Institutional Change and the Electoral
Connection in the Senate
Political Research Quarterly
Volume 61 Number 3
September 2008 445-457
© 2008 University of Utah
10.1177/1065912907309156
http://prq.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Revisiting the Effects of Direct Election
Scott R. Meinke
Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
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.
Keywords: U.S. Senate; Seventeenth Amendment; representation; electoral connection; constituency; bill sponsorship
D
uring the first two decades of the twentieth century,
state-level reforms and, ultimately, the Seventeenth
Amendment brought about a major institutional
change: the direct election of U.S. senators. The shift
was a gradual one, with individual states adopting various arrangements for popular control of the statelegislative selection process in the years leading up to
the ratification of the constitutional amendment in 1913
(Kyvig 2004; Stewart 1992), but the end result was a
more direct institutional link between senators and mass
electoral politics. Because the reform reoriented the
relationship between the public and the Senate, there is
good reason to expect that the change yielded behavioral consequences in the Senate. Until very recently,
however, evidence that direct election brought significant behavioral changes has been quite limited. In the
past several years, a small amount of work has uncovered broad, long-term patterns of change in voting
behavior that correspond theoretically and empirically
to the onset of direct election (e.g., Bernhard and Sala
2006; Gailmard and Jenkins 2006).
In this article, I revisit and augment those findings
by highlighting new types of evidence that direct election had measurable effects on senators’ behavior. I
argue that direct election intensified individual electoral considerations and increased the incentive for
senators to make choices oriented toward mass electoral appeals. The argument, as I will explain, is not
that direct election created an electoral connection
for the Senate—that linkage existed to some degree
prereform (e.g., Cooper and Rybicki 2002; Schiller
2006; Stewart 1992)—but rather that mass electoral
considerations became measurably stronger influences on behavior.
To test this expectation empirically, I explore the
behavioral differences between senators chosen by different selection mechanisms as well as the overall contrast between pre– and post–Seventeenth Amendment
behavioral patterns. Starting with the adoption of statelevel reforms in the first years of the twentieth century,
and continuing well into the 1920s, significant numbers
of originally elected senators1 and senators originally
chosen by state legislative selection served side by side
in the Senate. The simultaneous service of these two
classes of senators permits me to compare the behavior
of elected senators with the behavior of those originally
chosen by state legislatures, testing the expectation that
the originally elected senators will exhibit a stronger
Author’s Note: I thank Marisa Aronson, Kevin Doherty, Ann Grant,
Karen Guarino, Carl Marchioli, Emily Miller, and Greg Yankee for
their data-collection assistance on this project, and I thank John
Enyeart, Robin Jacobson, and Kevin Scott for valuable comments. An
earlier version of this research was presented at the 2005 meetings of
the Midwest Political Science Association. All data and commands
necessary to replicate the empirical results in this article will be made
available on the author’s Web site (http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/
smeinke/directelect.htm) upon publication.
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445
446 Political Research Quarterly
pattern of behavior oriented toward the mass electorate.
I also separate the analysis into pre- and post–
Seventeenth Amendment time periods to examine acrossthe-board changes in behavior associated with the
national-level reform.
Focusing on this time period of simultaneous service, I look for individual-level behavioral evidence
through several empirical measures that capture
activity oriented toward securing electoral reward
and avoiding electoral punishment from the mass
electorate. First, using new data, I examine patterns
of bill sponsorship, both overall and in constituencyoriented categories, to evaluate whether senators
directly accountable to a mass constituency were more
disposed to demonstrate responsiveness through bill
sponsorship. I then explore roll-call participation to
assess whether direct accountability to a mass electoral
audience provided senators with an incentive to
increase their floor-voting participation. Finally, to test
the effects of a strengthened electoral connection on
Senate partisanship, I examine the effects of direct
election on the party loyalty of individual senators’
voting behavior. As I detail in the discussion and conclusion, the results provide some unambiguous support
for the argument that originally elected senators
engaged more consistently in mass-oriented behavior,
and they illustrate that the Seventeenth Amendment
itself was associated with a change in some of the
determinants of these behaviors.
The Effects of Direct Election
Until very recently, political scientists have had
surprisingly little to say about direct election and the
Seventeenth Amendment. As recently as the mid1990s, King and Ellis (1996) and Crook and Hibbing
(1997) each noted that our understanding of direct
election had almost no foundation in empirical analysis. Crook and Hibbing further observed that in this
dearth of research, congressional scholars assumed
that direct election had minimal effects (p. 845). In
the past several years, however, direct election has
seen some revived attention, with most of the work
focused on the reform’s consequences.2
One line of inquiry has sought to understand
whether and how direct election affected the Senate’s
composition. Comparing House and Senate composition over time, this work has revealed increasing similarities between the House and Senate as senators
became both less aristocratic and more politically
experienced after the 1914 elections and as the party
composition of the two chambers converged (Crook
and Hibbing 1997; Stewart 1992). Students of direct
election’s partisan origins have also produced some
evidence of shifting partisan advantage in Senate
composition, with Democrats seizing a slight post1914 advantage from Republicans, who had been
advantaged somewhat before reform (King and Ellis
1996; see also King and Ellis 1999; Wirls 1999).
Other work on direct election has emphasized the
reform’s behavioral consequences for senators, particularly in terms of constituency representation. Focusing
on aggregate voting patterns pre– and post–Seventeenth
Amendment, Bernhard and Sala (2006) have produced
compelling evidence that senators changed their ideological positioning in response to direct election: in contrast to their legislatively selected predecessors, directly
elected senators were much more likely to moderate in
their NOMINATE scores as reelection approached.
Bernhard and Sala interpreted this result as evidence of
increased responsiveness, a conclusion that is bolstered
by a related study of the relationship between state-level
ideology and roll-call voting. In that work, Gailmard
and Jenkins (2006) showed a strengthened postamendment connection between roll-call voting and preferences in the mass electorate, even as senators became
less responsive to state legislative preferences. Research
on other aspects of the postreform Senate has revealed
changes in features of the lawmaking process that relate
to constituency representation and the electoral connection. Lapinski (2004) demonstrated that support coalitions for Senate legislation increased in size after direct
election; he also showed that duration of individual senators’ committee service increased, suggesting an effort
to forge a consistent public image.
