Meaning
The exchange of favours between legislators - you vote for my project and I will vote for yours - so each passes measures that could not succeed on their own merits. In ordinary use it covers any mutual back-scratching alliance, and it also names the literary variety, authors trading praise for each other's books. Disapproving in tone, implying measures passed by trade rather than merit; political science also uses it neutrally for vote-trading theory. Regional use: American English; the political and literary senses now general.
Origin
An American frontier image: when a family had felled timber, neighbours would shoulder their axes and come in to the log-rolling, jointly hauling the logs into heaps to clear the land, help that would be returned in kind. Etymonline dates the legislative vote-trading sense to 1823, from the proverbial frontier expression 'you roll my log and I'll roll yours' - and notes, delightfully, that the literal rolling sense is not recorded until 1848, so the political use is in print a quarter-century before the barn-building one. An 1835 observer described the custom of a settlement gathering to clear a newcomer's land, and the same year Davy Crockett was already scolding it on the House floor: 'my people don't like me to log-roll in their business, and vote away pre-emption rights to fellows in other states'. Bartlett's 1877 dictionary records a further sense, a merry-making in Maine lumber camps, and the log-cabin imagery the phrase carried helped fuel William Henry Harrison's 1840 campaign.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- logroll
- you roll my log and I'll roll yours
Usage Examples
- The dam and the dairy subsidy passed in one bill, a neat piece of logrolling that left taxpayers covering both.
- Critics accused the two committees of logrolling: each tucked the other's pet project into its own spending bill.
- Theirs was an old-fashioned logroll - your vote for my bridge, my vote for your base - struck in a corridor over coffee.