For the Balkinization symposium on Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Daniel Carpenter[1]
The demos must have the exclusive opportunity to decide how matters are to be placed on the agenda of matters that are to be decided by means of the democratic process.
Robert Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (1989), 113.
Seeds come from many places. Why they germinate, grow, and flourish is much more interesting than their origins.
John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies (1984), 77.
What is
democracy and how does it advance? The
equation of democracy with elections and parties is so deeply ingrained as to
defy inspection. We assume that where more
voting occurs, more democracy follows; that where parties develop, democracy
matures. Canonical accounts of
democratization now identify bargains of elites, major parties or dominant
class coalitions as necessary processes of democratization. So too, a laser-like focus upon near-term responsiveness
has led scholars to examine whether more or less democracy, or more or less
equal democracy, follows from the short-run mapping of policies to voter
preferences (Bartels 2008; Gilens 2012).
With attention to expansions of constitutional rights and the courts, a
more liberal reading of democracy has arrived, combining emancipation and
equality, especially in the twentieth century.
Yet even there, the origins of those rights, their constitutional
embedding, remains elusive as an analytic target, confined more to narratives
of “movements” and court decisions than to elections.
I am
indebted to the network at Balkinization and to four outstanding scholars for
their time spent with the book. Frances
Lee and Robert Tsai each raise valuable questions about the relationship
between petitions and democracy.
Before engaging
with their readings seriatim, I want to pose the main question of this essay: How should we think about whether democracy
has advanced at any given time, or by any single plausible cause? In addressing that question, how do we
structure the proper narrative, how do we count and test properly?
There is no single answer to this question, but Democracy by Petition centers the idea of egalitarian agenda transformation as a necessary and too-often ignored process of democratization. The centrality of agendas to democracy in general is hardly new, as Robert Dahl underscored it in Democracy and Its Critics over three decades ago. Political scientists who have emphasized agendas – Kingdon, Baumgartner and Jones and many others – have followed E.E. Schattschneider in arguing that “the definition of alternatives is the supreme instrument of power.” Kingdon’s elegant typology of problem streams, solution streams and political streams, and their conjunctural creation of “policy windows,” showed that much had to happen before something became a dominant and attention-getting agenda item in Washington. But all of these streams are themselves the result of considerable “advance work,” even more than Kingdon himself fully theorized. Advance work not only precedes solutions but also the political stream, the politics of what gets defined as urgent, “unholy” or “evil,” dangerous or threatening, public or private, possible or impossible. Acts and processes that reshape agendas reshape what Deva Woodly has described as political or public “common sense” (Woodly 2015).
We cannot understand democratizing moments without examining this “advance work.” The coming of democracy and greater equality also had agenda-setting processes – rendering equality in its political, legal, social and economic dimensions as desirable, necessary and possible. Consider the Populist and Progressive eras (and movements) as narrated by two scholars, Daniel Rodgers in Atlantic Crossings (Rodgers 1998) and Elizabeth Sanders in Roots of Reform (Sanders 1999). Rodgers was astute enough to cite Kingdon (1984). The dynamics of Kingdon’s agenda-setting model affected not only “agendas” as a menu of final choices but the constrained stream of ideas up for debate at any one time. If we neglect the idea of agenda-setting, we miss the connections between the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The democratizing character of the Progressive Era, too, should be debated (McDonagh 1993), and our nation’s reckoning with the complicated – both progressive and aggressively racist – legacy of President Woodrow Wilson says as much. Yet as Elizabeth Sanders wrote in Roots of Reform, if one sees in the movements of the populists and progressives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century merely a failure, then one is misreading the way they changed the conversation in Congress. And as Rodgers, notes, the New Deal is in many ways an extension of the Progressive Era and the many political ideas and platforms to which it gave birth in Europe and the United States (see also Katznelson 2013)..The same
kind of advance work should be at the forefront of our thinking about the age
of American democratization. To take one of the prominent cases, democracy
is incompatible with slavery. Any number
of studies, most recently Manisha Sinha’s pioneering The Slave’s Cause,
show that the ideas and the inspiration for antislavery happened very early, as
did the emergence of various ideas about how to combat it politically, legally
and economically. To ask whether “the
Golden Age of Petitioning” improved democracy by focusing on short-run results is
something like asking whether “the golden age of slave revolts” (say Haiti
through Demerara through Nat Turner) improved American democracy by looking at
what happened in the ten years after the blood stopped flowing. The question is not, by itself, misleading. But
if asked in a myopic way, without attention to the agenda-setting processes
that Sinha and others narrate, it misses the entire relevant frame of action,
the whole ballgame if you will. On their
own and at the time, the massive petition campaigns of the 1830s changed
little, perhaps nothing. By mobilizing
American women en masse, by turning northern men against the Democratic Party,
by fostering an organizational legacy in the American Anti-Slavery Society and
the Liberty and Free Soil Parties and by creating the template for activity
that would again shift agendas during the Civil War, the cross-regional
explosion of the 25th Congress reshaped American politics for
generations.