Still, not all recent work reveals change in
response to direct election. Schiller (2006) compared
electoral careers and bill sponsorship patterns in the
periods before and after direct election, demonstrating the importance of state-legislative party support
in the indirect election period and showing that sponsorship of private (pension and relief) bills under
indirect election is related to electoral support.
Finding that bill sponsorship follows similar patterns
in the earlier and later periods, Schiller emphasized
the importance of popular support for Senate candidates
before and after direct election and noted that even the
indirect election system produced strong incentives to
build constituency connections. Paralleling Schiller’s
findings of minimal effects for direct election, the
analysis in Wawro and Schickler’s (2006) study of
the filibuster and cloture reform gives further reason
to expect that the Seventeenth Amendment had little
if any impact. Assessing the predictive power of
House NOMINATE scores on Senate scores over
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Meinke / Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate 447
time, Wawro and Schickler found little evidence that
the relationship between the two strengthened after
1914 (pp. 199-205).
The findings on direct election’s effects, then, are
mixed. Research in the past several years has yielded
numerous sophisticated analyses of direct election, and
multiple scholars have pointed to some measurable
changes in Senate lawmaking and senator behavior, primarily in the form of shifts in aggregate voting patterns.
At the same time, there are theoretical reasons to
expect weaker effects, as Schiller (2006) has argued,
and some evidence fails to support a post–Seventeenth
Amendment shift in behavior.
Direct Election and the Mass
Electoral Audience
I argue that further evidence of direct election’s
effects should be visible in measures of senators’
Washington activity that go beyond their aggregate
roll-call behavior. Direct election should have
strengthened senators’ attention to the mass electorate and its potential to reward and punish certain
choices. As a result, those senators who, in particular,
began their Senate career by building electoral connections with a mass constituency should exhibit
behavior that reflects mass reelection concerns.
This argument is grounded in the uncontroversial
assumptions that senators are individually goal-oriented
and that senators around the turn of the twentieth
century possessed a mix of personal goals. What we
know about prereform senators strongly suggests that
one of these goals was reelection. During the nineteenth century, senators had developed more of a
long-term orientation toward Senate service, with the
average length of service doubling from around three
years in the mid-nineteenth century to around six
years by 1900 (Stewart 1992, 73). Similarly, more
senators began to serve multiple terms; by the late
nineteenth century, a majority of senators were
returning for service after a completed term (Stewart
1992, 75). Senators in the same period began to
engage in some career-oriented behavior by, for
instance, sponsoring constituency-oriented legislation (Schiller 2006) and even by engaging in mass
campaigns (the “canvas”) for their Senate seats in
some cases (Riker 1955). It may not be an exaggeration to say that reelection was senators’ proximate
goal, in Mayhew’s (1974) terms, by the turn of the
twentieth century.
The subsequent direct-election reforms then modified the institutional context in which senators pursued these existing electoral goals. With the advent of
direct election, the objectives of reelection-oriented
senators were linked more directly to a public audience rather than to a relative handful of ultimate
arbiters in the state legislatures. From this perspective, the state-level reforms and the Seventeenth
Amendment reoriented and intensified the electoral
connection that already existed in the pre-reform
Senate.3 Stated somewhat differently, direct election
freed electorally focused senators to develop individualized coalitions for mass electoral support, and it
created the conditions for those electoral coalitions to
hold those senators accountable.4 Accordingly, senators concerned with securing reelection should have,
under direct election, increased their attention both to
engaging in the kind of activity—especially low-cost,
nonideological activity—that their mass electoral
constituency would reward (Mayhew 1974) and to
avoiding behavior that a mass constituency would be
likely to punish—especially the sort of activity electoral challenger could easily seize upon and link to
the senator (e.g., Arnold 1990).
I use several types of evidence to explore these
potential behavioral consequences of direct election.
I look first at several types of individual bill sponsorship as evidence of behavior oriented toward the
mass audience. We know that bill sponsorship offers
electoral advantages to members of the contemporary Congress as a tool for both credit claiming and
position taking (Hill and Williams 1993; Mayhew
1974; Schiller 1995). Moreover, research on the
nineteenth-century Congress has shown that senators
used bill introduction activity to forge constituency
connections with an eye to indirect electoral support
(Cooper and Rybicki 2002; Schiller 2006). Particularly because bill sponsorship allows senators to
display constituency responsiveness at relatively low
cost, I expect that senators who obtained office through
the support of a mass constituency will make greater
use of bill sponsorship for electoral purposes. To test
this relationship, I tally individual bill sponsorship levels
by Congress during the period of simultaneous service
by originally elected and originally selected senators. I
have coded each senator’s sponsored bills by private/
public status and, among public bills, by type: narrowly
constituency-oriented or broadly policy-focused (see
Appendix A). I expect, specifically, to find that when
other factors are controlled, originally elected senators
sponsor more private bills and constituency-oriented
legislative bills than their originally selected counterparts. Similarly, because broader, policy-oriented bills
provide an opportunity for electoral position-taking, I
expect to find that originally elected senators sponsor
more policy-focused bills.
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448 Political Research Quarterly
Second, I examine overall roll-call participation
for behavioral differences associated with the shift in
electoral audiences. Roll-call nonparticipation carries
with it the risk of electoral punishment, particularly if
a challenger advertises an incumbent’s low participation to the mass electorate. Therefore, an electorally
oriented and risk-averse senator should be concerned
with maintaining high rates of roll-call participation.
