Pledging Democracy: Congressional Politics and Strategic Support for a National Initiative and Referendum

Matthew T. Harrigan (corresponding author) Ph.D. Student University of Florida Department of Political Science 234 Anderson Hall P.O. Box 117325 Gainesville, FL 32611-7325 Phone: 561-386-8988 Email: [email protected]

Daniel A. Smith Professor University of Florida Department of Political Science 234 Anderson Hall P.O. Box 117325 Gainesville, FL 32611-7325 Phone: 352-273-2346 Email: [email protected]

Abstract

While Congress routinely delegates legislative authority to bureaucratic agencies and state governments, it has yet to devolve such power directly to the voters. There have been moments over the last century, however, in which individual members of Congress have chosen to publicly show support for direct democracy at the national level. In one such case, that of

Senator Robert Owen and the 60th House, over one-hundred representatives declared support for a national advisory initiative and referendum during the 1906 campaign. We argue that the rationale for such a pledge was strategic, that these members of Congress acted as members of a minority party and simply played on district opinion in the face of close elections. Drawing on a unique dataset and employing logistic regression, we find that those members who pledged support for a national initiative and referendum were much more likely to be members of the minority party, to hail from states that had recently adopted direct democracy, and to have faced close electoral margins. Our findings not only offer answers to the questions of 1906, but also add new wrinkles to our larger understanding of both Congressional behavior and the institutional effects of direct democracy.

2 Congressional delegation of legislative authority is not uncommon. Congress routinely delegates or devolves its authority to other entities, namely executive branch agencies.1

Bureaucratic agencies are commonly tasked by Congress to administer enacted programs, which typically includes making and enforcing civil service laws and administrative rules and regulations. As Lupia and McCubbins argue, the delegation of legislative power to bureaucratic agencies is “a necessary component of modern democracy,” and can actually serve to strengthen the political institution that is devolving power.2 The notion, however, that Congress might delegate its constitutionally prescribed authority to citizens is another matter entirely. Unlike state legislatures, of which roughly half have delegated to citizens the power of initiative and referendum, Congress has shown considerable reserve in not granting to citizens lawmaking powers.3 Indeed, permitting citizens to have a direct—or even an advisory—role in policymaking might compromise, if not outright undermine, the American constitutional system of representative government.

Yet, in the 1906 midterm elections, one in four members who would serve in the 60th

Congress (1907-08) pledged to delegate broad plebiscitary authority to citizens. In 1908,

Senator Robert Owen, a Democrat from Oklahoma, introduced a bill calling for the adoption of a national advisory initiative and referendum (I&R). When he introduced his bill, S. 7208, and its accompanying joint resolution, S.R. 94, calling for the support of the states on the matter, Owen submitted several supporting documents for the Congressional Record.4 Among them were several contemporaneous scholarly studies about the positive aspects of and state-level support for direct democracy, as well as a previously-published list of 113 members of the US House who in the previous election (1906) had publicly pledged their support for such measures.

Although the practice of direct democracy in several states and numerous localities was

3 becoming more commonplace and increasingly popular, the discussion in Congress of possibly adding such mechanisms at the national level had been entirely unprecedented.5

The consideration of members of Congress pledging support for a bill calling for advisory direct democracy mechanisms raises an important theoretical question: Why would members of Congress ever agree to cede their policymaking authority to citizens? Though scholars have probed this question in other legislative contexts and at the sub-national level, they have not broached the question of why some members of Congress a century ago entertained empowering citizens by devolving to them legislative powers. 6 In our examination of the considerable legislative support for what would have been perhaps the biggest congressional delegation of institutional power ever granted to citizens, we draw on a unique dataset culled from the historical record. Our analysis, which uses logistic regression to take into consideration the partisan and intrapartisan divisions in the House, the electoral competition facing its members, and the state-level political context of their districts, unpacks the motivations of the

113 House members of 60th Congress—79 Democrats and 34 Republicans—who pledged to support direct democracy at the national level. We argue that congressional support for delegating institutional power to citizens was not whimsical; rather, it was quite deliberate and rational, as those legislators who had pledged in the 1906 election cycle to support the mechanisms of direct democracy calculated that pledging to empower citizens could enhance their election prospects, or even upset the partisan balance of power in Congress.

Our historical account, which teases out the motivations of the men who pledged their support for Owen’s proposal for direct democracy at the national level, is a story of political party rivalry, electoral competition, and the changing political landscape across the American states. Congress, of course, did not adopt a national advisory I&R in the 60th Congress, or in any

4 subsequent legislative session. But the fact that roughly one-quarter of the members of the

House publicly pledged to subordinate the institutional power of the legislative branch is telling, as these members of Congress—most in the minority, but a sizeable number in the majority party—were willing to make a populist promise in order to win their own seat or upset the majority party’s control. Specifically, we argue that members of the minority Democratic

Party—as well as Republicans who were frustrated with Speaker Joe Cannon’s Tsarist rule— were likely to pledge their support for the reform. Most importantly, though, we argue that members of both parties who faced competitive elections in the 1906 midterms and who represented districts in states that had adopted direct democracy reforms were the most willing to pledge to subvert the institutional power of Congress. Our study, then, of Congress’ consideration a century ago of a national advisory I&R adds new wrinkles to our larger understanding of both congressional behavior and the indirect institutional effects of direct democracy. In light of the widespread anti-incumbent sentiment, Tea Party activism, and statewide ballot measures that characterize the modern political environment, our analysis of political pressures and the potential for institutional reform a century ago seems especially relevant today.

The Case of Senator Robert Owen and the 60th House of Representatives

Biennial losers for the previous decade, many Congressional Democrats saw the sweeping Progressive mood across the country as an electoral opening for them to take a collective swipe at the dominant Republicans. In 1908, amidst the rising tide of progressive sentiment in many of the states, Senator Robert Owen, a progressive Democrat from Oklahoma, introduced a bill “providing for a modern system whereby the voters of the United States may

5 instruct their National Representatives.”7 That “modern system” would have consisted of both an advisory initiative and an advisory referendum at the national level, each of which would have afforded citizens the right to introduce legislation for a popular vote. Owen’s bill detailed the specifics of such a system, including the signature requirements, verification procedures, and the ability of petitioners to call special elections. His bill was accompanied by a joint resolution

“inviting the cooperation of the States in the establishment of a national advisory initiative and referendum.”8 In the supplementary materials submitted to the Senate with his bills, Owen included a variety of documents intended to demonstrate the groundswell of support across the states for national direct democracy. A memorial by the Initiative and Referendum League of

America included a November, 1906 article from the Referendum News hailing the success of the 1906 election. The article listed 113 members of the 60th House who had just been elected or reelected and who, with varying intensity, were:

committed to restore to the people a system whereby they can instruct by direct ballot on measures concerning interstate commerce (the trusts), civil service, immigration, trial by jury, or any modification of the law of injunction, eight-hour day in Government-contract work, and the submission of constitutional amendments for the initiative and referendum, election of the United States Senators by the people, and election of fourth-class postmasters by the patrons of each office.9

Owen looked to House members who had pledged their support during the 1906 election as natural allies for his joint resolution in the lower chamber.

