People-Building Federalism and (De-) Democratization in the U.S.

• In Event: The Road to Representative Institutions

Abstract

We’ve witnessed in recent years a significant uptick in interest among Americanists in the study of democratization and de-democratization in the United States. While there is widespread agreement that Americanists *should* engage the democratization literature more carefully, there is relatively little clarity about *how* scholars should situate the case of the United States within this body of scholarship. One noteworthy stumbling block is the U.S.’s second, and most durable, founding charter: the constitutional plan that was framed and ratified in 1787-1788, supplanting the “imbecilic” Articles of Confederation (as Hamilton memorably described it). How should scholars situate this episode in their narratives of (de-) democratization?

There is, in fact, a great deal of disagreement on this matter. Did this second founding charter rouse the democratic energies unleashed by the Revolution, or was the Revolution a kind of “false-start” where democratic gains were reversed by an elite counter-revolution that foreclosed authentically democratic alternatives? Or perhaps the new constitutional regime introduced a mix of possibilities, hastening some forms of democratic change and thwarting others?

Mindful of the linkages between early institutional arrangements and the highly uneven path of democratic change in the U.S., Guillermo O’Donnell averred that the U.S. was “far from eliminating the negative legacies of its starting point.” Accordingly, he called on scholars to draw “a map of initial conditions” (Democratization in America, 34). In this paper, I propose a preliminary mapping of “initial conditions” that links the peculiar features of the U.S.’s constitutional “starting point” to the signature pattern that defined the development of representative institutions through the long nineteenth century: the conjunction of mass participation with new forms of racial subordination and enhanced protections for propertied classes. Politics certainly became more *popular* in the antebellum era—as evidenced by the proliferation of elective offices and the dramatic uptick in voter turnout—but it did not become more democratic.

This pattern of popularization without democratization is a developmental trend that merits explanation. Building on the work of scholars like David Bateman, Paul Frymer, Aziz Rana, and Dawn Teele, this paper presents an analytic narrative focused on the downstream effects of the Constitution’s federal allocation of policy responsibilities. Examining several often-overlooked aspects of the constitutional settlement as well as precedent-setting statutory measures from the 1790s, I make the case that the division of policy “labor” between the states and the federal government at once lowered the socio-economic stakes of electoral politics in the states—the jurisdictions where core questions of democratic governance would be decided—while incentivizing the states to compete with one another to attract White settlers socially constructed to be loyal and assimilable.

As I explain, several constitutional provisions centralized the governance of taxation and debtor-creditor relations, transforming state politics by taking these highly contentious questions of fiscal and monetary policy out of the hands of the state legislatures and dropping them in Congress’s lap. Nationalizing key matters of political economy defused the potential threat to property posed by White yeomen, laborers, and artisans, and facilitated elite acquiescence to their inclusion in the electorate.

The Framers also established a “free trade zone” that was continental in scope, setting competitive pressures in place that would delimit the reach of state regulatory and redistributive measures. Yet positive political economists who herald this strategic landscape as “market-preserving federalism” tend to overlook the ascriptive and exclusionary flip side of this same dynamic. With statutory restrictions in place that effectively deterred the immigration of nonwhites from the West Indies and beyond (for example, The Naturalization Act of 1790 which limited the naturalization process to “free white persons”), the same strategic setting that empowered investors, firms, and citizens to “vote with their feet” also incentivized state-level lawmakers to lower barriers to suffrage and officeholding to entice European-American settlers to migrate to their jurisdictions.

I refer to this dynamic as “people-building federalism” and argue that this brand of state competition, when taken in conjunction with constitutional measures that calmed the pre-industrial class divisions in the states, helps account for the pattern of “popularization without democratization” that took shape in the early republic. I conclude with an analysis of the durability of this pattern, making the case that it has had a pronounced impact on the trajectory of democratic change in the U.S. well into the 20th century.

Author

• Jeff Selinger, Bowdoin College