Long-term
agenda dynamics are central to the democratizing petition campaign. Even part of the organizational legacy of
petitioning campaigns as well as their cultural legacy can be understood, at
least in part, in this way. Levinson’s
intriguing gestures to issue entrepreneurship and to lobbying can in part be
understood as a call for greater awareness of agenda politics in modern
democratic republics. Robert Tsai’s gives
a thoughtful contrarian reading to Democracy by Petition, but he
neglects the central role of agendas and agenda-setting in politics. Frances Lee rightly sees agendas as central
and justifiably calls for a research strategy centered upon them. I might suggest a different kind of
quantification strategy, but I am taken with her reorientation of the champ
de jeu that Maggie Blackhawk, David Zaret, Susan Zaeske and others,
including myself, have been working for several decades. Julie Suk’s reminder that judicial venues
remain an ever-present remains a can
shift agendas (20th century civil rights is best known, but also see
Gerald Rosenberg The Hollow Hope) but coordinated court action does not
necessarily lead to deliberation.
Let me
clarify one point generally. In contrast to Lee and Tsai, I claim not so much
that petitioning in general helped democratize North America, but that “this
new and more democratic petitioning played a central role in the development of
different dimensions of democracy – what I call institutional democracy,
procedural democracy, organizational democracy, and cultural democracy”
(Carpenter 2021: 25). It was the democratized petition that partially
democratized other realms, not the petition of old.
How to
Count? Thoughts on Frances Lee
It is a
treat to read and learn from the critique reading of France Lee, a scholar who
brings a marvelous historical and contemporary command of Congressional
politics and American political development to her theoretically-informed
scholarship. Lee asks for a fuller
accounting of petitions, thinking about the balance of this activity, and asks
the important question of just what fraction of petitions were plausibly democratizing
from 1790 to 1870.
Lee is absolutely
correct to insist on this kind of research enterprise, including petitioning
for land. Part of the problem is getting
systematic data on petitioning in American history (see Blackhawk et al 2020
for an important start). Beyond that, a
fuller accounting would demand a systematic survey of all petitioning to state
legislatures, bureaus and perhaps even municipal governments and councils. I think we’ll be waiting another decade if
not two or three for that, especially on the bureaucratic and municipal
government side.
But
let’s examine the data before us, first with a factual note: it’s pretty clear
that antislavery petitioning figured massively in both petitioning numbers,
signature numbers and democratizing legacies in the nineteenth-century United
States. The historical peak of
petitioning to the U.S. Congress came in the 25th Congress (see
Figure 2.1 and 2.2; also Blackhawk et al 2020), and it was that Congress that
was buffeted (overwhelmed, really) by the broad antislavery petitioning
campaign detailed in Chapter 10 (see also the pioneering Zaeske 2003). We also see antislavery petitioning
represented in the list of mass signature campaigns in Table 2.1, not just in
the 25th Congress, but in the Latimer petition campaign in
Massachusetts and in the 1850s and again during the Civil War.
How
should we count? What should we count?
