Transatlantic Majoritarianism: How Murder, Migration, and Modernity Transformed Nineteenth Century Legislatures

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.

In 1890, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas Brackett Reed used the authority his position afforded to him to permanently hobble legislative minorities in the House and to usher in the practice of simple majority rule. Legislative scholars have long lauded Reed as a transformational leader, whose singular actions established majoritarianism as standard in democratic legislatures. But despite the credit given to Reed, his actions were not entirely of his own invention; Reed was deeply influenced by the actions of Speaker of the British House of Commons Henry Bouverie William Brand, who in 1881 implemented the first closure of debate in the Commons in response to extreme, obstructive behavior by Irish members of Parliament. This book explores the questions of why and how two national legislatures located on two different continents and established hundreds of years apart were forced to respond to obstructive behavior within the same decade. Relying on archival evidence from both the U.S. and the U.K., Transatlantic Majoritarianism: How Murder, Migration, and Modernity Transformed Nineteenth Century Legislatures reveals a transatlantic network of legislators, journalists, technocrats, and terrorists, whose intersecting milieux in the late nineteenth century radically transformed national legislatures in both the U.S. and the U.K.