In a related way, because roll-call voting is itself an
opportunity to take public positions on key issues,
senators with direct accountability links to the electorate should see a strong incentive to participate on
roll calls for their position-taking value, regardless of
each vote’s importance for the policy outcome. We
should expect, then, that a strengthened electoral
connection would lead to higher turnout on roll calls
because of both positive and negative electoral incentives: senators who were originally elected should
exhibit higher roll-call participation than originally
legislatively selected senators, when other likely
influences on turnout are controlled.5 The dependent
variable in this test is the individual senator’s percentage of participation on roll calls in the Congress
of interest, based on the NOMINATE roll-call participation data.
Individualism and Party Loyalty
If direct election led to a shift from an elite audience in the state legislature to a mass electoral audience, senators concerned with individual electoral
success should have experienced greater freedom to
build constituency connections independent of partisanship. Even though the party label is very relevant
to mass politics, we may be able to measure a marginal turn toward individualism and away from party
loyalty in voting as the target of senators’ electoral
ambitions shifts toward the mass electorate. Several
caveats are important here. First, party elites outside
the state capital were important prior to direct election (Schiller 2006),6 and they would certainly remain
relevant postreform—thus, the onset of direct election does not imply a wholesale shift of senators’
attention away from party and toward mass politics.
In addition, research on congressional parties makes
clear that mass electoral goals and partisanship are
intertwined and that Mayhew’s (1974) classic depiction of individual electorally oriented activity understates the role of parties in the reelection goal and
member behavior (Aldrich and Rohde 2001). Because
overall party strength can be important for individual
electoral success, and because party support can be
useful to individual members in electoral appeals,
party support should be relevant to the electoral goals
of originally elected and originally selected senators.
Still, the postreform shift away from the ultimate
power of state party elites does imply some relaxing
of the party elite connection to reelection, and it suggests that some senators who built their careers on
mass support may have chosen to develop a more
individualized electoral base. In short, senators originally chosen by direct election should exhibit lower
levels of party loyalty, when other factors are controlled, relative to their originally indirectly elected
counterparts.7
Methods
Operationalizing Direct Election
Comparing senators on their original mode of selection requires some important choices about operationally defining indirectly and directly elected
senators. The choice is a complex one because of the
way in which the reform itself was implemented. Direct
election occurred in what can be seen as a piecemeal
fashion: beginning around the turn of the century, and
continuing through the early 1910s, a majority of
states adopted reforms to the Senate selection process.
Although the reforms varied (most states used a direct
primary), each had the effect of linking senators to the
mass electorate while maintaining the formal, constitutionally prescribed system of selection by the state
legislature (Riker 1955; Stewart 1992). Of course, the
ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913
placed the process fully in the hands of the electorate
in all states, starting with the 1914 elections (Sixtyfourth Congress).
Recent analyses of direct election’s effects have
approached operationalization in varying ways. Some
work has simply divided senators into two groups—
pre- and post-1914—on the assumption that all senators would experience changed incentives as a result
of the definitive shift in rules at that time (Bernhard
and Sala 2006; Crook and Hibbing 1997; Schiller
2006). Recognizing the possible earlier impact of
state-level reforms, other scholars have attempted to
classify senators according to their state’s selection
mechanism (Gailmard and Jenkins 2006; Lapinski
2004; Wawro and Schickler 2006), relying on information from a thorough survey of historical sources
produced by John Lapinski (2004).
My argument anticipates that senators will adopt
a pattern of building electoral connections based on
the incentives that structured their initial means of
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Meinke / Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate 449
achieving office. The hypotheses I outlined above for
bill sponsorship, roll-call participation, and party voting
assume that the original mode of selection has enduring
effects on representation, with senators establishing
early patterns of representation that affect their choices
over time. To capture this tendency, I follow the statespecific approach, and I classify members as originally
elected or originally selected on the basis of the mechanism in place in their state at the time of their first
(s)election to the Senate (Lapinski 2004).
However, the representational patterns of incumbents can and do change in response to institutional
changes, so it is possible that the adoption of the full
direct election reform had an independent impact,
changing the way in which all senators make important choices about representation. The adoption of the
Seventeenth Amendment may have strengthened the
electoral connection for senators originally chosen
under state-level reforms and may have imposed a
new mass-electoral focus for senators originally chosen by state elites. To explore this possibility, I examine pre- and post-1914 differences by conducting a
separate analysis on each dependent variable for each
time period. This approach has the added advantage
of revealing how the determinants of the sponsorship,
participation, and partisanship measures shifted after
the ratification of the amendment.
Time Period and Modeling Procedure
To capture variation in direct election status and to
examine multiple Congresses before and after the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, I begin the analysis with the Sixtieth Congress (elected 1906) and end
with the Seventy-first Congress (elected 1928) for both
the participation and the party loyalty dependent variables.8 The bill sponsorship analysis time series also
begins prior to the Seventeenth Amendment and ends
several Congresses after its ratification, but I examine
only the Sixty-first through Sixty-third and Sixtyfifth through Sixty-seventh Congresses because of
data collection limitations (see Appendix A). In the pre–
Seventeenth Amendment analyses, a dummy variable
indicates whether each senator was originally chosen by
pseudo-direct election mechanisms or by traditional legislative selection. In the post–Seventeenth Amendment
analyses, the dummy variable for direct election captures whether each senator was originally chosen by
some form of direct election mechanism—either pre–
Seventeenth Amendment pseudo-direct election or post–
Seventeenth Amendment direct popular election.9
The time-series cross-sectional data in each analysis involve multiple observations on each senator
over time, with the resulting likelihood that the observations will be correlated. To account for this nonindependence and to generate interpretable average
effects for the independent variables, I use the generalized estimating equation (GEE, population averaged) approach in each analysis to estimate models
appropriate for each type of dependent variable (Zorn
2001). GEE is statistically appropriate for these
applications given the temporal correlation in the
data, and it is theoretically appropriate, as Zorn
(2001, 475) explained, since the substantive focus in
each analysis is on the average effect of the independent variables across the senator-specific clusters of
observations.
The analyses of bill sponsorship and roll-call participation exclude senators who did not serve a full term
in the Congress of record because these senators, with
their reduced opportunities for participation, are outliers on these dependent variables.10 During this time
period, approximately 84 percent of senators served a
full term in the Congress of record (see Appendix B for
additional descriptive data on the senators).
