RESEARCH

Prevailing theories about the nature and development of the democratic party system fail to account for the important case of the United States. Using a novel dataset on legislators and roll call votes in the New York State Assembly after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, we show that, contrary to existing accounts, legislative parties had already formed at this early stage. Yet these parties did not arise from the translation of social cleavages such as economic or social class into political oppositions, as sociologists might expect, nor were they merely networks of powerful elites disconnected from the polity, as political scientists and historians have suggested. Instead, these parties coalesced around formal issues—structural questions like the procedures for election and appointment, questions whose answer would determine the rules of the game for future contests. Parties emerged, we argue, not because of an inherent need to adjudicate conflicts between sectors of the polity, but because of the organizational affordances of the modern democratic state. Our findings suggest the formation of party systems is an integral part of the formation of the modern state.

Despite renewed interest in political parties among political sociologists, the origins of parties and party systems remain poorly understood. Turning to the important American case, this paper examines the formation of the first political parties in U.S. history through the lens of political patronage. Utilizing a novel dataset encompassing all appointments made in the State of New York between 1789 and 1802—the period during which the first American party system took shape—as well as data on the recipients of these appointments, I provide a systematic study of the factors shaping the allocation of political offices. Conditional logistic regressions identify partisanship as the strongest determinant of whether someone received an appointment. The results hold after controlling for other allocation mechanisms based on region/district, seniority, elite status (wealth, college education, number of slaves owned, member of the Society of the Cincinnati, being a lawyer), prior military service, and personal connections to the people in charge of allocating appointments. This finding challenges the prevailing view that the early American political system was primarily driven by personalistic networks and notables, showing that systematic party patronage emerged in New York as early as the 1790s. The study highlights the fundamental interdependence of state and party formation, arguing that the early use of patronage was not a form of corruption but a key mechanism for integrating political actors into the emerging party system and expanding state capacity.

Network studies of politics often assume that action is shaped by network position. However, this structuralist aproach breaks down in the case of political elites, who maintain power through strategic flexibility, and it distracts us from the actors and actions that are most revealing of the political field. We advance an “action-in-networks” approach that studies and theorizes how elites make, maintain, and sever ties as they form political alliances. We illustrate this through the case of John Williams, a prominent early New York politician who switched from the Republican to the Federalist party in 1795. Drawing on over 300 personal letters, we show that Williams’ switch was not the outcome of his network position but a strategic move that reconfigured his social ties. Our study highlights the importance of cutting ties and draws attention to the cultural logics that shape political action.

This paper introduces a novel database comprising all parliamentary speeches delivered in the German National Constitutional Assembly (1919) as well as the German Reichstag during the Weimar Republic (1920-1932). Our database provides high value to researchers due to improved text quality and metadata. In a first step, the original protocols, printed in the Fraktur (Black Letter) typeface, were turned into machine-readable text using eScriptorium, a platform based on the Kraken OCR engine. Frequent layout and text recognition errors were corrected using a series of custom Python scripts. Next, all speeches were extracted and compiled into a structured database. This database includes metadata such as the session and date of the speech and the speaker’s name and party. Finally, we classified speech topics using our own topic classification model based on an adjusted version of the CAP coding scheme. This model can in the future be used and fine-tuned by researchers for classifying historical political speech. We provide basic descriptives about the database and demonstrate the usability of our data and classification model by exploring issue salience between parties and following a major historical event.

Social scientists have long been interested in elite cohesion in American society, recognizing its potential implications for democracy and governance. While empirical research has focused on corporate elites and, in particular, on cohesion derived from shared board memberships, cohesion among those in highest positions in the American state and historical change in that cohesion have been little studied. Drawing on a novel dataset of the career histories of 2,221 people in these elite positions who were appointed to them between 1898 and 1998, I examine whether administrative elites, prior to their elite appointment, attended the same educational institutions or worked in the same agencies of the federal government at the same time. I find evidence of increasing elite cohesion during the twentieth century. Educational cohesion increases significantly in the three decades following the Second World War and then declines slightly toward the end of the century. This increase goes hand in hand with a change from college to graduate education as the primary site generating educational cohesion. Federal government workplace cohesion increases markedly in the 1930s and 1940s and then remains high. As people are appointed to different organizations within the American state, their educational and workplace connections create inter-agency networks that, it is expected, facilitate mutual understanding and coordination and thus help integrate the American administrative state.

What constitutes the structure of recruitment to elite, politically appointed positions in the American national government is thought to be a settled question. Recruitment works as the American founders intended, it is thought, bringing people into government with extensive careers in private organizations who then return to those organizations after a brief stint running a government department, agency, commission and the like. However, from the perspective of state-building, this seems unlikely. As the American state developed extensive bureaucratic organizations, we might expect these organizations to be a greater locus of careers, as is found in other countries. To see if this is the case, we collect exceedingly detailed data on the careers of people in these elite positions from 1850 to 1998 and look at three elements of recruitment: centralization, concentration, and permeability. We find that, over this time and especially since World War II, these elements have changed in ways consistent with state-building and at some odds to the picture drawn in the literature. We conclude with a discussion of the possible meaning of our findings for democratic governance.

