Petitions Above Party: Congressional Representation and Petition, 1789-1950
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Description
Political theory has long recognised the centrality of parties to representative democracy, even going so far as to claim that ‘parties created democracy’. Yet far less attention has been paid to other mechanisms of representation – above all, the petition. This chapter draws upon an original database of over 500,000 petitions submitted to the Congress from the Founding to 1950. The data demonstrates that petitions were a vital form of representation. The volume of petitions to Congress experienced a number of peaks before declining steadily in the early 20th century. After 1945, the vestiges of the congressional petition system were dismantled by a series of federal laws, and the number of petitions dwindled to negligible levels. The trends for petitions to seem not to correlate with major party shifted, unlike the close relationship between patterns of partisanship and the electoral process. In contrast, there does not appear to have been a period where the party in power resulted in a broadening or narrowing of petitioning. The exception centred on the ‘Gag Rule’ in Congress and focused more on the battle over slavery than petitioning and representation. This chapter shows that petitions were an important and independent form of representation within Congress.
First Page
268
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197267721.003.0018
Source Publication
Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period to the Present
Source Editors/Authors
Richard Huzzey, Maartje Janse, Henry Miller, Joris Oddens, Brodie Waddell
Publication Date
6-20-2024
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Recommended Citation
Maggie Blackhawk & Daniel Carpenter,
Petitions Above Party: Congressional Representation and Petition, 1789-1950,
Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period to the Present
268
(2024).
Available at:
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/2119