At the time Owen introduced his bill and joint resolution, Congress was dominated by the

Republican Party. Since the 1896 election, Republicans had controlled not only the presidency, but also both branches of the legislature with substantial majorities. Much has been written on the consolidation of power by the Republican majority in Congress during this time period, ranging from Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed’s Rules to Speaker Joe Cannon’s lockdown of the

6 legislative calendar, control of the Rules Committee, and distributor of all committee assignments.10 Republicans in Congress were winning elections and dominating the agenda, and they would enjoy a 223-167 majority over the Democrats in the 60th House when its 1st Session commenced in 1907.11 The Republican majority also had no third party to deal with, as the

Populists had faded out of Congress by 1906, and Progressive and Socialist candidates had yet to begin winning nationally-relevant elections.

Opposition to Republican dominance and the all-powerful Speaker Cannon had yet to coalesce in the 60th Congress. House Democrats, who held 168 of the 391 House seats, were generally disorganized and often at odds with one another, largely due to sectional differences. 12

Somewhat more threatening than the Democrats to the GOP’s legislative control, in terms of the future of both the Republican Party and the position of Speaker, was the rise of intraparty competition. Fringe Republicans—often called “insurgents”—who felt disenfranchised by the dominance of Speaker Cannon, began to organize and fight for rules changes that would allow them back into the process.13 Indeed, in 1907, over 30 House Republicans defected from their party on important procedural matters concerning the ability of the Speaker to dominate the floor agenda.14 In the coming years, Democrats and these insurgent Republicans would unite to take down the institutional powers of the Speaker and redefine the procedures in the House; but that clash would still be a few years away.

As the seeds of discord were beginning to be sowed in Republican Washington, populist sentiments and progressive reforms were manifesting themselves in new ways across the states at the turn of the century. By the time Owen introduced his bill to the Senate in 1908, South Dakota

(1898), Utah (1900), Oregon (1902), Montana (1906), and Oklahoma (1907) had already adopted the initiative, and Maine, Michigan, and Missouri would do so that year.15 Twelve more states,

7 renewing with Arkansas and Colorado in 1910, would adopt some form of direct democracy within the next decade. The move to direct democracy in these states was a remnant of the

Populist movement of the previous decade and was seen as a means of allowing the people to check their representatives.16 In many of the states, the push for adoption had taken years of effort and massive campaigns by referendum “leagues,” largely influenced by labor unions seeking to break the ties between corporate interests and politicians.17

When members of the 60th House pledged support for national direct democracy prior to the 1906 election, they did so at a time in which the legislative branch was about to undergo great institutional change. Congress had been dominated by the untouchable Republicans, but it was entering a period of tension and antagonism that would reshape the institution itself.

Democrats had been broken and grasping for answers, but the Republican Party, while united at the top, was splintering on the edges. Outside of Washington, citizens were demanding the institutional power to check their state legislatures and to break the corporate stranglehold on the political system. The time was ripe for strategic politicians to use their minority party status and the changing political environment in the states to pledge their support for direct democracy as a way to cater votes and win close elections.

Strategic Delegation of Institutional Power

Assessing why some members of Congress might support delegating power to citizens in the form of direct democracy requires an understanding of the multi-layered contexts within which representatives operate. In rational choice language, the decision calculus of members of

Congress is defined by their involvement in “games in multiple arenas.”18 For the purposes of this analysis, we consider members of Congress to be involved in games at and across three

8 levels: the institution, the party, and the individual. These games are played simultaneously, and, while the outcomes are rarely perfectly zero-sum, gains at one level sometimes come at the expense of gains at another. In the campaign game, however, members are acting as individuals and playing to the constituency. Thus, they are afforded opportunities to promise tradeoffs at one level in exchange for electoral gains. Our argument stems from this last point, that the members of Congress who publicly supported national advisory I&R in 1906 advocated delegation of legislative authority from a strategic, electorally-motivated standpoint.

At the institutional level, members of Congress are concerned with the operation of government and the security of Congress’s place in that government. To that end, Congress sometimes delegates or devolves its authority to the executive branch and its bureaucratic agencies. Dodd and Schott discuss the delegation of authority to the bureaucracy as a necessary product of the expansion of the American state, a perception shared by other scholars.19 Kiewiet and McCubbins argue that delegation is simply a necessity in the face of a collective action problem, a point expanded upon by Epstein and O’Halloran, who emphasize delegation as a means of dealing with transaction costs including information, efficiency, and principal-agent concerns.20 Fiorina, however, takes a different track, arguing that members of Congress delegate authority as a means of avoiding blame, or to “lessen the legislator’s perceived responsibility for the effects of a program.”21 Abdication of this kind suggests a strategic, electorally-motivated element of delegation.

In the present analysis, we do not consider the institutional reasons for devolution to the citizens. While a national advisory I&R might have facilitated institutional goals by allowing voters to directly address untenable issues or to act as a check, these concerns remain largely irrelevant to this discussion. Congress did not in 1908, nor has it since, delegated legislative

9 authority to the citizens, and there is little indication that Senator Owen’s bill had any hope of passing. The measure never reached the floor for a vote, and the fact remains that a campaign pledge in 1906 hardly equates to a presumed roll call vote in 1908. Looking back on this episode with a century of hindsight, it seems more likely that those 113 members of Congress who supported national direct democracy in their campaigns did so with strategic motivations—not policy outcomes—in mind. The compelling question is not why Congress would alter its institutional authority by establishing a national advisory initiative and referendum, because it did not. Rather, the value of this case lies in the examination of strategic behavior at the other two levels of Congressional activity: the party and the individual.