Analysis
Bill Sponsorship
Tables 1 through 3 present bill sponsorship models
with three different dependent count variables: private
bills, constituency-interest bills, and policy-oriented
bills (see Appendix A for coding details). For each
dependent variable, two models are presented—one
for the pre–Seventeenth Amendment period (Sixtyfirst through Sixty-third Congresses) and one for the
post–Seventeenth Amendment period (Sixty-fifth
through Sixty-seventh Congresses). In addition to a
dummy variable for each senator’s original method of
selection (1 = originally elected), the models each
contain controls for other factors that existing work
suggests may affect bill sponsorship. These controls
include tenure (log of cumulative terms served), state
population, number of committee assignments, and
dummy variables for committee chair and majority
party status.11 I also include a dummy variable indicating whether each senator at time t is serving in the
last Congress prior to a reelection bid; this variable
captures potential electorally directed variation in
behavior that research on the historical and contemporary Senate has identified (e.g., Bernhard and Sala
2006; Elling 1982; Hibbing 1984).
The negative binomial regression models12 for private bill introduction (Table 1) provide some support
for behavioral shifts in response to direct election. In
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450 Political Research Quarterly
Table 1
Private, Constituency, and Policy Bill Sponsorship, Sixty-First through Sixty-Third
and Sixty-Fifth through Sixty-Seventh Congresses (First Sessions)
Private Bills
61st-63rd
Coef.
(RSE)
Originally
elected
Tenure (log)
State
population
(/100,000)
Preelection
Committees
(z-score)
Majority
party
Committee
chair
Constant
N
Wald χ2 (df)
Prob. > χ2
–0.419**
(.205)
0.245***
(.082)
0.010***
(.004)
–0.067
(.106)
0.086
(.065)
0.021
(.128)
3.001***
(.179)
264
28.26 (6)
<.001
Constituency Bills
65th-67th
dy/dx
–11.271
8.068
0.339
Coef.
(RSE)
0.819**
(.376)
0.768***
(.207)
0.005
(.005)
0.061
(.127)
0.113
(.090)
–0.241**
(.119)
1.726***
(.520)
266
45.63 (7)
<.001
dy/dx
16.188
22.232
61st-63rd
Coef.
(RSE)
–0.013
(.181)
0.558***
(.112)
–0.002
(.003)
0.187
(.149)
0.271***
(.085)
–7.896
0.498***
(.164)
–0.338*
(.184)
0.210
(.199)
264
51.63 (7)
<.001
Policy Bills
65th-67th
dy/dx
1.454
Coef.
(RSE)
0.805***
(.344)
1.026***
(.204)
–0.004
(.008)
0.239*
(.124)
0.708
0.089
(.073)
1.023
0.314**
(.158)
–1.048 –0.242
(.163)
–0.607
(.416)
266
51.89 (7)
<.001
dy/dx
2.457
4.560
1.199
61st-63rd
Coef.
(RSE)
0.231
(.272)
0.516***
(.149)
–0.0004
(.006)
0.227
(.183)
0.312***
(.092)
1.197
0.581***
(.209)
0.143
(.252)
–1.547***
(.241)
264
43.85 (7)
<.001
dy/dx
0.403
65th-67th
Coef.
(RSE)
0.959***
(.310)
1.247***
(.160)
0.003
(.008)
–0.066
(.116)
0.243
0.235***
(.071)
0.344
0.272
(.169)
–0.235***
(.071)
–1.923***
(.380)
266
107.47 (7)
<.001
dy/dx
1.065
2.154
0.406
–0.851
Note: Models are generalized estimating equation (population-averaged) negative binomial regression models with robust standard errors (RSEs) in parentheses. The Sixty-fifth through Sixty-seventh Congresses model for private bills contains an additional control variable (not displayed) for cases in the
Sixty-seventh Congress. Senators not serving for the full Congress of record excluded. Reported marginal effects are values at the modes of categorical
variables and means of all other variables.
*p ≤ .10. **p ≤ .05. ***p ≤ .01; Two-tailed tests.
the pre–Seventeenth Amendment period, state population size is a significant positive predictor of the
volume of private bill introduction, while status as a
senator originally elected under state provisions is
not—in fact, originally elected status negatively predicts private bill introduction. However, in the
post–Seventeenth Amendment Congresses, originally
elected status positively predicts higher levels of private bill sponsorship. Based on the model estimates,
with all other variables held constant at their means
(modes for dummy variables), originally elected senators could be expected to sponsor an average of
about thirty-seven private bills in a session, compared
to about thirteen bills for senators originally chosen
by legislative selection.13
The models in the middle columns of Table 1 use a
count of narrowly targeted policy bills as the dependent
variable. Here, in the pre–Seventeenth Amendment
period, a senator’s majority-party status, number of committee assignments, and Senate tenure all predict bill
sponsorship activity, all following general expectations,
while originally elected status is not a statistically significant predictor of higher sponsorship levels. In the later
time period, tenure and majority party membership
continue to significantly predict higher sponsorship,
although committee assignments do not. Preelection
status is positively related to constituency bill sponsorship (p = .054) in the post–Seventeenth Amendment
time period, as is originally elected status. The effects
of these variables are illustrated by predicted values for
bill sponsorship: an originally selected senator not serving in the last Congress before reelection would sponsor, on average, 1.98 bills. That predicted value would
increase to 4.44 for an originally elected senator, and to
5.64 if that senator were serving in his preelection
Congress.
The remaining models in Table 1 use major policy bill sponsorship as the dependent variable; thus,
these models capture the issue-focused, positiontaking possibilities in bill sponsorship. Committee
membership, tenure, and majority party status are
positive predictors of policy bill sponsorship in both
time periods, and all are statistically significant
except for majority party status in the later period (p =
.107). Before the Seventeenth Amendment, originally
elected status did not affect policy bill sponsorship,
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Meinke / Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate 451
but originally elected senators did show significantly
higher levels of post–Seventeenth Amendment bill
sponsorship, when other factors are held constant. The
average predicted number of first-session policy bills for
an originally elected senator (post–Seventeenth Amendment) is 1.73, compared to 0.66 for a senator originally
chosen by legislative selection.
