Policy Space and Voting Coalitions in Congress: The Bearing of Policy on Politics, 1930-1954

The question of how the substance of politics helps shape legislative coalitions and bases of support has been displaced from the center of studies of Congress since the publication of pioneering work in the 1960s and early 1970s. Seeking to revive this research program, the authors apply an original coding scheme in tandem with a factor analytic analysis of voting and policy space to the period spanning the last years of the Hoover presidency to the start of Eisenhower's. Investigating legislator parameters—the dimensions of voting space—and roll call parameters—the dimensions of policy space—the paper confirms the strong independent impact of the substance of policy on the political decisions of legislators and reveals an issue-specific concatenation of party and region that altered over the course of the period

Financing the Civil War: The Confederacy's Financial Strategy

The onset of the American Civil War forced both the Confederate and Union governments to swiftly develop strategies to fund their military efforts. Focusing on the Confederacy's financial policies, I take up the following puzzle: Why did the Confederacy rely almost exclusively on inflation financing, waiting to enact any significant tax legislation until the Winter of 1863, while the Union embarked on a successful financial strategy effectively combining loans, notes, and taxes? From the confident vantage point of twenty-twenty hindsight, the south's choices may seem to have been irrational in a war against a more resourceful and asset rich state. I argue that southerners were not irrational, nor were northerners exceptionally shrewd. Rather the ideological predispositions developed over the antebellum period were carried over into Civil War politics. Generally, the northern Republicans' support of a national banking system, a large national debt, and taxes turned out to be vital to finance the war. While the southern Democrats' opposition to national financial institutions, a large public debt, as well as taxes to protect their most valued assets, slaves, led to financial policies that proved to be disastrous. Despite their predispositions, not all southerners were blindly committed to their policy choices. Once the war turned significantly against the Confederacy in the Summer and Fall of 1863, legislators updated their beliefs about the probability of success and began to reevaluate their preferences for financial policies. I find that legislators from states with large slave assets were more likely to oppose tax legislation throughout the war, while representatives from states that would face the largest political and social turmoil after emancipation were more likely to support tax policies after the Fall of 1863. To evaluate the relat