Railroads and the Silver Shoes of Populism: The Rise and Fall of the People’s Party in 19th-Century America

The People’s Party is the only major populist movement in American history that was quickly reabsorbed by mainstream parties. We study the main trigger of its rise— technological disruption from railroad expansion—and discuss its dissolution in light of the conceptual framework we develop and test empirically. We construct a novel county-level measure of Technological Disruption Exposure (TDE) that captures the change in competitive pressure each county faced from all other counties, driven by railroad-induced reductions in transportation costs between 1870 and 1890. TDE positively predicts People’s Party vote share in the 1894 congressional elections: a one standard deviation increase raises Populist support by nearly 3 percentage points. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect is concentrated in counties with high crop specialization—where competitive vulnerability translates into concentrated losses. A commitment-politics framework organizes these patterns: railroads reduced the probability of being a market winner in high-TDE counties, where voters shifted from discretionary to commitment politicians. The 1890s episode is uniquely informative because, unlike today, there was fiscal and institutional room to rebuild trust: mainstream parties credibly adopted Populist demands, and the movement dissolved. Today those conditions do not hold—which may explain why modern populism has proven more persistent.