At the party level, members of Congress are concerned with the control of the chamber that is necessary for the pursuit of collective goals. One consequence of the delegation of authority is the potential weakening of the institution, as a loss of authority is, on its face, a loss of the power to control a set of circumstances. There is ample evidence to suggest that institutional weakening may be a byproduct of party conflict. Minority parties, in their pursuit of eventual control of a chamber of a legislature, must first weaken a majority, and such weakening often entails institutional losses. Minority-majority conflict has played out extensively over the course of Congressional history and has resulted in procedural changes that have arguably detracted from the efficiency of the legislative process.22 Some scholars have suggested that minority parties will be even more willing to attack the institution if it represents the will of the voters.23 It is evident that, at least to a point, minority parties are somewhat willing to sacrifice the power of an institution for control of that institution. There is evidence of such a sacrifice at the state level on the topic of direct democracy, as Smith and Fridkin explain the decision by state legislatures to establish I&R during the Progressive Era as a product of close party

10 competition within a state’s legislature.24 They argue that, as the margin between the majority and minority parties shrinks, the minority party is afforded the opportunity to convince the majority to cater to the median voter and adopt institution-changing reforms.25

Here, again, we consider a variation of Fiorina’s point, and depart from the Smith and

Fridkin explanation.26 We argue that, in the case of the 60th House, Democrats used their deficits in the chamber as an enabling force to make promises to the electorate. Since the Republican majority in the House was so large, the actions of this particular set of Democrats do not comport with the theory offered by Smith and Fridkin. Perhaps, rather than trying to bring the majority closer to the median voter to pass institution-weakening reform, the Democrats in the 60th House instead seized upon an opportunity to make popular promises to voters without of fear of actually losing institutional control. If the Owen bill, or some other form of national direct democracy, were to actually pass, the Democrats could argue that they delivered on their campaign promises.

If it failed, it would be no fault of theirs, as they did not possess enough seats to push legislation, and the promise would have still been good enough to win election. In essence, this is an extension of the Smith and Fridkin theory: minority parties facing larger deficits are even more motivated to challenge the minority by offering to weaken the institution, as they have nothing to lose.

At the individual level, members of Congress are concerned with personal goals, the pursuit of which begins with election and reelection.27 Mayhew and Fiorina discuss the various ways in which members structure their activities in pursuit of reelection, from position-taking and credit-claiming to casework and the “Washington establishment.”28 Fenno views the reelection-oriented actions of members of the House in terms of presentations of self to different portions of the constituency.29 It is this dynamic relationship between a member and his or her

11 constituency and its electoral impact that form perhaps the most important part of the theory offered here. Theriault directly relates these concerns to incumbency, or institution-weakening decisions, highlighting the special importance of not just party competition (addressed above), but also public attention and electoral vulnerability.30

Regarding public attention, members of Congress were keenly aware of the growing populist pressure for more citizen participation in the legislative process. During the early 1900s, more than a dozen state legislatures acceded to citizen demands and granted to the electorate the powers of direct democracy, including the initiative, popular referendum, and recall.31 The growing participatory public mood and support for direct democracy was a very salient issue and did not go unnoticed by members of Congress.32 Of course, public opinion does not exist on its own in a system of representative government. Not only do we expect representatives to reflect the wishes of their constituents, there is reason to believe that such responsive representation is a reality. Clausen describes this “constituency influence” as occurring in two forms.33 The first is

“the congressman’s internalization of the political orientations of the constituency,” and the second is “the congressman’s perceptions of the needs and demands of his constituents.”34 Miller and Stokes famously tested the influence of a constituency on its members of Congress and found that members were more likely to reflect constituent opinion on high-salience issues.35

This proposition has been retested and reaffirmed by later scholars.36 Fiorina frames the proposition in the form of two questions: does the representative think his constituents care, and can he use that strategically?37 Others have suggested that members of Congress will adjust their positions as their districts change and that there are significant electoral implications for representatives whose positions do not reflect those of their constituents.38 Overall, there appears

12 to be reason to believe that members of Congress attempt to reflect the opinions of their constituencies and that they have ample incentive to do so.

The second half of the “electoral connection” of importance here revolves around the

“marginality hypothesis,” which suggests that salience is of special concern to those members facing the most challenging elections.39 The “marginality hypothesis” maintains that the more competitive an election becomes, the more likely the candidate is to move away from his party’s position and toward district opinion.40 While some scholars have raised doubts about the reality of this hypothesis, others have confirmed it.41 Furthermore, even while raising questions about the marginality hypothesis, Fiorina concedes that there are important differences between behavior in the legislature and appearance to constituents.42 In our case, this is a vital distinction, as we are not examining action within the Congress but rather action on the campaign trail. The logic of marginality provides a compelling point of view for an analysis of the 1906 campaign under discussion: if elections do afford the public an opportunity to align the representative with public opinion, and members of Congress in the most marginal districts truly feel unsafe, then we should expect those feelings to motivate candidates to move toward the constituency when involved in activities directly related to elections.43 In fact, evidence exists to suggest that the members of Congress who are best able to campaign on issues that are salient to their constituencies enjoy the most success in the closest elections.44 Thus, not only is the marginality hypothesis a sensible logic to follow in a campaign, it is also a winning one.

Moving back from these particular levels of activity to the overall picture, the literature suggests that members for whom these several pressures converge will be the most likely to support the delegation of authority away from the Congress. Specifically, we argue that minority parties will seek, simultaneously, to weaken the majority and to appeal to the prevailing mood of

13 the voters in pursuit of election, especially in districts featuring the most competitive races.

Thinking about Congressional behavior in terms of strategic position-taking in the face of a variety pressures that include institutional concerns, party politics, and electoral uncertainty, helps elucidates the 1906 campaign, when these pressures aligned in such a way for a substantial number of members that they were motivated to undermine their institution and pledge support for national direct democracy.

Expectations, Data, and Methods

Building on our theoretical understanding of why members of legislative bodies might pledge to devolve power to citizens, we test several interrelated hypotheses concerning why 113

House members of the 60th Congress publicly pledged their support for a national advisory I&R.

We test these hypotheses using logistic regression, with a member’s pledged support for the national advisory I&R as the dependent variable. The 113 House members whose names appear on Senator Owen’s list are coded as 1, with the other 284 members coded as 0.45 Using logistic regression, we model support for direct democracy at the national level as dependent on four key variables, which we discuss below.

First, we argue that members of the minority (Democratic) party may have been more likely to support the call for a national plebiscite because they viewed direct democracy as an electoral wedge that could allow them to gain seats in the 1908 election, altering the balance of

Congressional power. By 1906, the Democrats had failed to control the presidency, the House, or the Senate for an entire decade. Within the House, they were blocked from the legislative process by Speaker Cannon, who had consolidated power by controlling all committee assignments and chairing the Rules Committee, which allowed him to dictate the schedule

14 according to his own preferences.46 Essentially, the Democrats were left with few options aside from attacking the institution, a tactic not entirely uncommon for minority parties.47 Those members who felt most alienated by Cannon and the Republican leadership likely turned to the debate over the national advisory I&R as a chance not only to paint themselves as the party of the people, but also as a way to potentially weaken Republican Party dominance of the political system. If Owen’s bills had passed, the Democratic minority would have been heralded as the party that broke the Republican stranglehold on Washington and returned government to the people. If the measure never got off the ground, they could still benefit by endearing themselves to the voters while taking a pot shot at the majority party. Additionally, as a minority party operating in the House with a deficit of nearly 60 seats, Democrats had little reason to worry that their measure would actually pass, so they could comfortably use populist symbolism in their attempt to regain power from the Republicans. To test this hypothesis, we code each of the 168

Democratic members as 1 and each non-Democrat—the 223 Republicans and the lone

Independent Republican—as a 0. We expect to find a significant, positive relationship between being a Democrat and being listed as pledging support for Owen’s national advisory I&R.

