Recreating the American Republic: Rules of Apportionment, Constitutional Change, and American Political Development, 1700-1870

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the context, the causes, and the immediate consequences of the first constitutional change in the rule of apportionment. This rule change begins with the constitutional breakdown of British-colonial relations in 1776 and ends with the formalization of a new American constitutional order in 1781. Whereas the former event signaled the abandonment of the unwritten but working rule of apportionment within the British Empire, the latter event established the written equal state rule of apportionment within the first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on how and why the imperial rule of apportionment was abandoned. In brief, Chapter 2 provides a macrolevel description of the broader context within which this event occurred. It specifically recounts the development of economic, demographic, institutional, and ideological conditions in Great Britain and the American colonies over the course of the eighteenth century. Assessment of these conditions over time is necessary given this study's interest in explaining the causes of apportionment rule change because it aids the identification and measurement of long-term patterns in these contextual conditions prior to (and, therefore, apparently independent of) a subsequent rule change. Chapter 3 follows with a microlevel account of the political actors most immediately responsible for the breakdown in the constitutional union between Great Britain and the American colonies between 1774 and 1776. Chapter 4 completes the story of the birth of the American constitutional order by focusing on the process by which the new equal state apportionment rule was established within the Articles of Confederation.

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