The sponsorship evidence, then, provides support
for the argument that senators responded to direct
election by becoming more likely to use bill sponsorship to appeal to the mass electoral constituency.
Senators who initially built their constituency connections in the context of a direct election system
showed significantly higher rates of bill introduction
in the period after the Seventeenth Amendment. It is
notable that the direct election effects do not manifest
themselves until after ratification, suggesting that the
constitutional change may have had an effect independent from the state-level reforms.
Vote Participation
Roll-call voting participation similarly provides a
perspective on how the shift in electoral audiences
affected senator behavior. Table 2 shows the pre– and
post–Seventeenth Amendment models of vote participation.14 Along with the dummy variable for originally
elected status in each time period, the models include
controls for tenure, majority party status, and the senator’s absolute ideological distance from the chamber
median, as measured by DW-NOMINATE scores. As
in the bill sponsorship models, I include an indicator
for the senator’s preelection Congress as well.
The GEE model in the first column of Table 2 displays the effects of these variables on roll-call turnout
prior to the Sixty-fourth Congress. As earlier work
suggests, ideologically distant senators have, on average, lower participation rates than their more centrist
counterparts; majority party status, meanwhile, is
associated with higher participation. The variable for
originally elected status is not significant in this
model, demonstrating that originally elected senators
did not maintain higher participation rates prior to the
Seventeenth Amendment, in contrast to the original
hypothesis. Finally, note that senators in their preelection Congress had significantly lower participation rates in this time period. The model’s estimates
predict that preelection senators would have participation rates about 3 percentage points lower than
those of other senators, on average. This result may
reflect senators’ decisions to devote time to rallying
support from state leaders in the months leading up to
Table 2
Roll-Call Participation, Sixtieth through
Seventy-First Congresses
Originally elected
Tenure (log)
Preelection
Majority party
Ideological distance
Constant
N
Wald χ2 (df)
Prob. > χ2
60th-63rd
64th-71st
.033 (.030)
–.013 (.014)
–.036** (.017)
.064** (.026)
–.001** (.0006)
.688*** (.043)
344
64.63 (5)
<.001
.101*** (.023)
.001 (.010)
–.004 (.009)
.002 (.012)
–.001** (.0003)
.661*** (.031)
712
29.30 (5)
<.001
Note: Models are generalized estimating equation (populationaveraged) regression models with robust standard errors in
parentheses. Senators not serving for the full Congress of record
excluded.
**p ≤ .05. ***p ≤ .01; Two-tailed tests.
contested reelection. This significant and negative preelection effect is not present in the post–Seventeenth
Amendment model, and here, the indicator for originally elected status is positive and significant, supporting the hypothesis that originally elected members will
place greater weight on roll-call participation for its
position-taking value. Originally elected senators,
according to the model, had a predicted participation
rate about 10 percentage points higher than originally
selected senators, when other factors are held constant.
As in the earlier period, senators’ participation declined
as their distance from the chamber median increased.
The participation results support a relationship
between direct election and attentiveness to roll-call
participation, and like the sponsorship results, they suggest that the effects did not clearly emerge until the
post–Seventeenth Amendment Congresses. After the
amendment’s ratification, senators who originally
earned election through popular support maintained
significantly higher turnout records; they also appear to
have been more attentive to maintaining consistent
records through their terms. This shift is consistent with
both an increased attention to the position-taking value
of roll-call votes and a heightened concern with the
negative electoral impact of low participation.15
Party Unity
As discussed above, directly elected senators have
some incentive to edge away from partisan behavior
and toward activities that foster an independent electoral coalition, and they may therefore display less
party loyalty than their legislatively selected counterparts. The models in Table 3 use normalized party
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452 Political Research Quarterly
Table 3
Party Support Scores, Sixtieth through
Seventy-First Congresses
60th-63rd
64th-71st
Originally elected
.588 (.385)
.369 (.386)
Ideological distance
–.029*** (.010) –.034*** (.005)
Tenure (log)
.083 (.084)
–.073 (.048)
Preelection
.115 (.075)
.040 (.045)
Democrat
.019 (.146)
–.381*** (.098)
Originally Elected ×
–.014*** (.004) .005** (.002)
State Presidential Vote %
Originally Selected ×
.002 (.005)
.012** (.005)
State Presidential Vote %
Constant
.212 (.343)
.047 (.380)
N
392
811
Wald χ2 (df)
34.12 (7)
68.00 (7)
Prob. > χ2
<.001
<.001
Note: Models are generalized estimating equation (populationaveraged) regression models with robust standard errors in parentheses. Interaction coefficients represent the conditional effects of
an interaction of originally elected and same-party state presidential vote (see text and Wright [1976] for discussion).
**p ≤ .05. ***p ≤ .01; Two-tailed tests.
unity scores as the dependent variable and are again
separated into pre– and post–Seventeenth Amendment
models.16 To control for other influences on party loyalty, the models include measures of tenure, ideological distance from the party median, and, as a measure
of state-constituency party support, the percentage of
the state presidential popular vote (two-party) obtained
by the senator’s party in the last presidential election.
To examine how a senator’s electoral history conditions responsiveness to state-level partisanship, I interact this state popular vote measure with the originally
elected indicator variable in both models. Finally, to
account for possible differences in cohesion between
the parties, the models include a party dummy, and they
also include an indicator for each senator’s preelection
term, as in the other analyses.
The findings on the effects of direct election are
somewhat different than in the sponsorship and participation models; nonetheless, they reveal some important
trends. As we would expect, senators who are further
from their own party’s ideological center are also less
partisan in their voting behavior, an effect that is statistically significant in both time periods. In the earlier
period, senators in their last Congress before reelection
showed a higher level of party loyalty than other senators, although this effect (p < .10, one-tailed test) does
not reach conventional levels of significance. A significant preelection effect does not emerge in the post–
Seventeenth Amendment time period.
