Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of 1840: Three Perspectives from Massachusetts

Zboray, Ronald J.; Zboray, Mary Saracino

doi:10.2307/3124448

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…123 This may be why the Whigs mobilized women to engage in nonvoting forms of electoral participation, especially during the election of 1840. 124 After the Log Cabin campaign, which acted as a catalyst for the involvement of women in Whig political activity, women were invited to participate in public events, and their engagement in political discussion was encouraged by prominent party members. 125 Even in the South, the Whig Party reached out to women and these overtures were met with enthusiasm, as women became active partisans in conventions, parades, and dances.…”

Section: Representation Of the Disenfranchisedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratic Representation of all “the People”: Antislavery Petitions in the U.S. Senate

Griffin

Sager

2020

Stud. Am. Pol. Dev.

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In keeping with the demands of political philosophers, America's constitutional design harnesses elected officials to the mass public's prevailing views, but also provides avenues for the opinions of disenfranchised groups and numerical minorities to be reflected in policy. We seek to shed light on this constitutional balancing act by studying U.S. senators’ decisions on thirty-six roll call votes related to the practice of slavery between 1835 and 1847. These voting decisions are modeled using the prevalence of antislavery petitions sent to Congress over the same period from each state's residents. We observe considerable and systematic senator representation of perceived majority opinion on antislavery petitions, despite the presence of nineteenth-century institutions buffering senators from the public. We also report evidence that the representation of disenfranchised women's views (as expressed in petitions) relative to those of men varied by party, and in ways that are predictable. Finally, we observe that senators sometimes represented perceived minority viewpoints, seemingly motivated by their political ambitions. These findings not only hold important implications for our understanding of democratic representation, but also for the processes of American political development.

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Section: Representation Of the Disenfranchisedmentioning

confidence: 99%