Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate

Abstract

The author argues that direct election intensified existing electoral incentives in the early-twentieth-century Senate, shifting the audience for senators' reelection efforts with measurable behavioral consequences. The author examines patterns of bill sponsorship, roll-call participation, and party voting in the decades surrounding the Seventeenth Amendment's ratification, a time when originally elected and originally selected senators served side by side. The author finds evidence of increased sponsorship and participation among originally elected senators. Comparing behavioral patterns before and after the constitutional amendment also reveals other important behavioral shifts toward a mass audience in the postamendment period, including a tendency to increase constituency bill sponsorship immediately before reelection and a strengthening of the link between state partisanship and senators' party support voting.

The Responsiveness of Direct and Indirect Elections

“…Even with empirical and legal foundations, assumptions limit my counterfactual approach. By focusing on the votes-seats relationship, my analysis sheds less light on how the Seventeenth Amendment influenced senators' legislative responsiveness or behavior than other recent research (Bernhard and Sala 2006;Gailmard and Jenkins 2009;Meinke 2008). The party-loyalty assumption only predicts the partisanship of an indirectly elected senator.…”

“…Progressives hoped direct elections would correct the unresponsive Senate through the redemptive powers of democracy (Hoebeke ; Riker ; Rossum ). Recently, there has been a surge in interest amongst political scientists to identify the effects of the Seventeenth Amendment on legislative behavior (Bernhard and Sala ; Gailmard and Jenkins ; Meinke ; Romero ; Schiller ; Wawro and Schickler ). There is comparatively less research investigating how direct elections affected the electoral responsiveness of Senate elections.…”

When Congress Asserts Itself: Examining Legislative Challenges to Executive Power

“…Still, prior to the XVII Amendment in 1913, after which all Senators were directly elected, such electoral pressures were muted (Gailmard and Jenkins 2009;Lapinski 2004;Meinke 2008). Senators had greater cause to expand congressional power back then.…”

Making Washington Work: Legislative Entrepreneurship and the Personal Vote from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression

“…The few studies of bill sponsorship in the premodern Congress focus on the Senate. Meinke () finds that directly elected senators introduced more constituency and policy bills, but fewer private bills than senators elected by state legislatures. As in the modern Senate, senators with more seniority, majority status, and better committee assignments introduced more bills.…”

“…We follow other scholars in using committee of referral to classify the subject matter of bills (Meinke ; Schiller ). We classify as private any bill referred to one of several committees that predominantly handled claims of private citizens against their government.…”