The results for the direct effect of the originally
elected variable do not support the main hypothesis in
either time period—originally elected senators did not
exhibit significant differences in party loyalty independent of other factors. However, state presidential vote
emerges as an important factor in explaining party loyalty, and this variable shows especially interesting effects
after the Seventeenth Amendment. The conditional interaction effects17 for selection mechanism and presidential
vote show that, prior to the Seventeenth Amendment,
originally elected senators showed significantly lower
levels of party unity as their state’s level of party voting increased (the effect for legislatively selected
senators is not statistically significant). This somewhat counterintuitive finding on partisanship in the
preamendment time period may be a reflection of the
types of states that were early adopters of directelection reforms—as a generalization, these states
tended to be those with weaker traditions of partisanship
as well as southern states (see Lapinski 2004, 43-44).
However, after the Seventeenth Amendment, both originally elected and originally selected senators engaged
in more partisan voting as their states’ partisanship
increased—the coefficients on both conditional interaction terms for state presidential vote are positive and
significant. This effect is substantively significant as
well. For instance, an originally selected senator (with
other variables held at means/modes) would range
from a predicted normalized unity score of .05 to .42
as presidential vote share ranged from one standard
deviation below to one standard deviation above the
mean value.
Taking these results together, an interesting picture of
party loyalty and direct election emerges. Senators’original selection mechanism does not have an independent
impact on party loyalty levels. However, the relationship
between party loyalty and state constituency partisanship varies with the adoption of the Seventeenth
Amendment. Senators in the early period were not
significantly responsive to popular partisanship in their
states, as measured by presidential vote, in choosing
their level of party support in the Senate. After direct
election was adopted across the board, senators followed state-level cues in their partisan voting activity.
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.
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Meinke / Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate 453
Summary and Discussion
Recognizing that important elements of an electoral connection had evolved in the Senate prior to
direct election reforms, I have argued that direct
election shifted the reelection audience in ways
that should be visible in shifting patterns of masselection-oriented behaviors. Overall, the data analysis supports the expectation that originally elected
senators engaged in more bill sponsorship activity
and showed significantly higher rates of roll-call participation; it further suggests that senators’ choices
about these activities were shaped in different ways
after the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in
comparison to the years preceding it. Senators who
were originally elected, either by full-fledged direct
election or through state-level popular reforms, sponsored bills at a higher rate than other senators in the
post–Seventeenth Amendment period. And senators
experienced a postreform tendency to increase their
sponsorship of constituency-oriented bills in the last
Congress before standing for reelection, a trend that
did not appear prior to the Amendment’s ratification.
The post–Seventeenth Amendment change in position taking can also be seen in roll-call participation,
which was significantly higher for senators who had
originally established their careers on the basis of
mass electoral connections.
If direct election led senators to engage in more
activity targeted at an independent base of mass support, did it also lead to a commensurate decrease in
party voting for affected senators? The empirical
results offer a less clear answer to this question, but
they nonetheless suggest some important changes in
party voting that correspond to direct election
reforms. Originally elected status does not show a
significant independent effect here either before or
after the Seventeenth Amendment. However, a very
telling result emerges in the postamendment analysis:
senators’ partisanship corresponds to the strength of
state-level party support in a way that it did not
before the Seventeenth Amendment. Regardless of
original method of selection, greater state partisanship predicted significantly higher levels of senator
partisanship after the amendment. It is also worth
noting that a weakly significant and positive preelection effect on party unity appeared before the
Seventeenth Amendment, and that this effect disappears after the amendment. Senators began to tailor
their party voting to respond to a mass constituency
(state partisanship levels), and there is at least weak
evidence that this change came at the expense of
responsiveness to a state party elite (through preelection partisanship).
These findings on direct election’s behavioral
effects extend and elaborate on several other recent
efforts to specify the reform’s impact. The results
here extend findings on preelection ideological
responsiveness (Bernhard and Sala 2006) by showing
that direct election shaped preelection sponsorship of
constituency bills; similarly, the results strengthen
recent evidence of Seventeenth Amendment–driven
ideological responsiveness to state-level preferences
by showing a postreform shift toward responsiveness
in level of party support (Gailmard and Jenkins
2006). On bill sponsorship specifically, the findings
reinforce recent evidence that senators in this period
used bill sponsorship to build electoral support with
the mass public (Schiller 2006) but add new evidence
that senators originally chosen by direct election
relied more heavily on this kind of legislative strategy
for building popular support.
In addition to these extensions of and additions to
recent work, the patterns of behavioral change established here provide a new look at the interaction
between senators’ long-term representational patterns
and institutional change. The results show that the
original electoral audience—which we know shapes
and constrains representational choices (Fenno
1978)—has a lingering effect on the way senators
respond to their constituencies, in that originally
elected senators displayed heightened mass-oriented
behavior, as expected. But senators also responded to
Seventeenth Amendment itself in more immediate
ways. The behavioral differences between senators
originally elected and originally elite-selected do not
emerge clearly until after the national change to fullfledged direct election, even though a large number of
senators were chosen by pseudo-direct election well
before 1914. Similarly, all senators—including those
originally chosen by state elites—show a responsiveness to state partisanship in their chosen levels of party
loyalty after the Seventeenth Amendment that did not
emerge before the national reform. The picture of representation we see here, then, is a complex one, in
which senators’ choices are partially shaped by their
initial mode of election and partially responsive to
changing contexts. Overall, we can see that the reform
brought about subtle changes, not by replacing partisans with renegades or extremists with moderates but
rather by motivating strategic politicians to tailor their
behavior to modified institutional incentives.
Although it is beyond the scope of this article,
future work on the development of the Senate should
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454 Political Research Quarterly
further consider the relationship between the change
in Senate electoral incentives and other significant
institutional changes in the early twentieth century.
