Partisanship and Procedural Choice: Institutional Change in the Early Congress, 1789-1823

Abstract

Conventional accounts of institutional change in the early House of Representatives suggest that increases in the size and workload of the chamber led members to adopt rules restricting the procedural rights of its members. In this article, I argue that this conventional explanation understates the influence of partisanship in dictating early procedural choice. Specifically, I use the House's adoption of the previous question rule in 1811 to test competing workload and partisan explanations of institutional change. Analyzing changes in congressional workload and partisanship from 1789 to 1823, I find that the polarization of partisan preferences strongly directed procedural choices in the early House. Moreover, I argue that procedural choices in both the House and Senate outlasted the voting alignments that first shaped them. The findings suggest the power of a partisan theory of institutional change to account for the timing and direction of congressional development and interchamber differences.