In addition to aggregating and analyzing documents, as Lee suggests, I
think we should do at least three other things in thinking quantitatively about
this question. First, the democratizing
petition was more likely to be a mass petition or at least a petition with more
signatures, often tethered to other documents intentionally. If we do count documents, then, perhaps we
should weight our counts by signatures (e.g., Carpenter and Moore 2014; Democracy
by Petition, Chapters 2, 5-6, 10-15).
Second,
maybe we should be counting not just petitions but petitioning campaigns. This would of course require some sort of
definition of what a campaign is, what “adds up to” one and what does not.[2] Save for anti-dispossession petitions, land
petitions tended to come in individually, not as orchestrated aggregations of
documents and signatures. What made the
antislavery, Native rights, woman’s rights, anti-feudal, anti-dispossession,
anti-Dalhousie, pro-Catholic Mexican and other petitioning moments different
from most earlier petitions in human history was not the sheer number of
documents but their signatory weight, their connection to other mobilizations
of violence, protest and dissent, and their orchestration.
Third, I
think the question Lee asks should be reoriented to a degree. From an analytic perspective, the question is
less whether the majority of petitions were democratizing from 1790 to 1870
than whether petitioning and petitioning campaigns in those eight decades were
more likely to have left democratizing legacies petitioning campaigns before 1790
or petitioning campaigns after 1870.
Consider
the following scenario. If ten percent
of petitions were democratic or democratizing from 1800 to 1820 and yet they
left little legacy, but twenty percent of petitions were democratic or
democratizing from 1820 to 1850 and left a larger legacy, would we resist the
conclusion that “new and more democratic petitioning played a central role in
the development of different dimensions of democracy” (Carpenter 2021: 25)? In each case only a minority of petitions
were “democratizing,” but the legacy of petitioning campaigns is clearly larger
in the second one and that forces us (again in a Bayesian sense) to draw conclusions
different from the “priors” in our head. I think the estimate is probably larger than
10-20 percent, but taking this case at baseline, I would call for a
reorientation in how we count and, beyond that, in what our counts mean for how
we think about democracy.
Optimism
or Realism? Responses to Tsai
Robert
Tsai gives a thoughtful reading to Democracy by Petition, asking about
the nature of democratization in the broadest sense of the term and whether
petitioning comes from a stance of weakness or suffering as much as from an
attempt to shift power (I see these hypotheses as complements, not as the
substitutes that Tsai does). Tsai’s judgment
that Democracy by Petition is a “very optimistic portrait – perhaps
overly so” is one I I’m going to contend with.
The alternatives here are not “optimism” versus “pessimism” but one of
realism, an emphasis on the kind of agenda politics that too often escapes our
view.
First
let me register two notes of factual disagreement. Democracy
by Petition is a long book and any reader can be forgiven for missing it,
but Tsai did indeed neglect the extensive evidence for petitioning’s
“significant impact on the trajectory of the development of political
parties.” Some of the quantitative
evidence has been published in greater detail in articles (Carpenter and Schneer
2015; Carpenter 2016). Yet Chapter 9
shows that the American Whig Party emerged from Henry Clay’s petitioning
campaign to fight the Bank War against President Jackson, and that the statistical
and geographical legacy of that petitioning campaign is evident in voting
aggregates until the 1850s. So too, as
Foner (1970) and Gienapp (1987) showed long ago, understanding the pre-Civil-War
Republican Party is impossible with organizational reference to the Liberty and
Free Soil Parties and the broader organizational ecology on which they rested. And as Chapter 10 shows, the Liberty and Free
Soil parties, part of which were incorporated into the Republican coalition of
the 1850s, owe some of their origins to the vast petitioning campaign of the 25th
Congress.
The
evidence for Canada is no weaker. Chapter
9 relies on Mary Wilton’s authoritative account (Wilton 2000) to show that
petitioning was the dominant political practice in early nineteenth-century
Upper Canada and was in fact the motive force in the formation of an anti-Tory
opposition. Before that, Chapter 7 shows
how petitioning was one of the integrating practices that knit together the
French Canadian opposition in the 1820s, leading to the formation of a reform
movement and, later, the parti patriote.
