By DAVID EVERSON
Con-Con voting
David Kenney, Jack R. Van Der Slik and Samuel J. Pernacciaro, Roll Call! Patterns of Voting in the Sixth Illinois Constitutional Convention. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. $3.45, 85 pp.
CAN THE Illinois Constitutional Convention of 1970 best be understood as a gathering of nonpartisan and public interest oriented delegates who sought to do what was best for the state as a whole, or were more partisan and regional factors at work? Evidence produced by Roll Call!, one of a series of studies in Illinois constitution making published for the Institute of Government and Public Affairs by the University of Illinois Press, suggests that the convention was marked by clearly partisan and regional (as well as other) conflicts. This evidence is contained most palpably in the roll call votes of the convention delegates. These roll calls fall into several intelligible patterns which can be related to the characteristics of the delegates. For example, one set of issues is appropriately labeled "Daley Orthodoxy." The issues, of course, were those which particularly concerned the city of Chicago and the Daley Democratic organization. On these issues, both partisanship (Democrat vs. Republican) and regionalism (Chicago vs. Downstate) were clearly evident in the study's analysis of the roll calls.
There are two core conclusions to this study. One is that roll call voting at the convention was quite structured—that is, highly predictable. The second is that the key to voting patterns lies in political party affiliation. Although this study employs sophisticated statistical techniques of roll call analysis, these conclusions are well supported and articulated.
As the authors frequently observe, many of the findings are not surprising—except I might add, to those who cling to the myth of nonpartisanship—but they serve to reinforce the interpretation that the convention was a battleground of real conflicts of interest and partisan divisions.
October 1975 / Illinois Issues / 315