Beginning with a couple of papers published in this JOURNAL in the mid 1980s, Robert McGuire and Robert Ohsfeldt returned to the once-dormant view of Charles Beard's (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York: Macmillan Company, 1913) thesis that delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 clashed over creation of the constitution, based primarily on whether they were merchants with “personalty” interests, or farmers with “realty” interests. In To Form a More Perfect Union, McGuire updates his joint work with Ohsfeldt and his solo-authored work, corrects some errors in the earlier data, and presents some new specifications and additional estimations. Although most of the original studies appeared in the mid to late 1980s, one chapter is adapted from a 1997 article. All told, this is an impressive volume that, while not without its share of questions, nicely synthesizes and surpasses the earlier work, pulling it all into a single coherent and impressive piece of scholarship.

The central theme of the book is a recasting of the Beard thesis to show that self-interest by the delegates played a fundamental role in influencing their decisions at the margin. This is an important distinction from Beard and from much of the previous analysis of Beard by historians and political scientists, which focused on whether individuals and groups at the Convention did or did not vote a specific way. Instead, multivariate regressions are employed to estimate the marginal impact on the probability of voting for or against.

Sixteen specific votes at the 1787 convention are analyzed. Thirteen of the votes are then pooled to determine the percentage of times a delegate voted in a pronationalistic stance. Using a variety of explanatory variables, multiple regressions suggest that personal interests and ideology, and constituency interests and ideology, matter.

Although the analysis is comprehensive, there are some methodological questions that suggest the results are not as straightforward as presented. First, the actual votes of the delegates to the 1787 convention are unknown. McGuire relies upon Forrest McDonald's (We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) inferences on 16 specific votes, which were based on a review of the debates, correspondences, and some educated guesswork. McDonald was not able to make any inferences regarding the eight Pennsylvania delegates for any votes but conjectured they probably all voted the same. McGuire accepts this conjecture and also adds delegates who were not present on particular votes, so that he has the same 53 delegates (two delegates who left the convention early were not included) for each vote regardless of whether or not they actually voted. This makes interpreting the results a little more difficult. Furthermore, assuming the Pennsylvania delegates always voted the same may bias the state-level variable estimates. In chapter 3 McGuire presents a very nice detailed analysis for six of the individual votes. He also discounts two of the votes because McDonald's coding for these votes are not consistent with how the states actually voted. This may cause concern for some readers regarding McDonald's inferences for the other votes as well.

Second, from a great variety of regressions, the economic model is supported if any of the variables are found to be significant, even when there is no consistency across the votes. This also suggests pooling the votes may not be appropriate. Also, with so few observations some of the variables do not contain enough variation to be included in logit analysis. For example, there are only three debtors in the dataset, so this variable could be included in a logit regression only when one of the three debtors opposed the other two in how they voted. And given that the debtor variable had some of the strongest results, it is hard to reach a firm conclusion based on only three voters. Similarly, only four delegates are considered farmers. This coding for farmer is also apparently much different than Beard's view, which suggested that farming interests comprised a sizable coalition.

Finally, I might quibble with the interpretation of the importance of constituency interest variables. McGuire argues constituency interests would constrain delegates from acting in their own immediate self-interest in order to secure future votes for office. This is questionable because delegate votes were kept secret. To the extent that constituency interests matter, it might be that delegates wanted to benefit their constituents regardless of future political ambitions.

These methodological concerns, however, are absent from the last two chapters, which focus on the 13 state ratification conventions, and are therefore much more convincing. Here, the actual votes are known and only actual voters are included in the analysis. And with observations for over 1,350 delegates, there is more variation in the data. Most of the constituency variables are not found to be important but, surprisingly, delegates from smaller states were more likely to support ratification. On average, delegates from the later conventions were more likely, at the margin, to oppose ratification, until it became a moot issue after the first nine states ratified, after which point delegates from the remaining states were much more likely at the margin to support ratification. The economic interests were also estimated to be much stronger in impact during the nine conventions before ratification became moot.

Empirical analysis is also conducted on seven individual state conventions for which more data exist, by recasting constituency interests to the county level. Finally, three states for which McGuire could obtain data representing personal ideology (age, ancestry, religion, etc.) are considered in greater detail. In both cases, the results vary considerably as to which specific variables are found to be important. While many historians believe different factors were at work in different states, McGuire's analysis often conflicts with which particular factors are or are not estimated to be important in each state.

In sum, this book should help to reawaken the debate on construction of the U.S. Constitution. The detailed summaries and reams of regression analysis will be fruitful to economic, political, and legal historians. Although this may not represent the last word on the subject, it is hard to argue with McGuire's contention that “Constitutions are the products of the interests of those who frame and adopt them” (p. 8, italics in original).