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

Apportionment rules establish the basis upon which a political institution exists. Charles A. Kromkowski, a lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, places the issue of apportionment at the center of an institutional analysis of the United States from 1700 to 1870. He examines three periods—the Revolutionary Era, the Constitutional Era, and the Civil War and Reconstruction Era—as pivotal periods of apportionment conflict, reassessment, and consensus. Within these time frames, his study "define[s] constitutional rule change as an alteration of the capacities and practical limits that define the formal or customary content and uses of collective authority" (423). When apportionment rules became controversial and in need of re-assessment, apportionment changes usually "entail[ed] the abandonment of the existing rule of apportionment and the creation of a new rule" (423).

In the Continental Congress, the states constituted the voting members of the body with each state casting one vote (although each state could and did have several delegates representing that state). But state equality did not last long. In 1787, at the Philadelphia federal convention, the framers of the new proposed constitution invented a new form of apportionment: dual apportionment. In the Senate, state equality was retained while the House of Representatives was based on the populations of the several states. This new type of apportionment reflected the growing diversity of the new Union and the growing pressure for proportional representation at the national level. Thus, the founders creatively continued state equality and accommodated the building pressure for proportional representation.

Further apportionment change occurred in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. By rejecting the dual apportionment scheme established peacefully in 1789 and deciding upon secession, Southern states and leaders concluded that the constitutional and political structure that had served their interest in 1787 had come to work against them by 1860-1861. Their increasing minority status in the country, in the Senate, and in the House of Representatives caused them to reject the entire constitutional structure and seek to establish their independence. Conversely, Northern determination to use coercion and prevent the establishment of a Southern confederacy resulted from the strengths that Northerners and their party, the Republicans, saw with the apportionment structure that served their interests and provided them majority power to defend and preserve the Union. Reconstruction merely capped and made permanent the dominance of the apportionment schema that provided for a recreated American republic.

In pursuing his thesis through these apportionment decisions, Kromkowski labors mightily—and makes the reader labor mightily as well. Eschewing solely a historical approach or solely a political science/modeling approach, Kromkowski employs both methods in this densely argued tome. His thick descriptive analysis requires him to employ fifty-seven tables and thirty-one figures; they assist the thick prose but only just. Kromkowski dissects each era generally and then examines the "microlevel (or actor-centered)" (108) conditions; next he targets the larger macrolevel conditions as understood through the arguments and explanatory models advanced by political science and social science theory.

For all of his impressive work, Kromkowski occasionally provides less than startling insights, such as his conclusion that the American Revolution "occurred because British and colonial political leaders failed to maintain a working consensus about the constitutional terms and limitations of their relationship" (144). For those primarily concerned with the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Kromkowski offers the era as a period that demonstrates his theories about the role which apportionment played in the handicapping of each side's relative attachments to the 1787 apportionment compromises up to secession. His five-page treatment of Reconstruction is so terse that one wonders why it is included at all.

Kromkowski's audience is advanced graduate students in political science theory. A bibliography would...