Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2011
Antebellum states were critical in supporting the emerging rail system of the nineteenth century, yet not all states engaged in active rail promotion efforts. In this analysis, I consider how local economic and political conditions, as well as the rail promotion activities of a state's contiguous neighbors, impacted a legislature's rail promotion decisions. The findings suggest that states only engaged in rail promotion when local infrastructure was of poor quality and a state's tax revenues were sufficient to support rail expenditures. These findings reveal that diffusion, powered by social learning, does not drive all state policy innovations. Instead, local conditions and parallel thinking are important factors in state policy development. Furthermore, the analysis underscores the power of local governments in the antebellum period, while also raising the question of whether such diffuse state building was effective.
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76. Communication between states can be measured through a range of proxies, including publications that cross borders, economic ties, and citizen mobility. While all of these approaches offer insight into intrastate communication, the current analysis examines specifically connectivity through transportation infrastructure. By examining the impact of railroads and canals on policy development, the overlooked role of space and geography in policy diffusion as well as state building can be brought to light.
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88. Since the temporal dependence measure is primarily a control, the results for this coefficient are not reported.
89. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting additional rail promotion programs overlooked in the initial analysis.
90. Another potential internal economic factor driving state legislatures' decisions on rail promotion policies was local debt. For instance, Ohio's costly canal system could have prevented future state railroad promotion. However, state per capita debt is actually a poor predictor of local rail promotion choices. Utilizing state debt per capita for the year 1841, the correlation between state debt and rail policy adoption after 1841 is 0.011. This finding implies that states with higher debt were more likely to engage in rail promotion, however the relation is fairly weak (Rodden, J. A., Hamilton's Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006Google Scholar).). Table 6 summarizes the relationship between state debt and local rail promotion policies. Significantly, there were only five states that engaged in rail promotion policies after 1841. While all five states that engaged in rail policies after 1841 tended to have low debt levels, the table also reveals that states with both high and low debt levels elected to not engage in rail promotion policies. Though it plausibly could impact local development plans, compared to other internal economic factors, internal debt was not a driving factor in states' rail promotion policy choices.
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92. One plausible explanation for this lack of policy convergence is that rail promotion programs may only have appeared in states with large urban centers. In this scenario, rail promotion, and subsequent policy convergence, only occurred among states with the largest urban populations, and was primarily a mechanism utilized by large cities to exert control over the rural hinterland. This would explain why so many highly urbanized states, such as Pennsylvania and New York, possessed active rail promotion programs. Yet, many states with large urban centers, including Rhode Island (Providence) and Ohio (Cleveland and Cincinnati), refused to engage in rail promotion. Furthermore, many decidedly nonurban states did have rail promotion. In particular, Chicago was not an especially developed urban center when Illinois engaged in a rail promotion project in 1832 (Corliss, Main Line of Mid-America). Therefore, competition between states with large urban centers alone cannot explain state legislatures' approach to the problem of local rail development.
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110. This does not mean that local conditions were the only feature in determining local rail promotion strategies. As indicated, neighbors' did play a role in agenda setting. Furthermore, internal political conflicts between parties or regional interests also determined the odds of rail promotion adoption. Thus, while the present analysis sheds light on how local factors alone shaped state rail promotion activities, the process of local rail subsidy in the antebellum era was complex and involved a multitude of forces. Further work is needed to fully illuminate how all of these distinct processes were related to and interacted with one another.
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