It was DeTocqueville who remarked that the Canadian union plan of 1822
brought the colony’s French population together as never before, and what
interred the union project in the House of Commons and the Colonial Office was
the monster petition of 1822. Leaders of
Canadian reform politics in Lower Canada are the same leaders of the
petitioning movement (Chapter 7, 12). Similar
alliances played out in the Lower Canadian campaign against seigneurial tenure
(Chapter 12, Carpenter 2020).
Second,
Tsai’s reading of optimism neglects the degree to which Democracy by
Petition features democratizing petitions that served decidedly illiberal
interests. These narratives are a
feature, not a bug, of the democratization narrative in Democracy by Petition. The
petitions of Mexican Catholic conservatives (including newly mobilized Mexican
women) brought greater political equality on dimensions of gender, but their
endeavor resulted in a setback for religious minorities, especially Protestants
(Chapter 11). As the narratives of women’s petitioning emphasize (Chapters 10,
11, 14), temperance petitions to regulate alcohol were also some of the most
common and diffusive campaigns of the period.
I don’t know whether to celebrate these or not, but celebration or lamentation
is not the point. Temperance and
prohibition campaigns marshalled deeply democratic impulses. For women, they represented a strike against
the corrupt electoral order and the patriarchy of booze.
More
directly, why does Democracy by Petition place
partially greater emphasis on democratizing outcomes? One reason is that petitions themselves are
not the only, or even the main unit of analysis. And relatedly, the historical
characterization is not just that the “golden age” of petitioning advanced
democracy, but that it did so more than petitioning before and more so than
petitioning since.
I do highlight
– both analytically and narratively – democratizing petitions and petitioning
campaigns from those who were electorally weaker. By democratizing I mean that petitioners plausibly
transformed agendas, constructed new organizations (including parties as well
as the civil society organizations that DeTocqueville wrote about), reshaped
the dialogue around them and, in some cases, directly shaped the more formal
institutions of democracy (suffrage reform, non-feudal land holding, broader
participation in the public sphere).
Among
the main reasons I do so follows, as I have written elsewhere (Carpenter
forthcoming) from two philosophies of social science that emphasize distinctive
narratives. The first is Bayesian another reason is that scholarly research
should emphasize what we have learned from evidence that differs from that
which we already recognize or assume. In
the philosophy of science, this is the idea of Bayesian conditionalization,
the principle that if we think a pattern negligible but witness testimonies
(even a few) utterly discordant with that idea, then we need to revise our
judgments and perhaps appreciable so, in light of the evidence (Laplace 1823; Talbott
2008).
A
Bayesian approach would point to what already seems firmly ingrained in our theorization
and our evidence base, what which we already seem to “know”: American democracy
in the nineteenth century is that it was a racial empire (Frymer 2017; Greer
2018; Saunt 2020). The United States in
particular constructed “a white man’s republic” (Bateman 2019), a site of simultaneous
empowerment from below but also of newfound hierarchy where Black Americans,
Native Americans, women, immigrants and workers of many trades were disempowered
and kept from the public sphere. Even among white men, we have learned
(Wilentz 2003), nineteenth-century political power was often held by those
newly and long-ago capitalized, with landed and parvenu wealth, as well as by
church-aligned or party-aligned elites. So
too, our understanding of the history of petitioning suggests that the white
man’s republic was often built through mechanisms that bundled lobbying with
inside petitioning (Bailey 1979; Greene 2014).
Let’s
start with a radical counterpoint. Could
we not just as easily ask whether the golden age of elections improved American
democracy? According to our usual
calculus, such a question is literally illogical, meaningless. Since democracy is reducible to elections,
any advance of the frequency of elections is, ipso facto, an advance of
democracy. But if the golden age of
elections advanced slavery (the Second Party System systematically elided it);
furthered Indigenous dispossession (Saunt 2020); curtailed women’s rights and
presence in public spaces (the eclipse of petticoat electorate in New Jersey in
1808 was its last stand, save for the small women’s electorate in Mashpee
(Wampanoag) village that lasted until the 1820s); and stymied attempts to reform
a crippling feudal system of land tenure in New York (Huston 2000; McCurdy 2001);
then maybe we should revisit the question and how it is asked. In the 1850s, as Chapter 14 summarizes,
electoral democracy was flourishing in the Deep South, but by any number of
other indicia, democracy was struggling.
