The Remaking of an American Senate: The 17th Amendment and Ideological Responsiveness

Bernhard, William; Sala, Brian R.

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00411.x

Cited by 37 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Regardless of their original patterns, senators in the immediate post-Seventeenth Amendment period expressed more party loyalty in roll-call voting as their state's support for their party increased. This result augments existing findings on ideological responsiveness (Bernhard and Sala 2006;Gailmard and Jenkins 2006), suggesting heightened responsiveness to mass preferences after direct election. (7) 68.00 (7) Prob.…”

Section: Party Unitysupporting

confidence: 88%

Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate

Meinke

2007

Political Research Quarterly

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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.

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Section: Party Unitysupporting

confidence: 88%

Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate

Meinke

2007

Political Research Quarterly

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“…Some papers in this tradition analyze how election proximity affects senators' ideological positions (e.g. Thomas 1985, Bernhard andSala 2006). Other papers examine instead the effects of election proximity on senators' responsiveness to the desires of the polity (e.g.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Policymakers' horizon and trade reforms: The protectionist effect of elections

Conconi

Facchini

Zanardi

2014

Journal of International Economics

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This paper shows that electoral incentives deter politicians from supporting trade liberalization. We focus on all major trade liberalization bills introduced since the early 1970s in the U.S. Congress, in which House and Senate members serve respectively two-and six-year terms and one third of senators face elections every two years. We show that senators are more likely to support trade liberalization than House representatives. However, this result does not hold for the last generation of senators, who face elections at the same time as House members, suggesting that inter-cameral differences are driven by term length. Considering senators alone, we find that the last generation is less likely to support trade liberalization than the previous two. This result is pervasive and holds both when comparing the behavior of different senators voting on the same bill and that of individual senators voting on different bills. The protectionist effect of election proximity disappears for senators who are retiring or hold safe seats.JEL classifications: D72, F10.

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“…Amacher and Boyes, 1978;Thomas, 1985;Glazer and Robbins, 1985;Levitt, 1996;Bernhard and Sala, 2006). Rather than focusing on senators' choices on specific policy Our analysis is also related to a large body of work that studies political obstacles to reforms.…”

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confidence: 99%

Guns and Votes

Bouton

Conconi

Pino

et al. 2014

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Why are U.S. congressmen reluctant to support gun control regulations, despite the fact that most Americans are in favor of them? We argue that re-election motives can lead politicians to take a pro-gun stance against the interests of an apathetic majority of the electorate, but in line with the interests of an intense minority. We develop a model of gun control choices in which incumbent politicians are both office and policy motivated, and voters differ in the direction and intensity of their preferences. We derive conditions under which politicians support gun control early in their terms, but oppose them when they approach re-election. We test the predictions of the model by analyzing votes on gun-related legislation in the U.S. Senate, in which one third of the members are up for re-election every two years. We find that senators are more likely to vote pro gun when they are close to facing re-election, a result which holds comparing both across and within legislators. Only Democratic senators "flip flop'' on gun control, and only if the group of pro-gun voters in their constituency is of intermediate size.

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The Remaking of an American Senate: The 17th Amendment and Ideological Responsiveness

Cited by 37 publications

References 28 publications

Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate

Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate

Policymakers' horizon and trade reforms: The protectionist effect of elections

Guns and Votes

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