Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century

✍ Scribed by Ballard C. Campbell

Publisher: Harvard University Press
Year: 1980
Tongue: English
Leaves: 272
Edition: Reprint 2013
Category: Library

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

The rise of an immensely powerful federal government in the twentieth century has tended to obscure the importance of state and local government in American history. Yet government at these lesser levels had the most direct and continuous effect on the lives of ordinary citizens. Through an analysis of late-nineteenth-century state legislatures in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, Ballard Campbell has written what one expert has called "the best book on legislative politics, past or present." The period he examines was one of rapid change and great challenge. Urbanization, industrialization, and increasing national integration forced innumerable difficult and important decisions on state legislators. Campbell is sensitive to these stresses on law-making, and skillfully analyzes the interplay between personal and constituent factors that affected lawmakers.

The author differentiates clearly between local and general aspects of state policymaking, giving full consideration to its more subjective and idiosyncratic elements. His comparison of partisan, economic, urban, ethnocultural, and regional influences on legislative behavior will serve as a model for all future studies.

By closely examining the substantive dimension of the governmental process and its relation to mass politics, Representative Democracy advances "the new political history." Campbell's discussion of legislative composition and procedure, the content and context of contested issues, and responses to these issues challenges numerous stereotypes about American state legislatures.

✦ Table of Contents

PREFACE
CONTENTS
TABLES
1. INTRODUCTION
2. Electing Representatives
3. The Lawmakers and Lawmaking
4. The Contested Issues
5. Party Voting
6. Legislating Community Mores
7. Ethnicity and Dimensions of Legislative Voting
8. Economic Policy
9. The Issues of Government and the Roots of Partisanship
10. Legislative Democracy in the Late Nineteenth Century
Appendix on Sources and Methods
Notes
Index

📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES

Political Thought and Public Policy in t

📁 Political Thought and Public Policy in the Nineteenth Century: An Introduction

✍ Robert Pearson; Geraint Williams 📂 Library 📅 1984 🏛 Longman 🌐 English

The Decline of Representative Democracy:

📁 The Decline of Representative Democracy: Process, Participation, and Power in State Legislatures

✍ Alan Rosenthal 📂 Library 📅 1997 🏛 CQ Press 🌐 English

<p><span>Based on a leading scholar′s firsthand observations of legislatures as well as extensive interviews with legislators, legislative staff, and lobbyists, this important work describes and analyzes the contemporary state of legislatures and the legislative process in the fifty states. It explo

Democracy and Its Critics: Anglo-America

📁 Democracy and Its Critics: Anglo-American Democratic Thought in the Nineteenth Century

✍ Jon Roper 📂 Library 📅 2012 🏛 Routledge 🌐 English

Originally published in 1989, a guide for students coming for the first time to the study of democracy, who often find it difficult to trace the developement of the idea and to place it in historical context. In this accesible and informative text, Jon Roper introduces the reader to arguments for an

Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in

📁 Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century

✍ Mary P. Ryan 📂 Library 📅 1998 🏛 University of California Press 🌐 English

Mary P. Ryan traces the fate of public life and the emergence of ethnic, class, and gender conflict in the nineteenth-century city in this ambitious retelling of a key period of American political and social history. Basing her analysis on three quite different cities--New York, New Orleans, and San

Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in

📁 Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century

✍ Mary P. Ryan 📂 Library 📅 2020 🏛 University of California Press 🌐 English

Civic wars: democracy and public life in

📁 Civic wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century

✍ Mary P. Ryan 📂 Library 📅 1997 🏛 University of California Press 🌐 English