to kill the bank. When the government faced its second major financial crisis caused by the War
of 1812, the Democratic-Republicans established the second national bank in 1816, even though
they had been the most adamant opponents. But again, the bank remained untouched even
though Jackson, a resolute adversary of the bank, took office with majorities in tow. The
democratic president only began his bank war when Clay, in an attempt to discredit Jackson,
brought up the bank’s recharter four years before the bank would expire leading to Jackson’s
famous veto.
But once the franchise expanded, party leaders actively began building the party’s brand
name, explicitly identifying the party’s policy position on financial institutions; party members in
turn took advantage of the electoral gains from being identified with a particular party. As a
result, after the early 1840s, the partisan model performed extremely well in predicting when
policies would change and how they would change. Whenever there was unified Democratic
government, they enacted the Independent Treasury, the Democrat’s version of the national bank.
And whenever the Whigs or the Republicans controlled the legislative and executive branches,
they actively worked on creating a national banking system based on the first and second national
banks.
The key mechanism underpinning the partisan model was the electoral connection. As
the electorate expanded, party leaders had an opportunity to capitalize on the larger voting base
and had stronger incentives to build the party’s brand name, while party members could reap the
electoral benefits of the party’s brand by voting with the party leadership on key policies.
Consequently, coalition building was no longer an arduous process and during unified
government gridlock was reduced substantially.
Given the importance of the electoral connection and its impact on the ability of political
leaders to exploit their party’s capacity and strength in Congress, we have to integrate significant
changes in the franchise, whether expansions or contractions, into a partisan theory of policy-
making. In addition to the extension of voting rights throughout the early antebellum period,
there were subsequent changes that could have significantly altered the ways in which political
parties mobilized winning coalitions and the substantive policies they chose to galvanize,
including the adoption of the 15
th
amendment, Jim Crow, women’s suffrage, direct election of
senators, and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
In addition to partisan theories, preference based models also predicted policy-making
accurately in these last two decades, although not because of any formal comparison of the two
hypotheses, but rather because the evidence confirmed the predictions of both models.
2
Convention