Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Emergence of Political Careers and Parties, New York 1777-1821

作为美国公民，我们往往认为当代美国选举政党的存在和运作是理所当然的。虽然它们一直是许多研究的主题，但我们对现代选举政党在我国历史上是如何出现的知之甚少。本项目以第一个全国性政党制度的枢纽纽约州为重点，系统地分析了构建第一个政党的个人行动的社会和政治因素。该项目调查了他们是如何形成跨越空间和不同级别政府（地方、州、联邦）的政治支持网络的，并追踪了地方政治精英是如何被拉入新兴的联邦政党体系的。该项目的研究结果将有助于我们更深入地了解我们民主制度中政党的起源，并通过更详细地了解其演变，帮助我们了解当代政党。虽然政党是多个学科学者关注的主要问题，但对于政党从何而来这个问题的答案仍然几乎完全缺失。解决这一问题的进展受到阻碍，部分原因是缺乏系统的个人层面数据。本项目通过包括这些数据的两项分析来探讨政党形成的问题。首先，因为在美国，政党的组织与国家的组织有着内在的联系，因为创建一个国家涉及到职位的创建，这个项目将首先重建政治精英必须驾驭的更大的职位系统的结构。该项目将建立一个新的数据库，包含纽约州从1777年到1821年从联邦到州和地方各级的所有民事、司法和军事办公室。利用流动性表、空缺链和序列分析，该项目调查了政治生涯作为个人持有的有意义的职位序列的出现。这构成了第二个分析的背景。对于在制宪会议和1800年大选之间的关键时期活跃的730名政治精英，该项目增加了党派关系、社会人口特征以及他们所处的多种社会网络的信息。利用这一综合数据集，该项目采用回归框架来研究决定哪些政治精英隶属于哪个政党的因素。该项目的研究结果将为民主及其演变的理论提供信息，并为我国发展的关键时期的个人政治生涯提供重要的历史画像。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

As U.S. citizens, we tend to take for granted the existence and operation of electoral parties in the contemporary United States. While they have been the subject of much study, we know very little regarding how modern electoral parties emerged in our history. Focusing on the State of New York, the pivot for the first national party system, this project provides a systematic analysis of the social and political factors that structured the actions of those individuals who built the first parties. The project investigates how they formed networks of political support that spanned across space as well as different levels of government (local, state, federal) and traces how local political elites were pulled into the emerging federal party system. Findings from the project will provide greater insight into the origins of political parties in our democracy, and help to inform our understanding of contemporary political parties through greater detail regarding their evolution. While political parties were a major concern of scholars across several disciplines, answers to the question of where parties come from are still almost entirely absent. Progress in addressing this question has been stymied in part by the absence of systematic individual-level data. This project approaches the question of party formation through two analyses that include these data. First, because in America the organization of parties was intrinsically bound up with the organization of the state and because creating a state involves office-creation, this project will first reconstruct the structure of the larger system of offices that political elites had to navigate. The project will construct a novel database of all civil, judicial, and military offices from the federal to the state and local level from 1777 to 1821 in the state of New York. Using mobility tables, vacancy chain and sequence analysis, the project investigates the emergence of political careers as meaningful sequences of offices held by individuals. This forms the backdrop for the second analysis. For a subset of 730 political elites who were active during the crucial years between the Constitutional Convention and the election of 1800, the project adds information on party affiliation, socio-demographic characteristics, and the multiple social networks in which they were embedded. Using this comprehensive dataset, the project employs a regression framework to study the factors that determined which political elites affiliated with which party. Findings from this project will inform theories of democracy and its evolution, as well as provide an important historical portrait of individual political careers at a critical time in the development of our nation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.