This time period saw the emergence of several crucial
features of the modern Senate—including a more
streamlined committee structure, the first cloture rule,
and a system of floor leadership. In addition, the Senate
grew rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, approaching its current size by the early
1910s, and this change appears to have influenced some
of the contemporary institutional developments (Wawro
and Schickler 2006). Although the research in this article and other recent research on direct election provides
evidence for the independent effect of direct election,
further research is needed to show how the rapid
changes in this time period were interrelated. For
instance, the changes associated with the sharp increase
in the Senate’s size may have helped facilitate the individualistic responses to direct election that this paper
identifies.18
Overall, it is apparent that the Seventeenth
Amendment, as well as the state-level shifts, had measurable consequences of potential importance for Senate
policy making and representation. In a broad view, the
shift to direct election can be seen as providing one
important starting point for understanding the contours
of the contemporary Senate. In describing the “transformation” of the Senate in the late twentieth century,
Sinclair (1989) has shown that changes in Senate membership and in external forces have produced a Senate
that is more participatory, more media-oriented, more
policy-focused, and more prone to position-taking
behavior. These changes near the end of the twentieth
century were facilitated, in part, by the closer electoral
connection forged in the early twentieth century. The
beginnings of the Senate “transformation” that Sinclair
described can be seen in the effects of direct election, a
kind of “pretransformation” that set the stage for further
shifts in later decades.
Appendix A
Bill Sponsorship Coding
I obtained both a total count of bills introduced and a
classification of those bills by policy area; the counts and
the coding are based on the brief descriptions of each bill
provided in the Congressional Record. In the interest of
limiting a time-intensive data gathering task while collecting a reasonable sample, I chose to analyze three
Congresses prior to the Seventeenth Amendment’s implementation (Sixty-first, Sixty-second, and Sixty-third) and
three Congress following its implementation (Sixty-fifth,
Sixty-sixth, and Sixty-seventh). Again for reasons of economy, I gathered bill sponsorship data only from the first
session of each Congress. I exclude the first session of the
Sixty-fourth Congress from the analysis since—unlike
every other Congress between the Sixty-first and Sixtyseventh—the Senate did not meet in a comparable full session beginning in the spring of the year following the
election. As a result, the bill sponsorship totals (overall and
per senator) are significantly higher in the first session,
which began in December.
The raw counting of bills introduced per member from the
Record is a straightforward task; the coding of those bills by
issue category inherently involves some judgment and compromise. I began with Peltzman’s (1984) issue classification,
which is used by Poole and Rosenthal (1997) for some purposes and provides a middle ground among possible coding
schemes in terms of issue detail. I have modified Peltzman’s
rubric slightly to collapse the multiple defense/foreign policy
categories and to create a separate category for private bills
(which includes pension bills, general relief bills, bills
dealing with individuals’ military records and/or status,
and other nonpolicy bills affecting one person or an identified small group). The final coding scheme contained
twelve categories: private bill, budget—general interest
(affecting many individuals in most states), budget—special
interest, regulation—general interest (affecting many individuals in most states), regulation—special interest, domestic
social policy, defense and foreign policy, government organization, internal congressional organization, Indian
affairs, D.C., and unclear/indeterminate. Coders placed
each introduced bill or resolution into one issue category,
identifying secondary issue categories for each bill if necessary. Based on a test coding of four hundred bills from a
Congress not in the analysis (Sixty-fourth), agreement
among the coders on the primary issue category was high,
with a combined kappa statistic of .69. Further information
on the coding categories is available in Peltzman (1984) or
Poole and Rosenthal (1997, 259-260), or from the author
upon request.
For the analysis in this article, I used information from
the full coding scheme to create three count variables for
use the analysis of bill sponsorship. The first two bill variables account for bills explicitly targeted toward the constituency. The first is a simple count of each senator’s
private bill introductions in each Congress (first session),
and the second is a count of constituency-oriented legislation in each Congress (first session), where constituencyoriented legislation includes all special-interest budget and
special-interest regulatory bills and resolutions. Although
both types of bills are assumed to be constituency-focused,
I have modeled private bills and constituency-oriented legislative bills separately for two reasons. First, the rate of
private bill introduction dropped sharply during the 1910s
relative to the rate of legislative bill introduction (Schiller
2006, 189-90), and separating the private and legislative
allows me to isolate the potentially different resulting
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Meinke / Institutional Change and the Electoral Connection in the Senate 455
dynamics in sponsorship. Second, although private and
constituency-oriented legislative bills may target a similar
audience, their different nature (straightforward assigning/
adjusting of benefits to an individual or small group vs. a
more complex choice to modify policy and/or funding
affecting a state or region) implies possible differences in
the costs and benefits that senators faced in their sponsorship activity.
The third sponsorship variable is a count of policyfocused legislation, which includes all general-interest
budget, general-interest regulatory, and domestic social
policy bills and resolutions. I exclude defense and foreign
policy bills from the counts since I assume that these are primarily the province of a few committee leaders and that they
are especially affected by the rapidly changing foreign/defense
climate across this time period (1909–1921). The breakdown of the three types of bills in the pre– and
post–Seventeenth Amendment periods is summarized in
the table below.
61st-63rd
Congressesa
65th-67th
Congressesa
Total
Private
Bills
Constituency
Bills
Policy
Bills
8,195
(89.43%)
6,665
(82.08%)
14,860
(85.98%)
752
(8.21%)
1,078
(13.28%)
1,830
(10.59%)
217
(2.37%)
377
(4.64%)
594
(3.44%)
Total
9,164
8,120
17,284
a. Counts reflect first-session bill sponsorship only.
