Membership, Mobilization, and Policy Adoption in the Gilded Age: The Case of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

Relatively little is known about how late nineteenth-century associations worked to get their policy goals adopted by state governments. We study this question here, considering the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and three policies it supported: scientific temperance instruction, increasi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of policy history 2021-10, Vol.33 (4), p.345-372
Main Authors: CHAMBERLAIN, ADAM, YANUS, ALIXANDRA B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
20th century
Associations
Communications networks
Consent
Geography
Institutionalization
Interest groups
Legislation
Legislatures
Lobbying
Lobbyists
Membership
Mobilization
Morality
Partisanship
Political parties
Reforms
Sales
State government
State legislatures
Tobacco
Women
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Summary:Relatively little is known about how late nineteenth-century associations worked to get their policy goals adopted by state governments. We study this question here, considering the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and three policies it supported: scientific temperance instruction, increasing the age of consent, and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors. Overall, WCTU-supported legislation was more likely to succeed in states with unified Republican state legislatures, aided by neighboring state adoptions (scientific temperance) and greater WCTU membership (increasing age of consent and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors). These findings are supported by historical evidence, which reveals how WCTU leadership targeted particular states when lobbying for scientific temperance instruction laws and utilized its broad membership base to pressure state legislatures on the other two issues. In total, these results show how one late nineteenth-century membership group was able to facilitate the successful spread of its policies throughout the nation.
ISSN:0898-0306
1528-4190
DOI:10.1017/S0898030621000166