| This dissertation describes the conditions, explains the causes and consequences, and proposes a general theory accounting for the development of the American political order between 1700 and 1870. For these ends, this work completes a comparative historical analysis of the contexts, the decisionmaking sequences, and the consequences associated with three constitutional changes in the national rule of apportionment.; This dissertation makes four primary contributions. Firstly, it presents new empirical data on the conceptual and institutional development of representative government at the national and state-levels between 1700 and 1870. Secondly, this work utilizes a comparative research design to describe and to analyze three sequential apportionment rule changes. Beyond specification and comparison of four macro-structural conditions and of one micro-behavioral condition, this work offers a method for synthesizing macro- and micro-level conditions into a causal analysis of institutional change. This work additionally integrates detailed historical research with game theoretic models--thereby, demonstrating the analytical leverage of an empirically grounded rational choice approach. Thirdly, this work proposes and tests a new general theory of political development that relates changes in political expectations to the creation, transformation, and breakdown of constitutional order. More specifically, this work proposes a two-dimensional equilibrium model composed of expected relative decisionmaking capacities and expected levels of governmental authority. Fourthly, this work offers a new metanarrative for the founding, consolidation and dissolution of democratic constitutional orders and for three pivotal periods within American political development: namely, the American Revolution, the Philadelphia Convention and the American Civil War. In this new account, this work abandons the family of uncertainty and probabilistic metaphors utilized by Rawls, Buchanan and Tullock and contemporary formal modelers. In sharp contrast, this account describes and explains the motives and interactions of constitutional actors with reference to subjectively defined desires for certainty. Constitutional orders, thus, are like long-term contracts in that their principal actors commit and remain committed with the intention of reaping relatively stable levels of collective and discrete benefits. Rules of apportionment are elemental institutions for securing this type of stability because they define the basis for participating within the collective decisionmaking process. |