Appendix B
Descriptive Statistics for Senators
Private bills sponsored (1st session)
Mean
SD
Median
Constituency bills sponsored (1st session)
Mean
SD
Median
Policy bills sponsored (1st session)
Mean
SD
Median
Tenure (cumulative terms served)
Mean
SD
Median
Roll-call participation (%)
Mean
SD
Median
Party unity
Mean
SD
Median
DW-NOMINATE (1st dimension)
Mean
SD
Median
Originally elected
Percentage
Served full term in Congress of record
Percentage
Pre–Seventeenth
Amendment
Post–Seventeenth
Amendment
Full Time Period
28.95
39.30
16
23.96
44.05
11
26.44
41.78
13
2.71
3.52
1
3.88
5.75
2
3.30
4.80
2
.78
1.34
0
1.38
2.18
0
1.08
1.83
0
4.11
3.21
3
4.51
3.19
4
4.38
3.20
3
67.38
17.09
69.05
72.48
14.81
74.87
70.82
15.76
73.82
85.66
13.69
89.76
80.55
15.89
85.34
82.81
15.16
87.2
.09
.42
.15
.09
.39
.03
.09
.40
.12
23.28
75.77
58.57
83.65
84.70
84.35
Note: Pre–Seventeenth Amendment statistics reflect the pooled data for the Sixtieth through Sixty-third Congresses, except for bill sponsorship data, which is limited to the Sixty-first through Sixty-third. Post–Seventeenth Amendment statistics reflect the pooled data for the
Sixty-fourth through Seventy-first Congresses, except for bill sponsorship data, which is limited to the Sixty-fifth through Sixty-seventh.
All variables except party unity, DW-NOMINATE, and served full term reflect only those senators who served the full term in the
Congress of record.
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456 Political Research Quarterly
Notes
1. As I explain below, the analysis defines elected senators as
those chosen by unmediated direct election after 1913 and those
chosen by state legislature before 1913 under “pseudo-direct”
procedures that allowed popular control of the process.
2. The history of the Seventeenth Amendment’s proposal and
ratification has been evaluated in a number of works, including
Haynes (1938, esp. 96-117), King and Ellis (1996), and Wirls
(1999). For a concise overview, see Kyvig (2004). The larger
context for the reform, including the process and problems of
Senate selection prior to the Seventeenth Amendment, is discussed from a political science perspective in Stewart and
Schiller (2004), Stewart (1992), and Riker (1955).
3. Note that this argument does not necessarily contradict
Schiller’s view (2006) that pre–direct election senators had a significant incentive to build constituency support, in addition to
their state legislative partisan support. Rather, the argument is a
matter of degree—I expect that senators who originally attained
office by some form of election will have placed greater emphasis on building support within the mass electorate through
observable legislative behavior.
4. Carson and Jenkins’s (2007) unpacking of Mayhew’s
(1974) electoral connection argument emphasizes the importance
of coalition-building autonomy and accountability alongside
ambition and responsiveness as conditions for a legislative electoral connection.
5. Existing work on roll-call abstentions (e.g., Cohen and
Noll 1991; Forgette and Sala 1999; Poole and Rosenthal 1997)
typically focuses at the bill level rather than on senator turnout
rates; several variables appropriate to that level of analysis, relating to partisan behavior and the closeness of votes, are therefore
not operationalized in this model of overall participation.
6. And state party bosses were not consistently dominant
players in prereform selection processes. See Stewart and
Schiller (2004).
7. Although this hypothesis has never been directly tested in
the literature, it has received some attention in earlier work
(Daynes 1971, chap. 2).
8. The Sixtieth is the first Congress in which more than about
5 percent of the membership was originally elected, and the
Seventy-first is the last in which more than about 5 percent was
originally selected.
9. The post–Seventeenth Amendment models capture considerable variation in the original means of election. As Appendix
B indicates, approximately 75 percent of the senators across the
later time period were originally chosen by some form of direct
election, and about 41 percent overall had previously served in a
pre–Seventeenth Amendment Congress. The proportion of senators with pre–Seventeenth Amendment experience ranges from a
high of 88 percent in the Sixty-fourth Congress to a low of 15.5
percent in the Seventy-first Congress.
10. Private bill sponsorship among senators serving a partial
term averaged around eleven bills versus around thirty-five for fullterm senators, and roll-call turnout for partial-term senators averaged 35 percent compared with 71 percent for full-term senators.
11. Tenure data are drawn from Inter-university Consortium
for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Study 7803 (ICPSR
and McKibbin 1997). State demographic data are 1910 Census
data from the Historical Census Browser at the University of
Virginia (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/).
Committee assignment data is from Canon, Nelson, and Stewart’s
(n.d.) Historical Standing Committees data set, and committee
chair data is from Canon, Nelson, and Stewart’s (2002) published
volumes on the standing committees. The committee assignments
variable is normalized by Congress to adjust for changes over
time in the average number of committee assignments, particularly as a result of the major reduction in standing committees in
the Sixty-seventh Congress (Canon and Stewart 2002). The committee chair variable is included only in the models for legislative
bills.
12. Data for the sponsorship models were found to be overdispersed, making the negative binomial models appropriate.
13. The second model for private bills contains an indicator
variable for cases from the Sixty-seventh Congress to control for
significant changes in the average private bill sponsorship by the
end of this time period; the control is necessary for the laterperiod private bill model to converge.
14. Raw roll-call participation data obtained from DWNOMINATE data files and converted to percentages on the
basis of roll-call totals from ftp://pooleandrosenthal.com/junkord/
partyunity_46_109.dat. The data includes all roll calls with a minority
vote greater than 2.5 percent (Poole and Rosenthal 1997).
15. This individual-level finding about the contrast between
directly and indirectly elected senators contrasts with the conclusion Poole and Rosenthal (1997, 225-26) drew from their aggregate turnout data, which show a sustained post-1910s drop in
Senate turnout relative to House turnout, a shift Poole and
Rosenthal attributed to direct election.
16. To construct the dependent variable, I obtained raw party unity
scores from Poole and Rosenthal (http://voteview.com/Polarized_
America.htm) and calculated z-scores for each senator by party and
Congress.
17. For ease of presenting the effects of presidential vote conditional on election mechanism, I include in each model a interaction
of originally elected and presidential vote as well as originally
selected and presidential vote, plus the indicator of electoral mechanism. This approach yields estimates that are identical to a conventional dummy variable interaction (see Wright 1976).
18. I thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this
connection.
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