Second, we hypothesize that the 37 Republican members who had opposed the

Republican leadership under Speaker Cannon may have been more willing to compromise the institutional power of Congress in order to place internal pressure on the entrenched Republican leadership. Although the internecine split within the GOP was not huge in 1908, with just one in six members falling in the “insurgent” camp, it was clear to them that Democrats were not the only members of the 60th House who were locked out of the procedural process by Cannon.

Several Republicans found that their own party leadership was not open to the increasing heterogeneity of the party.48 While the insurgency would not truly take off until the next

15 Congress, many Republicans in the 60th House expressed a desire for rules reform to temper the

Speaker’s growing power. We argue that insurgent Republicans—like the minority Democratic members—were more likely to sell out the institution and devolve institutional power to citizens for political gain. To test this proposition, we refer to a list of Republicans who signed resolutions demanding an elected Rules Committee and a “Calendar Tuesday” in the 60th

House.49 A total of 37 Republicans signed on to one or both of these resolutions. We code each insurgent member as a 1, and all other members of the House as a 0. We expect to find a significant, positive relationship between being a Republican advocate of rules reform and pledging support for a national advisory I&R.

Third, we contend that state context matters when it comes to the predisposition of a member of Congress toward the mechanisms of direct democracy. We suspect that members of both political parties who represented districts in states that had recently adopted or were about to adopt direct democracy reforms would be more likely to feel pressure from their districts to support a national advisory I&R. The political landscape of nearly two-dozen states during the first decade of the 20th century was defined in part by the debate over direct democracy. By

1906, four states had formally adopted the initiative or referendum; four more would do so in the next two years. And 12 more states would adopt direct democracy mechanisms in the next decade.50 In most of these states, campaigns to adopt direct democracy lasted several years and often included lengthy speaking tours, mass mailings, and union mobilization.51 Scrutiny of representative government and populist rhetoric had become part of the political fabric for a large portion of the country. Members of Congress routinely involved themselves in state-level debates. Senator Owen, for example, not only helped to usher in direct democracy in Oklahoma in 1907, he also barnstormed the country advocating the virtues of I&R. Likewise, Senator

16 Jonathan Bourne, Jr., a Republican from Oregon, became a national spokesman for the adoption of direct democracy.52 We argue that campaigns for the adoption of direct democracy in the

American states helped place public pressure on members of the House representing districts in those states to pledge their support for a national advisory I&R. To test this hypothesis, we code each of the 45 House members in the 60th Congress who represented a district in the eight states that adopted direct by 1908 as 1, and all others as a 0.53 We expect to find a significant, positive correlation between members of the House who represent districts in states that adopted direct democracy by 1908 and their pledged support for the national advisory I&R.54 In testing this hypothesis, we expect that Democratic as well as Republican members representing districts in states that adopted direct democracy would be the most compelled to pledge their support for

Owen’s proposal in the interest of abetting their upcoming 1908 reelections.

Finally, we argue that electoral competition may have increased the likelihood of members of both parties to support a national advisory initiative referendum, especially those representing states that already adopted direct democracy.55 Again, we argue that members who pledged their support for national direct democracy were as conscious of their own electoral situations as they were of institutional and party politics. Members of Congress are often willing to pull out all the stops to appeal to voters when they feel their electoral prospects are vulnerable.56 We suggest that those members who faced the closest elections in 1906 would be most likely to make a populist appeal to the voters, promising them that they would support direct democracy at the federal level. To test this hypothesis, we use a member’s margin of victory in the 1906 general election, a variable agreed upon by several scholars as the “best and easiest” measure of electoral vulnerability.57 We expect to find a significant negative correlation

17 between a member’s margin of victory and his support for national advisory I&R, as members who had narrower electoral margins should be more motivated to play the populist card.

Findings and Analysis

What best explains why 113 members of the House pledged to support a national system of direct democracy, and in doing so, express a willingness to devolve the institutional power of

Congress to citizens? Table 1 reports the logit regression covariates for Democrats, Republican insurgents, the member’s 1906 electoral margin, and whether a member represented a district in a direct democracy state. The model is estimated by clustering respondents by the 50 states to adjust the standard errors for the multilevel data.58

First, as Table 1 reveals, we find that all four of the explanatory variables in the model are in the predicted direction and significant at conventional statistical levels. Democrats, as we hypothesized, were much more likely than Republicans to have pledged their support for a national advisory I&R, as were Insurgent Republicans when compared to all other members of the 60th House. As expected, those members who won office in 1906 by wide margins were considerably less likely to have pledged their support for direct democracy at the national level than those who had narrow electoral margins. Finally, as we predicted, members who represented districts in states that adopted direct democracy by 1908 were much more likely to have pledged their support than those who represented districts in non-direct democracy states, all else equal.

[INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]

In Table 1, we also report the marginal effects for all four variables, which allow a quick comparison of the substantive magnitude of each explanatory variable regarding the probability

18 of favoring a national advisory I&R, holding the other variables at their mean value. We also provide the marginal effects of the predicted effect (first difference) when varying an explanatory variable from its minimum to maximum values, while holding all other variables constant at their mean value. All else equal, Democrats were nearly 47 percentage points more likely to support the national reform than Republicans, and Insurgent Republicans were roughly

20 percentage points more likely than other all other members to do so as well, holding the other variables at their mean values. With respect to electoral competition, holding other variables at their mean values, for each percentage point margin of victory, a member was four-tenths of a percentage point less likely to support a national plebiscite. In other words, if a member won his district by 10 percentage points in 1906, holding other factors constant, he was four percentage points less likely to support Owen’s joint resolution. Finally, with other factors held at their mean values, members representing states that adopted direct democracy by 1908 were nearly 30 percentage points more likely than their counterparts to pledge their support for a national advisory initiative and referendum.