What explains career advancement and success within organizations? While existing research tends to attribute career outcomes to individual attributes, this study offers a complementary account that emphasizes how centralized personnel management strategies shape careers. We develop this account in a study of career mobility in the Chinese party-state during the reform period (1978-2011). Drawing on a unique dataset of over 5,000 career histories of Chinese political elites and using vacancy chains as a novel measure of strategic job transfers, we show that officials involved in longer chains of orchestrated intraorganizational transfers were more likely to be promoted within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This relationship holds after controlling for personal attributes and social capital, is stronger for younger officials, and aligns with the timeline of China’s economic reforms. We interpret these findings as evidence that the CCP pursued a strategy of organizational sponsorship, in which promising young officials were rotated among subdivisions to develop them like pieces in a chess game. This strategy was a response to increasing organizational decentralization, aligning officials’ careers with the Party’s evolving goals. The study offers a novel framework for understanding job mobility in centralized bureaucracies, highlighting how organizational strategies shape individual career trajectories.

The Florentine *Consulte e Pratiche* is the oldest recorded series of speech-by-speech policy discussion by political elites in European history, over one hundred and fifty years in length. This article is the first of an extended two-article sequence on political discussion in the *Consulte e Pratiche*, during the 1376–1378 period of the War of Eight Saints, which led up to the famous Ciompi Revolt. Our interest is in discovering both the semantic- network (article 1) and the factional-network (article 2) mechanics of this unexpected spillover from foreign-policy conflict into domestic revolt. Our central finding at the semantic level, in this first article, is that the spillover from war to revolution was mediated through the ceremonial and political-economy sides of religion. The methodology in this first article is to uncover the evolving narrative-network structures exhibited in Florentine political discussion – namely, changing inter-correlations among keywords about topics, through chapters and subplots. "Narrative-network analysis" for us means (a) uncovering changing topological portraits of how subplots interlink through time, and (b) discovering interlocking linguistic "hinges" through which new historical trajectories of subplot combinations become defined. In our case, the linguistic hinges between foreign policy and domestic revolt were rooted in religion. How the evolving issues and topics discussed in this article express themselves in domestic (and eventually violent) political conflict between the anti-war Parte Guelfa faction and the pro-war Civic ‘faction’ will be the subject of the second of this complementary pair of articles.

We analyze public-policy speeches in the Florentine *Consulte e Pratiche*, immediately prior to the Ciompi Revolt, for signs of elite factional conflict, in the context of self-proclaimed unity. We employ three statistical analyses of these speeches in Latin: namely, scatterplots of word frequencies, Wordfish scaling, and regressions on speech-similarities. Plus we employ two qualitative analyses: a case study of the speeches of Lapo da Castiglionchio, leader of the Parte Guelfa faction, and a close examination of the rhetoric of unity in three important sets of meetings. Our main finding is this: The runup to the Ciompi Revolt was crystalization of "unity of citizens" in the room of the *Consulte e Pratiche* and, among the same actors, crystallization of "unity of Guelfs" in the room of the Parte Guelfa, with a lack of recognition in the multivocal speeches in the former of the obvious contradiction with actions in the latter. In our opinion, the tragedy of "the valiant failure of republicanism" in Florence was that intense wishful yearning for unity in speech induced, under background conditions of deep social-class contestation about "Who is Florence?," an intensification in action of the very revolutionary forces that it most desperately wanted to suppress.

It is common for social scientists to use formal quantitative methods to compare ecological units such as towns, schools, or nations. In many cases, the size of these units in terms of the number of individuals subsumed in each differs substantially. When the variables in question are counts, there is generally some attempt to neutralize differences in size by turning variables into ratios or by controlling for size. But methods that are appropriate in many demographic and epidemiological contexts have been used in settings where they may not be justified and may well introduce spurious relations between variables. We suggest local regressions as a simple diagnostic and generalized additive models as a superior modeling strategy, with double-residualized regressions as a backup for certain cases.

While much of economic sociology has been interested in how culture shapes economic networks, there has been less attention to how economic networks shape culture. In this chapter, we focus on the case of political culture. Surveying literature in political and economic sociology and history, we argue that there are general patterns that link formal characteristics of economic networks (whether actors have direct ties or occupy structurally equivalent positions, whether relations are voluntary or involuntary) to aspects of political culture (whether it is particularistic or universalistic, whether it is conflictual or pacific). We discuss how these patterns vary for elite and non-elite political actors, and conclude with some preliminary generalizations about the relationship between economic and political relations that can guide future exploration.