What
Tsai misses is the power of agenda
democracy. This is the democracy to
which John Kingdon pointed in his positivist work in 1984 and which Robert Dahl
urged in his theoretical work in 1989. Put
differently, if we think democratic agenda-setting petition an unlikely
narrative, then we need to address the following questions and do so in a joint
narrative.
· How did women, who never had been invited to give testimony before legislatures or their committees before 1838, come to appear regularly at legislative hearings across the American states – Massachusetts (1838) and then in the 1850s New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nebraska Territory, Kansas and Indiana – on matters on which women had petitioned in greater numbers than ever before. Why are the reports of these hearings invariable reports on the petitions that triggered the testimony itself? How did Massachusetts pass the first married women’s property law, immediately after these hearings, in 1855, when women were not part of the electorate?
- How did the United States come to debate slavery not just in print culture but in the halls of the United States Congress and state legislatures across the north and the west from the 1830s through the 1860s? How did that debate – so radical and transformative a battle as to open the question of whether or not the petitions and, by extension, their many thousands of Black and women authors, could be heard in the U.S. Congress (Zaeske 2003, Sinha 2019) – come to capture the attention (and vitriol) of Americans nationwide?
- How did the relentless processes of Indian removal and the machineries of injustice targeted at Native Nations get debated so broadly before assemblies and offices across the continent, whether in Boston, Québec, Lansing, Washington and Santa Fe (Chapter 5, Chapter 12)?
- How did French Canadians, a subject population in the world’s most powerful empire, fend off a Colonial Office plan to merge their colony with its English-language neighbor and erase French institutions in doing so? How did those same French Canadians cast so much doubt on the reputation of a colonial governor as to get him ousted from office? How did that same campaign raise metropolitan awareness of the weakness of legislative institutions in French Canada and lead to them being strengthened (Chapter 7; Carpenter and Brossard 2019)?
- After centuries of the persistence of feudal tenure long after the advance of fee simple arrangements in land, how did two countries at roughly the same time launch decades-long debates on the persistence of pre-modern land holding (Chapter 12; Carpenter 2020)?[3]
When we neglect agenda-setting, we neglect one of the most important potential “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985). In this sense, if Democracy by Petition is optimistic, so is James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak and so, likely, the other narrative that Levinson read, Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done (and beyond that, also Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause).
It is in that long run of discourse-shifting, association-building and aspiration voicing – procedural democracy, organizational democracy and cultural democracy – that we must center analysis. We should do it when the legacies of democratization are not celebrated from a liberal standpoint: temperance, anti-religious toleration, even dispossession and enslavement. And we should do it when century-long struggles for equality, sovereignty and liberation – always partial, never forever won – cry out for explanatory narrative.
Daniel Carpenter is Allie S. Freed Professor of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. You can reach him by e-mail at dcarpenter@gov.harvard.edu.
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[1] For the Balkinization symposium on Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021). I thank Maggie Blackhawk, Allan Greer, Jacob Hacker, Frances Lee, Sandy Levinson, Christopher Parker, Paul Pierson, Julie Suk, Robert Tsai and Nadia Urbinati for discussions that were generative in forming these ideas.
[2] Without casting doubt on the reality of “movements” as they have energized and buffeted American history (Sinha 2016, Masur 2021), I consciously avoided the term but for a few instances in Democracy by Petition, preferring “activism” and “campaign” as concepts historically more tethered to the reality of petitioning. The question I kept coming back to is what evidentiary criteria historical social scientists should use in deciding whether a constellation of activities and organizations amounted to a movement versus what constellations fell below that threshold.
[3] For quantitative evidence that petitioning campaigns in French Canada had plausible effects more direct and discernible on agenda-setting votes than on votes for the final legislation, see Carpenter 2020.