The consequences of the Seventeenth Amendment: The twentieth century Senate

The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution changed the method of selecting U.S. senators from appointment by state legislatures to a direct popular vote. This historic amendment has been neglected in terms of its impact on Congress. In this dissertation I begin to fill that gap. I study demographic, behavioral, and institutional consequences of the Seventeenth Amendment in this dissertation. The research reveals that the Seventeenth Amendment resulted in senators who had less family ties to Congress, were more likely to have been born in the state they represented, were more likely to have attended an Ivy League college, and were more likely to have had a higher level of prior governmental service. Behaviorally, the Seventeenth Amendment appears to have had a ripple effect into the House of Representatives. These data support that the Seventeenth Amendment encouraged House members to seek a Senate seat and to do so with less tenure in the House. Individual states were more likely to have split Senate delegations after the Seventeenth Amendment was enacted. Also, the post-amendment Senate has more closely matched the House in terms of partisan composition. On the basis of this research I conclude that the Seventeenth Amendment had significant consequences, not only for the United States Senate, but for the entire national legislative branch