State Formation, Patronage, and Parties in the Early American Republic

Benjamin Rohr, University of Mannheim

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.

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 Presented in Session 134. Theorizing Axes of Conflict in US Politics