Congressional Leadership and Party Voting in the McKinley Era: A Comparison to the Modern House

This paper examines some aspects of the relationship between leadership structure, constituency bases of congressional parties, and party voting in the U. S. House of Representatives at the turn of the century. The findings for the McKinley era are compared to the modern House. The analysis shows that the higher levels of party support found in the two McKinley Congresses were related to the centralized leadership structure and the homogeneity of the constituencies represented by each party. The leadership structure in the late 1890s gave the party organizational leaders control over the committee system, more control over policy formulation, and a monopoly on voting cues. The homogeneity of the congressional parties along an industrial-agricultural continuum insured policy differences which encouraged party voting. Moreover, the leadership of the two parties represented the extremities of the continuum, and given their power this reinforced the basic party cleavages. OF THE CONGRESSES for which we have information on levels of party voting, the 55th and 56th United States House of Representatives stand out for their high levels of party voting. Table 1 shows the proportion of party votes in the House of Representatives for selected Congresses from 1845 to 1966. The criterion for a party vote in this table is 90 percent of one party voting against 90 percent of the other party. If the criterion for characterizing a roll call as a party vote is reduced to a majority of one party voting against a majority of the other party, then the percentages of party votes in the 55th and 56th House rise to 93.9 percent and 92.2 percent respectively. No matter how party voting is defined, it is clear that party voting was more visible at the turn of the century than at any other time in the known history of the House. The two variables which have been most consistently related to high levels of party voting in American legislatures are a strong centralized leadership and ideological parties representing distinct poles