The Responsiveness of Direct and Indirect Elections

Abstract

Previous research argues the Seventeenth Amendment made Senate elections more responsive. To make this claim, existing work compares the vote‐seat relationships of direct and indirect elections before and after the Seventeenth Amendment. I argue this approach is problematic because it does not account for regional variation and compares elections from different time periods using presidential instead of Senate vote. I overcome these problems by simulating indirect elections using state legislatures’ partisan compositions to evaluate the responsiveness of direct and indirect elections after the Seventeenth Amendment. With this counterfactual approach, my findings suggest direct elections are not necessary for electoral responsiveness.

The Impact of Electoral Rules and Reforms on Election Outcomes

“…The outcome variable denotes whether a Democrat was elected to the Senate, which is modeled as a function of the gubernatorial vote and an interaction between gubernatorial vote and the state’s ballot laws. The use of an interaction term to capture differences across electoral rules comports with common methodological practices in the study of electoral reforms and election outcomes (Engstrom & Kernell, 2005, 2014; Rogers, 2012). By including the interaction terms, we are able to ascertain how the same vote totals translates into election outcomes across the different electoral rules.…”

“…While the analysis reported above supports the idea that ballot reforms conditioned the extent to which indirect elections corresponded with the partisan outcome of direct elections, it does not account for the relationship between gubernatorial elections and of the partisan composition of the state legislature. Understanding this relationship is crucial because partisan control of the legislatures was an important, if not the sole, determinant of Senate election outcomes (Rogers, 2012; Schiller et al, 2013; Schiller & Stewart, 2015). It is, therefore, plausible that the observed effect of the office bloc ballot is a function of ballot reforms weakening the correspondence between the composition of the state legislatures and gubernatorial elections.…”

“…The malapportionment of state legislatures during this period is argued to be an important source of this bias (Haynes, 1912; King & Ellis, 1996). Other studies find that indirect elections largely mirrored the partisan preferences of the statewide electorate (Rogers, 2012; Schiller & Stewart, 2015; Stewart & Weingast, 1992; Wirls, 1999). Relatedly, Stewart and Weingast (1992) argue that the Republicans’ advantage was not due to indirect elections, but rather the admission of pro-Republican states during the 1860s.…”

“…While there is debate over how well indirect elections responded to the preferences of the mass electorate, prior research largely agrees about the importance of state legislative partisanship as the state legislature almost always selected a copartisan (Rogers, 2012; Schiller & Stewart, 2015). 1 The connection between the outcome of indirect and direct elections, therefore, depended upon how well state legislative partisanship mirrored the outcome of statewide races.…”

“…Electoral reforms during the 19th century profoundly altered American elections from party-controlled affairs to contests in which voters had greater control over the selection of elected officials (Burnham, 1965; Ware, 2002). While a large literature examines the impact of these different electoral rules on American election outcomes (Carson & Sievert, 2017; Crook & Hibbing, 1997; Engstrom & Kernell, 2005, 2014; Rogers, 2012; Rusk, 1970; Schiller & Stewart, 2015), most studies examine a single reform or rule in isolation. By doing so, scholars may fail to account how other reforms altered the effect of the electoral rule under study.…”