Wealth, Officeholding, and Elite Ideology in Antebellum Georgia

Abstract

Does personal wealth translate into political power, and does it influence the ideology of officeholders? This paper investigates the role of personal wealth in politics using the 1805 Georgia land lottery as a natural experiment. Matching lottery records to a roster of officeholders and roll call votes, I estimate the effects of winning a land lot prize on ex-post officeholding, and on votes in favor of slavery legislation and state banking policy for participants who served in the state legislature. I find that lottery wealth significantly reduces legislators' support for slavery legislation, and find no evidence that wealth effects officeholding nor legislators' support for banking policy. I use property tax records to show that the treatment effect on support for slavery legislation varies systematically according legislators' pretreatment wealth. The results demonstrate that wealth can influence policy, but not in the direction anticipated by economic elite theories of American politics.