Joseph G. Cannon: Majoritarian from Illinois

Congressional scholars regularly identify Speaker Joseph G. Cannon as the personification of centralized authority and partisan strength in the United States Congress. This paper assesses the conventional wisdom on Cannonism by employing the Groseclose-Stewart (1998) method for estimating values of committee seats to study variation in member-specific committee portfolio values. The data are useful both for reassessing the historical thesis of Cannon as tyrant and for testing more recent political science hypotheses about the underpinnings of a strong majority party. The findings fail to corroborate the notions of majority party power and Cannon as tyrant, and, if anything, support a new portrait of Cannon as a majoritarian.