Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Emergence of Political Careers and Parties, New York 1777-1821

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

As U.S. citizens, we tend to take for granted the existence and operation of electoral parties in the contemporary United States. While they have been the subject of much study, we know very little regarding how modern electoral parties emerged in our history. Focusing on the State of New York, the pivot for the first national party system, this project provides a systematic analysis of the social and political factors that structured the actions of those individuals who built the first parties. The project investigates how they formed networks of political support that spanned across space as well as different levels of government (local, state, federal) and traces how local political elites were pulled into the emerging federal party system. Findings from the project will provide greater insight into the origins of political parties in our democracy, and help to inform our understanding of contemporary political parties through greater detail regarding their evolution. While political parties were a major concern of scholars across several disciplines, answers to the question of where parties come from are still almost entirely absent. Progress in addressing this question has been stymied in part by the absence of systematic individual-level data. This project approaches the question of party formation through two analyses that include these data. First, because in America the organization of parties was intrinsically bound up with the organization of the state and because creating a state involves office-creation, this project will first reconstruct the structure of the larger system of offices that political elites had to navigate. The project will construct a novel database of all civil, judicial, and military offices from the federal to the state and local level from 1777 to 1821 in the state of New York. Using mobility tables, vacancy chain and sequence analysis, the project investigates the emergence of political careers as meaningful sequences of offices held by individuals. This forms the backdrop for the second analysis. For a subset of 730 political elites who were active during the crucial years between the Constitutional Convention and the election of 1800, the project adds information on party affiliation, socio-demographic characteristics, and the multiple social networks in which they were embedded. Using this comprehensive dataset, the project employs a regression framework to study the factors that determined which political elites affiliated with which party. Findings from this project will inform theories of democracy and its evolution, as well as provide an important historical portrait of individual political careers at a critical time in the development of our nation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.