Keith L. Dougherty , Political Science, UGA


	Keith L. Dougherty
	Professor

	Success at the Constitutional Convention

	Abstract. Like members of any assembly, some members of the U.S. Constitutional Convention were more capable of getting their ideas accepted than others. We exploit a new dataset to determine which delegates were more capable of getting their proposals passed at the 1787 Constitutional Convention and why. We consider three types of factors: innate ability, institutional role, and the context of decision-making. Our analysis provides little support for the first two explanations, which are common factors in legislatures. Instead, we find strong support for contextual factors, such as a delegate's ability to pivot the assembly, the types of issues he proposed, the size of his state and the day in which he made a proposal -- all of which affected a delegate's success. We conclude that delegate effectiveness had more to do with other members of the convention than with a delegate's personal qualities, providing a largely new explanation for why some ideas were adopted in the Constitution but not others. To request a copy of this paper, please e-mail: [email protected].
Last Modified: 6/1/20