Imperial Governance and the Growth of Legislative Power in America

Abstract

The power of assemblies in the British new world grew far beyond the bounds intended at their creation. Although the British crown instructed royal governors to use legal powers to restrain assemblies, they were unsuccessful. I develop a formal model to account for this. In this model colonial assemblies can challenge the agenda setting powers of colonial governors. “Strong” governors withstand these challenges easily; “weak” ones prefer to capitulate. The crown wishes to retain only strong governors; however, it observes only policy outcomes but not the resolution of challenges to the governor’s agenda power. In equilibrium, the crown cannot distinguish between a strong governor holding agenda power against a tough assembly, and a weak governor conceding agenda power to a moderate one. Weak governors therefore avoid conflict with the assembly, yet conceal their weakness from the crown. But the assembly observes the governor’s concessions, and challenges weak governors even more in the future. This creates a dynamic path of growing assembly power. The model provides a strategic logic of endogenous institutional change, and one of the most important institutional developments in American history: the growth of legislative power. [P]rogressive strengthening of the powers of the assemblies against the governors is the most striking characteristic of colony government, exploding, finally, in the Revolution of 1776. —Finer (1997, 1401) The growth of legislative power is a foundational element of political institutions in the United States—indeed, as Finer (1997) suggests, of its very existence as an independent state (cf. Bailyn 1968). Yet political science and political economy have had almost nothing to say about the origins or growth of this power, instead taking the institutional landscape as given and exploring its effects.1 Legislative power in the United States dates to the British colonial era and was taken as given at the American founding. From modest origins as a consultative check on the actions of colonial corporations (Kammen 1969), legislative power in royal colonies grew to encompass the authority to initiate all legislation, propose unamendable money bills, audit public accounts, name inferior executive officers, disburse funds on the assembly’s own warrant, and even plan specifics of military expeditions (Greene 1963). How can we account for this growth of legislative power? A natural explanation is that the English “imported” their political institutions with them to the new world (e.g., North 1990). Yet the English Parliament did not claim2 several of the powers listed above (Finer 1997, 1401) and could not serve as a model of them. More importantly, colonial institutions were never straightforwardly “imported,” but instead were regulated by the English crown. In royal colonies, legal authority over institutions resided in crown commissions to Sean Gailmard is Professor of Political Science, Charles & Louise Travers Department of Political Science, Social Sciences Building 210, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley CA 94720 ([email protected]). The author would like to thanks Ryan Brutger, Dan Carpenter, Gary Cox, Tiberiu Dragu, Lindsey Gailmard, Scott Gehlbach, Sandy Gordon, John Patty, Maggie Penn, Bob Powell, Mike Ting, and audiences at APSA 2018, the University of Chicago, USC PIPE Collaborative and University of Michigan for helpful comments. [email protected] Squire (2012) is an important and rare exception, though his analyses focus on institutions internal to colonial legislatures (e.g., committee systems), rather than the place of legislatures in the system of government. Outside, at least, of the Protectorate period (1649–60). By the American revolution, almost all future U.S. states were royal colonies. Gailmard (2017) showed that the crown could benefit from empowering assemblies to control the governor when the crown itself could not. However, by 1700 the crown’s control over governors was much greater, and thus it attempted to roll back assembly privileges. The present article essentially shows why this was strategically impossible. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 0, No. 0, March 2021, Pp. 1–14 ©2021, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12601