To further facilitate interpretation of the model presented in Table 1, we converted the logit coefficients into expected values (probabilities) of pledging to support an advisory initiative and referendum at the national level. We begin by estimating the likelihood of a member pledging support for Democrats, Republican Insurgents, and Republicans representing districts in states with and without direct democracy in 1908. For purposes of these simulations, we hold the value of a member’s electoral margin in 1906 at the median value (which was 20 percentage points). What is most striking is the effect of a member representing a district in a state that adopted direct democracy by 1908 of whether or not he pledged to support the reforms at the national level. While Democrats representing districts in states with and without I&R were

19 roughly 30 percentage points more supportive of the reforms than Insurgent Republicans, the likelihood of Insurgent Republicans who had I&R back home were nearly (52.8 percent probability) as likely to support I&R at the national level as Democrats (57.8 percent probability) representing districts in states without the plebiscitary mechanism. Even more impressive regarding effect of the state environment on members’ propensity to support I&R at the national level, Republicans representing districts in states with direct democracy (31.2 percent probability) were even more likely to have pledged support in 1906 for a national advisory I&R than were Insurgent Republicans representing districts in states without the direct democracy

(23.0 percent probability), all else equal. While partisanship and GOP intraparty divisions go a long way of explaining members’ pledging their support for delegating congressional power to citizens, the political environment of their home state was an even stronger force.

[INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]

In Table 2, we also provide several alternative scenarios regarding the predicted support for national advisory I&R by members who were in hotly competitive elections in 1906

(electoral margins of 1 percentage point and 5 percentage points), as well as those who had little competition (electoral margins of 10 percentage points and 30 percentage points). Regardless of their electoral competition, four out of five Democrats representing citizens who had adopted direct democracy at the state level were likely to have pledged support for national advisory

I&R. But Democrats representing citizens who had not voted to adopt direct democracy by 1908 were much less likely to support the reforms if they faced little competition in the 1906 midterms. A similar story can be told about Insurgent Republicans and Republicans who faced great or little electoral competition in 1906, with regard to whether their district was in a direct democracy state or not. A super-majority of Insurgent Republicans, and 40 percent of

20 Republicans, who faced tight elections in 1906 pledged their support for Owen’s proposal if their districts were in one of the eight states that adopted direct democracy by 1908. Only a fraction of

Republicans, insurgent or otherwise, supported the national reforms if they hailed from a state that had yet to adopt direct democracy. From these results, it is clear that Republicans who faced little electoral competition in 1906, and who did not feel the populist pressure of their state’s political environment, had little likelihood of pledging support to delegate legislative authority to citizens at the national level. Those members in the majority who controlled Congress, and faced no electoral competition or pressure by their constituents to devolve decision-making to citizens at the federal level, had no reason to pledge to delegate congressional power. But cracks in the

GOP foundation could be seen, especially from Republican Insurgents who hailed from states adopting direct democracy and who felt electoral pressures.

Populism and the Commonality of the Congressional Experience

One of the overarching goals of this study is to encourage the application of theories of modern legislative politics to historical contexts. It would be a mistake to write off the case of

Senator Owen and the 60th House as a century-old isolated incident or a product of a time gone by. The question of national direct democracy, in fact, appeared before Congress several times in the decades following the introduction of Owen’s bills.59 Additionally, the current political environment appears to be characterized by much of the same populist rhetoric that pervaded

Owen’s era. Therefore, it is rational to imagine that many of the same forces at play in the 1906 election may still define Congressional politics today. If this is the case—and we argue that it most certainly is—then theories of modern legislative behavior and stories of past legislative politics should prove mutually illuminating.

21 The 60th House was the most polarized chamber in Congress since the Reconstruction, until its record distance between the parties was broken by the 108th House, and surpassed by each subsequent House.60 While the Progressive Era produced the advent of the institutions of direct democracy in the American states, it is the modern era that has seen the greatest explosion of the use of those institutions.61 For the handful of states using the initiative during Senator

Owen’s tenure, the device’s popularity now is only rivaled by its popularity then.62 If we characterize the period from 1890 to 1920 as one marked by a rise in populist sentiment and populist advocacy groups, need we not also note the shifts in modern political rhetoric and activity toward the same tone? Clear parallels can be drawn between the populist explosion of the Progressive Era and the rise of populist rhetoric in the current political climate.63 Even the belief that the TEA Party is merely “faux-populist” does not dampen such a comparison, as evidence exists showing that the early use of the initiative and referendum in the states, brought forth under the guise of populism, benefitted the moneyed interests more than the masses.64

Further, the 1906 election shows us that many aspects of electoral politics are universal in the American system, across not only space but also time. Seemingly, the ideas about “electoral connections” and “presentations of self” developed in the 1970s and used to describe Congress today hold similar explanatory power when applied to historical cases. Thus, being a member of

Congress—facing institutional power dilemmas, party conflict, public opinion swings, and electoral uncertainties—is perhaps, in general terms, very much the same today as it was in 1906.

In turn, perhaps, under the right circumstances, pitting populism against one’s own political institution for one’s own political gain is simply a party of the common Congressional experience, be it 1906 or 2010.

22 Conclusion

When Senator Robert Owen submitted his bills calling for a national initiative and referendum to the Senate in 1908, he included a list of 113 members of the 60th House who, in the previous election, had pledged their support for direct democracy at the national level. Those who made the promise were motivated by party politics and electoral strategy rather than policy results and institutional concerns. Additionally they were more likely to be Democrats than

Republicans and party insurgents than party loyalists, and they were more likely to be from direct democracy states and to face close electoral margins. Populist sentiment—and its emphasis on participatory politics—was strong in many districts across the country. When faced with such public opinion in their districts, many candidates in competitive races chose to move toward the voters and use the promise of delegation as a means of helping their chances.

The movement to bring direct democracy to the national stage did not come and go in

1908. Other scholars trace proposals for some form of national initiative or referendum presented in both chambers over the last century, including nearly annual introductions of such measures in both chambers of Congress from the Progressive Era into the 1940s.65 Clearly, direct democracy remained a salient—and strategically viable—issue for many years after Owen presented the list of those 113 members of the 60th House. A national initiative and referendum still have yet to be adopted, over 100 years later, but the logic of elected representatives pledging a voice to voters persists. In the current political context, for example, the safety of incumbency may be called into question as public distrust of Washington politics continues to grow. As challengers think strategically about elections, they may see fit to seize upon this sentiment and make campaign promises similar to those men from 1906. The object of these new pledges may not be a national

23 advisory I&R but some other language of popular devolution or delegation for which the logic presented here would hold.

Some questions remain. While this paper suggests that the members of the House who did pledge support for direct democracy were probably able to do so without the concern that would actually have to cede power, what if they did? At what point does this logic reach its limit? If this strategy proved successful in the next round of elections, it is plausible to imagine that the Democrats could have gained enough seats to substantially close the gap with the

Republicans. While the number 113 represented much less than a third of the entire House, what if the number had been 190? In that case, the House would have been in danger of having enough members in support of the measure to hold a vote that could actually result in its passage.

While the members of the House supported direct democracy for electoral gain, would they have done the same had they been faced with the reality of its passage? And if the bill did pass, would the Congress simply take control of the initiative and referendum process and water it down, as legislators had planned to do in the states?66

Additionally, while the results of the statistical analysis presented here show significant relationships between the hypotheses and the behavior of the members, 113 does in fact represent less than a third of the entire sample. Not even half of all House Democrats pledged their support for direct democracy in 1906. Minority party politics clearly were not enough to motivate promises to delegate. Members needed to feel the combined pressures of minority politics, public mood, and electoral vulnerability, and in some cases, that was not even enough.

