Political Action and Party Formation in the United States Constitutional Convention

Abstract

Using data on state voting patterns, we examine the positions taken by state delegations on questions that arose over the course of the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787. Whereas existing accounts tend to assume that this type of collective decision making can be understood by linking fixed interests—either material or ideological—to specific, decontextualized propositions, we argue that the meaning of any one issue was dependent upon its position relative to other issues in the overall sequence of questions. Consequently, each decision changed the meaning of future issues, and hence how actors understood where their commonalities of interest lay. Devoted to the task of rebuilding the institutions that constituted the national state, delegates explicitly reshaped the board on which the political game would be played such that patterns of action within the Convention had implications for patterns of action outside of the Convention. As each subsequent decision within the Convention fixed a previous point of contention, it also indirectly determined which issues would become viable points of conflict in the future. By the end of the Convention, even before the first presidential election, state delegations began to arrange themselves in a manner consonant with the outlines of the first party system. This previously unrecognized finding only makes sense, however, in terms of a temporally contextualized model of political action.