harvard Kennedy School), examines the link between mass civil society groups and policy outcomes by analyzing the opposition to national prohibition by German-American associations in the early twentieth century. Using historical club directories, petitioning activity, and newspaper directories to measure German-American civil society across time and geography, we find a rapid decline in organizational strength that coincided with anti-German hysteria and state-sponsored suppression efforts related to U.S. entry to World War I. We then compare two crucial votes on near-identical proposed constitutional amendments in the U.S. House of Representatives---the narrow defeat of the 1914 Hobson Prohibition amendment and the successful passage of the eventual Eighteenth Amendment in 1917---and find that efforts at suppression mattered most in districts where German-American organizational strength had previously been pivotal. We estimate that, without the suppression of German-American organizations, the Prohibition Amendment would not have passed the House of Representatives. Our findings add to an understanding of when and under what circumstances groups and organizations successfully influence public policy and provide a new explanation for the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. The second essay, coauthored with Benjamin Schneer, Maggie Blackhawk (NYU School of Law), and Daniel Carpenter (Harvard University), investigates committee formation in early American legislatures, which occurred at the same time as those assemblies were inundated with petitions. We present case studies and analyze original datasets of petitions sent to the Virginia House of Burgesses (1766--1769) and of petitions sent to the House of Representatives(1789--1875) to support our model-derived claims that petitions, complexity of their subject matter, and their geographic dispersion predict committee creation. Our theoretical argument helps reinterpret the entropy of political agendas and the origins of standing committees in American legislatures. In the third essay, also coauthored with Benjamin Schneer, Maggie Blackhawk, and Daniel Carpenter, we introduce and analyze the Congressional Petitions Database (CPD), which tracks virtually every petition introduced to Congress from 1789 to 1949. We present analyses to show that Native Americans and women not only petitioned regularly, but also that the initial treatment of their respective petitions was similar to that of all others, thus offering systematic evidence of the petition serving as a mechanism for representation among otherwise unenfranchised groups.

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This study was deposited under the of the Data-PASS standard deposit terms. A copy of the usage agreement is included in the file section of this study.

The data archived in the Harvard Government Dissertation Dataverse are <b>embargoed for use for up to five years<b/> from the deposit date.

I will include a bibliographic citation acknowledging the use of these data in any publication or presentation in which these data are used. Such citations will appear in footnotes or in the reference section of any such manuscript.

This dataset is made available under a Creative Commons CC0 license with the following additional/modified terms and conditions:

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10.1086/716285

Schneer, Benjamin, Tobias Resch, Maggie Blackhawk, and Daniel Carpenter. 2021. “The Popular Origins of Legislative Jurisdictions: Petitions and Standing Committee Formation in Revolutionary Virginia and the Early U.S. House.” The Journal of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1086/716285.

10.1111/lsq.12305.

Blackhawk, Maggie, Daniel Carpenter, Tobias Resch, and Benjamin Schneer. 2021. “Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789–1949.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 46 (3): 817–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12305.

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