Future studies that examined the support for direct democracy in later Congresses—Congresses that feature different partisan divisions, different public moods, and different electoral margins— would help to gauge whether or not the findings of this study can be generalized beyond the

24 Owen case. A study that combined all of those Congresses into one sample and expanded the measure of public mood would perhaps be the most helpful.

Beyond the discussion of direct democracy, and outside the context of the Progressive

Era, the theoretical claims and findings of this study suggest another way of thinking about the behavior of elected representatives. As they engage in these games across the institutional, party, and electoral arenas, representatives are often forced to weigh gains in one against losses in another. In the case of the supporters of direct democracy in the 60th House, those tradeoffs entailed potentially ceding institutional authority for electoral gains. It is theoretically possible that a member, when faced with a different arrangement of party politics, public mood, and electoral margins, could choose to do the opposite and pursue institutional authority or toe the party line at the expense of voter support. While all members of Congress operate within the same institution of government, rarely do they operate, as individuals, in the exact same political context.

25 Endnotes

1 Lawrence C. Dodd and Richard L. Schott, Congress and the Administrative State (New York: Wiley, 1979); David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran, Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making Under Separated Powers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Morris P. Fiorina, “Group Concentration and the Delegation of Legislative Authority” in Regulatory Policy and the Social Sciences, ed. Roger G. Noll (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 175-197; D. Roderick Kiewiet and Mathew D. McCubbins, The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 2 Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins, “Representation or Abdication: How Citizens Use Institutions to Help Delegation Succeed,” European Journal of Political Research 37 (2000): 304. 3 There are rare exceptions, of course. See Thomas E. Cronin, Direct Democracy: The Politics of Initiative, Referendum, and Recall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Ralph M. Goldman, “The Advisory Referendum in America,” Public Opinion Quarterly 14 (Summer 1950): 303-315; David D. Schmidt, Citizen Lawmakers: The Ballot Initiative Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); and Donald R. Wolfensberger, Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press) for other instances of congressional efforts to devolve legislative powers. 4 U.S. Congress, Senate, A Bill Providing for a Modern System Whereby the Voters of the United States May Instruct Their National Representatives, 60th Cong., 1st sess. (1908), S. 7208; U.S. Congress, Senate, Joint Resolution Inviting the Cooperation of the States in the Establishment of a National Initiative and Referendum, 60th Cong., 1st sess. (1908), S.R. 94; U.S. Congress, Senate, Memorial of Initiative and Referendum League of America Relative to a National Initiative and Referendum, 60th Cong., 1st sess. (1908), S.Doc. 516. 5 David B. Magleby, Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot Propositions in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); John G. Matsusaka, For the Many or the Few: The Initiative, Public Policy, and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Schmidt, Citizen Lawmakers; Daniel A. Smith and Caroline J. Tolbert, Educated by Initiative: The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Cronin writes, “The established national parties, the Republicans and Democrats, also enjoyed more influence at the party and national level, and they opposed the idea of a national initiative and referendum, viewing it not only as unnecessary but also as a threat to traditional representative principles and to their own role as agenda-setting organizations” (Direct Democracy, 165). 6 Sean M. Theriault, The Power of the People: Congressional Competition, Public Attention, and Voter Retribution (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Amy Bridges and Thad Kousser, “When Do Politicians Give Power to the People? Adoption of the Citizen Initiative in the American States,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 11 (June 2010), 167-197; Eric D. Lawrence, Todd Donovan, and Shaun Bowler, “Adopting Direct Democracy: Tests of Competing Explanations of Institutional Change,” American Politics Research 37 (November

2009): 1024-1047; Daniel A. Smith and Dustin Fridkin, “Delegating Direct Democracy: Interparty Legislative Competition and the Adoption of the Initiative in the American States,” American Political Science Review 102 (August 2008): 333-350. 7 U.S. Congress, Senate, A Bill Providing for a Modern System Whereby the Voters of the United States May Instruct Their National Representatives, 60th Cong., 1st sess. (1908), S. 7208. 8 U.S. Congress, Senate, Joint Resolution Inviting the Cooperation of the States in the Establishment of a National Initiative and Referendum, 60th Cong., 1st sess. (1908), S.R. 94. 9 U.S. Congress, Senate, Memorial of Initiative and Referendum League of America Relative to a National Initiative and Referendum, 60th Cong., 1st sess. (1908), S.Doc. 516. 10 Sarah A. Binder, Minority Rights/Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Asher C. Hinds, “The Speaker of the House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 3(May 1909): 155-166; Charles O. Jones, “Joseph G. Cannon and Howard W. Smith: An Essay on the Limits of Leadership in the House of Representatives,” Journal of Politics 30(August 1968): 617-646; Eric D. Lawrence, Forrest Maltzman, and Paul J. Wahlbeck, “The Politics of Speaker Cannon’s Committee Assignments,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (July 2001): 551-562; Ronald M. Peters, Jr., The American Speakership (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Robert V. Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). 11 U.S. Congress, House, “Party Divisions of the House of Representatives (1789-Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html (2011). 12 Robert Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13 Binder, Minority Rights/Majority Rule; David Brady and David Epstein, “Intraparty Preferences, Heterogeneity, and the Origins of the Modern Congress: Progressive Reformers in the House and Senate, 1890-1920,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 13(April 1997): 26-49; Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State; Kenneth W. Hechler, Insurgency: Personalities and Politics of the Taft Era (New York: AMS Press, 1940); James Holt, Congressional Insurgents and the Party System, 1909-1916 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 14 Binder, Minority Rights/Majority Rule; Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State. 15 Cronin, Direct Democracy; Schmidt, Citizen Lawmakers; Smith and Fridkin, “Delegating Direct Democracy.” 16 Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan, “Direct Democracy and Minority Rights: An Extension,” American Journal of Political Science 42(July 1998): 1020-1024; Bruce E. Cain and Kenneth P. Miller, “The Populist Legacy: Initiatives and the Undermining of Representative Government,” in Dangerous Democracy: The Battle Over Ballot Initiatives in America, ed. Larry J. Sabato,

Howard R. Ernst, and Bruce A. Larson, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Thomas Goebel, A Government by the People: Direct Democracy in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Magleby, Direct Legislation; Steven L. Piott, Giving Voters a Voice: The Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in America (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003); Smith and Fridkin, “Delegating Direct Democracy;” Daniel A. Smith and Joseph Lubinski, “Direct Democracy During the Progressive Era: A Crack in the Populist Veneer?” Journal of Policy History 14 (October 2002): 349-383; Caroline J. Tolbert 2003, “Direct Democracy and Institutional Realignment in the American States,” Political Science Quarterly 118 (Fall 2003): 467-489. 17 Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Groups Politics in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Goebel, A Government by the People; Piott, Giving Voters a Voice. Cronin (Direct Democracy) cites a piece by Jones discussing a survey circulated by the American Federation of Labor asking members of Congress about their levels of support for a national advisory I&R. 18 George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 7. 19 Dodd and Schott, Congress and the Administrative State.

