Though we know much about majority party agenda control in the House of Representatives during the “modern” period from the 1890’s forward, far less is known about agenda control prior to that time. There are numerous reasons to suspect that the majority party lacked agenda control during most of the 1800’s. This suggests that we may have missed the greatest variation in majority party agenda control; it also leads to the main question of my dissertation: when and how did the majority party gain control over the legislative process?

I argue that, unlike modern House majorities, nineteenth century House majorities did not control the agenda. By the 1880’s, massive increases in the House’s workload, as well as reduced ideological divisions within the majority party, led party members to revolutionize the legislative process in ways that allowed a bare majority to effectively decide which bills the House would pass. In so doing, they boldly stripped the minority party of many powers that it had enjoyed until that time.

To show this, I first map out the legislative process in the early 1800’s, showing that it differed radically from the modern process, and that it provided limited opportunities for agenda control. After showing that this process repeatedly produced outcomes that most majority party members disliked, I map out changes in the process that occurred across the nineteenth century. I then argue that an acute scarcity of floor time led majority party members to support strong majority party agenda control by 1890. I offer evidence to support this claim, as well as evidence showing that, after 1890, legislative outputs changed in ways that reflect majority party agenda control.

This has major implications regarding parties’ roles in the contemporary House. The changes of the 1880’s remain in place, and the majority party continues to wield the powers that it seized at that time. From this perspective, variation in majority party agenda control that has occurred since 1890 is minor compared to the revolutionary changes of the late 1800’s, and the majority has wielded a constant high level of agenda influence across the modern era.