Representation and Inequality in Late Nineteenth-Century America: The Politics of Apportionment

This book demonstrates that apportionment, although long overlooked by scholars, dominated state politics in late nineteenth-century America, setting the boundaries not only for legislative districts but for the nature of representative democracy. The book examines fierce struggles over apportionment in the Midwest, where a distinctive constitutional and electoral context shaped their course with momentous consequences. As the major parties alternated in effectively disfranchising their opponents through gerrymanders, growing tensions challenged established patterns of political behavior and precipitated intense and even dangerous disputes. Unprecedented judicial intervention overturned gerrymanders in stunning decisions that electrified the public but intensified rather than resolved political conflict and uncertainty. Ultimately, America's political ideal of representative democracy was frustrated by its own political institutions, including the courts, because their decisions against gerrymandering in the 1890s helped parties and legislatures entrench the practice as a basic and profoundly undemocratic feature of American politics in the twentieth century.

Author: Peter H. Argersinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 02/12/2015
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.79d
ISBN: 9781107498358

About the Author
Argersinger, Peter H.: - Peter H. Argersinger holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. From 1971 to 1998, he was a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he held the distinguished position of Presidential Research Professor from 1995 to 1998. Since 1998, he has been a professor at Southern Illinois University, where he was named Outstanding Scholar by the College of Liberal Arts. He has also been a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, received an Andrew Mellon Fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Helm Research Fellowship from Indiana University and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Historical Association. He has received the Binkley-Stephenson Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best article published in the Journal of American History. His work has appeared in the American Historical Review, the Political Science Quarterly, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, American Nineteenth-Century History, Agricultural History, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and other journals. He is the author of six books including Populism and Politics (1974); Structure, Process, and Party (1991); and The Limits of Agrarian Radicalism (1995).