20 Epstein and O’Halloran, Delegating Powers; Kiewiet and McCubbins, The Logic of Delegation. 21 Fiorina, “Group Concentration and the Delegation of Legislative Authority,” 183. 22 Binder, Minority Rights/Majority Rule; Gary Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins, Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); David W. Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 23 Susan E. Scarrow, “Party Competition and Institutional Change: The Expansion of Direct Democracy in Germany,” Party Politics 3 (1997): 451-472; Theriault writes, “Minority party members will systematically side with public opinion, either because the members hope to have a political divisive issue or because they are looking to upset prevailing congressional election dynamics” (The Power of the People, 23). 24 Smith and Fridkin, “Delegating Direct Democracy.” 25 Smith and Fridkin, “Delegating Direct Democracy,” 337. 26 Fiorina, “Group Concentration and the Delegation of Legislative Authority.” 27 James MacGregor Burns, Congress on Trial (New York: Harper, 1949); Lawrence C. Dodd, “Congress and the Quest for Power,” in Congress Reconsidered, eds. Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer. 1st ed. (New York: Praeger, 1977); Richard F. Fenno, Congressmen in Committees (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).

28 Morris P. Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 29 Richard F. Fenno, Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978). 30 Theriault, The Power of the People. 31 Smith and Fridkin, “Delegating Direct Democracy;” Cain and Miller, “The Populist Legacy;” Goebel, A Government by the People; Nathaniel A. Persily, “The Peculiar Geography of Direct Democracy: Why the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall Developed in the American West,” Michigan Law & Policy Review 2 (1997): 11-41; Piott, Giving Voters a Voice; Smith and Lubinski, “Direct Democracy During the Progressive Era.”

32 James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991). 33Aage Clausen, How Congressmen Decide: A Policy Focus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). 34 Clausen, How Congressmen Decide, 131. 35 Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, “Constituency Influence in Congress,” American Political Science Review 57 (March 1963): 45-46. 36 Robert S. Erikson, “Constituency Opinion and Congressional Behavior: A Reexamination of the Miller-Stokes Representation Data,” American Journal of Political Science 22 (August 1978): 511-535; James H. Kuklinski and Donald J. McCrone, “Policy Salience and the Causal Structure of Representation,” American Politics Quarterly 8 (April 1980): 139-164. The list of scholars confirming a significant constituency influence on Congressional behavior is lengthy and includes, but is not limited to, Larry M. Bartels, “Constituency Opinion and Congressional Policy Making: The Reagan Defense Build Up,” American Political Science Review 85 (June 1991): 457-474; John E. Jackson and David C. King, “Public Goods, Private Interests, and Representation,” American Political Science Review 83 (December 1989): 1143-1164; V.O. Key, Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1961); John W. Kingdon, Congressmen’s Voting Decisions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973); L. Marvin Overby, Beth M. Henschen, Michael H. Walsh, and Julie Strauss, “Courting Constituents? An Analysis of the Senate Confirmation Vote on Justice Clarence Thomas,” American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 997-1003; and Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy,” American Political Science Review 77 (March 1983): 175-190. Eileen Lorenzi McDonagh, “Representative Democracy and State Building in the Progressive Era,” American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 938-950 examines constituency influence specifically in the Progressive Era—the period under discussion—and reaches similar conclusions 37 Morris P. Fiorina, Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1974).

38 Gregory L. Bovitz and Jamie L. Carson, “Position-Taking and Electoral Accountability in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Political Research Quarterly 59 (June 2006): 297-312; Brandice Canes-Wrone, David W. Brady, and John F. Cogan, “Out of Step, Out of Office: Electoral Accountability and House Members’ Voting,” American Political Science Review 96 (March 2002): 127-140; Amihai Glazer and Marc Robbins, “Congressional Responsiveness to Constituency Change,” American Journal of Political Science 29 (May 1985): 259-273. 39 Duncan MacRae, Jr., “The Relation Between Roll Calls and Constituencies in the Massachusetts House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 46 (December 1952): 1046-1055. 40 Lewis A. Froman, Congressmen and their Constituencies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963); MacRae (1952). 41 Stephen Ansolabehere, James M. Snyder, Jr., and Charles Stewart, III, “Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (January 2001): 136-159; Barbara Sinclair Deckard, “Electoral Marginality and Party Loyalty in House Roll Call Voting,” American Journal of Political Science 20 (August 1976): 469-481; Morris P. Fiorina, “Electoral Margins, Constituency Influence, and Policy Moderation: A Critical Assessment,” American Politics Research 1 (October 1973): 479-498; John D. Griffin, “Electoral Competition and Democratic Responsiveness: A Defense of the Marginality Hypothesis,” Journal of Politics 68 (November 2006): 911-921; James H. Kuklinski, “District Competitiveness and Legislative Roll- Call Behavior: A Reassessment of the Marginality Hypothesis,” American Journal of Political Science 21 (August 1977): 627-638. 42 Fiorina, “Electoral Margins, Constituency Influence, and Policy Moderation.” 43 Robert S. Erikson and Gerald C. Wright, Jr., “Policy Representation of Constituency Interests,” Political Behavior 2 (1, 1980): 91-106; David R. Mayhew, “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals,” Polity 6 (Spring 1974): 295-317. 44 Robert H. Durr, “What Moves Policy Sentiment,” American Political Science Review 87 (March 1993): 158-170; Kingdon (1973); Thomas E. Mann, Unsafe at Any Margin: Interpreting Congressional Elections (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1978); John L. Sullivan and Eric M. Uslaner, “Congressional Behavior and Electoral Marginality,” American Journal of Political Science 22 (August 1978): 536-553; Christopher Wlezien, “The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preferences for Spending,” American Journal of Political Science 39 (November 1995): 981-1000; Christopher Wlezien, “Patterns of Representation: Dynamics of Public Preferences and Policy,” Journal of Politics 66 (February 2004): 1-24. 45 U.S. Congress, Senate Memorial of Initiative and Referendum League of America Relative to a National Initiative and Referendum.

