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The Emergence of Class Politics in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2020

Carl E. Gershenson*
Affiliation:
Sociology, Princeton University, Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544
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Abstract

How do economic and social position structure partisan affiliation? While neo-Durkheimian treatments of class and political behavior suggest the potential for extreme variability in the social bases of partisan affiliation, data limitations have largely restricted quantitative studies of this relationship to the postwar era. This temporal limitation restricts variation in observable social structure, thus limiting the ability of analysts to assess theoretical explanations. To address this gap, I introduce novel data on occupation and ethnicity for more than 20,000 Massachusetts state legislators in the nineteenth century. This allows me to find the “best fit” model for the social bases of party affiliation in four distinct periods in Massachusetts’ political history. I show that the Massachusetts political system transitioned from a system of occupational cleavages to proto-class cleavages between the First Party System (1795–1826) and Second Party System (1835–54). The Civil War and Reconstruction Era (1855–77) was characterized by the emergence of an ethnic cleavage, but near-modern class divisions emerged as the strongest predictors of legislators’ party affiliations for the remainder of the Third Party System (1878–93). Combined with historiographical accounts of the nineteenth century, these analyses suggest that the emergence of class politics requires intermediary organizations such as unions and professional associations, the liberalization of economic laws and regulation, and the increasingly unequal distribution of productive property.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Science History Association
Figure 0

Table 1. Summary of hypotheses

Figure 1

Figure 1. Occupational representation in Massachusetts State Legislature.

Note: The Y-axis is not constant across graphs.
Figure 2

Figure 2. Ethnic representation in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

Note: “Mean Bayes” refers to the average Bayes Score for all legislators in a given year.
Figure 3

Figure 3. Irish birth and Irish ethnicity, 1850–80.

Note: The summary values displayed in these graphs are highly correlated (r > .90).
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Table 2. Decomposition of big interest groups in best-fit models

Figure 5

Table 3. Best-fit logistic regression model for First Party System (Jeffersonian = 1)

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Table 4. Best-fit logistic regression model for Second Party System (Democrat = 1)

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Table 5. OLS regression models using “large classes” for First to Third Party systems and Civil War/Reconstruction Era (Jeffersonian Republican/Democrat = 1)

Supplementary material: File

Gershenson Supplementary Materials

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