From Political Pathways to Senate Folkways: Electoral Reform and Careerism in the U.S. Senate, 1868-1944

The 17th Amendment removed the responsibility for selecting senators from state legislatures and awarded it to voters. Scholars have argued that voters ’ ability to sanction their senators for poor performance ex post was an important mechanism influencing senators’ legislative activities. In this study, I focus on voters ’ ability to screen their senators ex ante. Using new data on senators ’ political experiences, I show that the onset of direct elections led to an increase in the professionalization of pre-Senate careers. I then use sequence analysis methods originally developed to study DNA sequences to identify the major career paths to the Senate between 1868 and 1944. Differences in pre-Senate career paths help explain which senators were assigned to the Senate’s most valued committees. These findings offer important revisions to past scholarship concluding that direct elections had minimal effects on the composition of the Senate and that political recruitment is unrelated to legislative behavior