46 Binder, Minority Rights/Majority Rule; Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State.

47 Scarrow, “Party Competition and Institutional Change;” Smith and Fridkin, “Delegating Direct Democracy;” Theriault, The Power of the People. 48 Binder, Minority Rights/Majority Rule; Brady and Epstein, “Intraparty Preferences, Heterogeneity, and the Origins of the Modern Congress;” Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State; Hechler, Insurgency; Holt, Congressionl Insurgents and the Party System. 49 Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State, 208. 50 Smith and Fridkin, “Delegating Direct Democracy.” 51 Goebel, A Government by the People; Piott, Giving Voters a Voice. 52 Cronin, Direct Democracy; Goebel, A Government by the People; Piott, Giving Voters a Voice; Smith and Tolbert, Educated by Initiative. 53 Of the 43 members representing districts in the 8 states that adopted direct democracy by 1908, 27 were Republicans and 16 were Democrats. The eight states that had adopted direct democracy by 1908 were (Smith and Fridkin 2008): South Dakota (1898), Utah (1900), Oregon (1902), Montana (1906), Oklahoma (1907), Maine (1908), Michigan (1908), Missouri (1908).

54 Alternatively, we created an ordinal scale to indicate the intensity of a state’s adoption of direct democracy for all the members of the 60th House. Drawing the data from Smith and Fridkin (“Delegating Direct Democracy”), we coded states that had adopted the initiative and/or referendum by 1908 as 3, states that would adopt the mechanisms by 1918 as 2, and states that had unsuccessful votes on adopting direct democracy by 1918 as 1. We coded members representing all other states as 0. The results in the models (not shown) remain are positive and significant. 55 We tested two alternative hypotheses (not shown), that members who were ideological liberals on either economic matters or civil liberty matters would be more likely to pledge support for a national advisory initiative and referendum. As Piott (Giving Voters a Voice) documents extensively, direct democracy campaigns across the states were largely driven by labor unions. Many people believed that elected officials at all levels of government were, to a certain extent, controlled by corporate interests. The initiative and referendum were seen as ways to return the government to the masses and to break the corporate hold on government by allowing the people to formally check their representatives. We hypothesized that House members with liberal (economic or civil liberties) voting records on economic matters would be more likely to pledge their support for direct democracy at the national level. To test these hypotheses, we used the first and second dimensions of Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-Nominate scores for member ideology (Royce Carroll, Jeff Lewis, James Lo, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, DW-Nominate Scores with Bootstrapped Standard Errors, Legislator Estimates 1st to 110th Houses, http://voteview.com/dwnomin.asp, 2011). These are directional measures, ranging from -1 to 1, in which the higher number indicates a more conservative voting record. We expected to find a significant negative correlation between economic ideology and support the initiative and referendum, as members closer to -1 would be more likely to make the pledge. We

31 found both indicators of member ideology, however, to be insignificant in our model, and the economic dimension is highly correlated with political party. 56 Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy; Kingdon, Congressmen’s Voting Decisions. 57 Elaine K. Swift, Robert G. Brookshire, David T. Canon, Evelyn C. Fink, John R. Hibbing, Brian D. Humes, Michael J. Malbin, and Kenneth C. Martis, 2003, Database of [United States] Congressional Historical Statistics, 1789-1989 [Computer file], ICPSR03371-v2. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2009-02-03, doi:10.3886/ICPSR03371; Theriault, The Power of the People, 24. See also Richard F. Fenno, “U.S. House Members in the Their Constituencies: An Exploration,” American Political Science Review 71 (September 1977): 883-917. 58 Failing to cluster members by geographic (states) area can artificially reduce the size of the standard errors of the contextual variables, which can increase the chance of finding a statistically significant effect on the outcome variable when none exists (David Primo, Matthew Jacobsmeier, and Jeffrey Milyo, “Estimating the Impact of State Policies and Institutions with Mixed-Level Data,” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 7 (2007): 446-459. When the model is run without clustering by state, the only change is the coefficient for Insurgent Republican becomes significant at the .05 level. Summary statistics can be found in Appendix A.

59 Goldman, “The Advisory Referendum in America.” 60 Carroll, et al., “DW-Nominate Scores for Member Ideology.” 61 Smith and Tolbert, Educated by Initiative. 62 John G. Matsusaka, “Initiatives (number, approval rate) by State and Year, 1904-2010,” http://www.iandrinstitute.org/data.htm, 2011. 63 Liz Halloran, “What’s Behind the New Populism?,” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=123137382, 5 February, 2010. 64 E.J. Dionne, Jr., “The TEA Party: Populism of the Priveliged,” The Washington Post, 19 April, 2011; Smith and Lubinski, “Direct Democracy in the Progressive Era.” 65 Cronin, Direct Demcoracy; Goldman, “The Advisory Referendum in America;” Schmidt, Citizen Lawmakers; Wolfensberger, Congress and the People. 66 Piott, Giving Voters a Voice.

Table 1:

Predicting Pledged Support for National Initiative and Referendum in the 60th House

Coef. p- Marginal Min Max value Effect Democrat 2.427 .000 .465 .328 .602 (.463) Insurgent Republican .905 .105 .196 -.065 .457 (.557) Electoral Margin, 1906 -2.099 .000 -.393 -.580 -.206 (.514) District in 1908 Direct 1.321 .000 .295 .092 .498 Democracy State (.444) Constant -1.692 .000 (.359) Pseudo R2 0.195 Wald χ2 35.53 0.00 N 391

Note: Unstandardized logistic regression coefficients, with robust standard errors in parentheses. Standard errors adjusted by clustering cases by state. Probabilities based on two-tailed tests. Min and Max indicate the predicted probability of support for the lowest and highest values of the independent variable holding all other variables constant at their mean values, 95% confidence interval.

Table 2: Predicted Probabilities for Support for National Advisory Initiative and Referendum, by Political Party, District in a Direct Democracy State, and Electoral Margin in 1906

Democrats Insurgent Republicans Republicans Electoral Margin = Median (20% points) Direct Democracy State 83.7 52.8 31.2 Non-Direct Democracy State 57.8 23.0 10.8

Electoral Margin = 1% point Direct Democracy State 88.4 62.5 40.3 Non-Direct Democracy State 67.1 30.1 15.3

Electoral Margin = 5% points Direct Democracy State 87.5 60.5 38.3 Non-Direct Democracy State 65.2 29.6 14.2

Electoral Margin = 10% points Direct Democracy State 86.4 58.0 35.8 Non-Direct Democracy State 62.8 26.9 12.3

Electoral Margin = 30% points Direct Democracy State 80.6 47.6 26.9 Non-Direct Democracy State 52.6 19.5 8.9

Appendix A: Summary Statistics

Variable Number of Mean Standard Minimum Maximum Observations Deviation Value Value Democrat 391 0.430 0.495 0 1

Insurgent Republican 391 0.095 0.293 0 1

Electoral Margin, 1906 391 .3252 .3136 0 1

District in 1908 Direct 391 0.110 .313 0 1 Democracy State Pledged Support for National advisory 391 0.289 0.454 0 1 I&R