Delegation of decision-making authority to agents
with different preferences and better information than their principals
is ubiquitous in politics, and political representation is no
exception. A prominent change in a political agency relationship,
at least in formal terms, occurred when the 17th Amendment to
the Constitution established direct election of U.S. senators
as of 1914. What effect did this institutional change have on
the representation of states by their senators?
The authors argue that before the 17th Amendment,
the state population relied on an intermediary, the state legislature,
to control its U.S. senators. This intermediary was a sophisticated
monitor of the behavior of senators, but itself not a perfect
agent of the populace. After the 17th Amendment, the state populace
gained more direct control over its U.S. senators, but sacrificed
expert monitoring of their behavior. If this view is correct,
senators after the 17th Amendment should better reflect the ideology
of their home states’ populace, but also exhibit greater
variability relative to other members of their state’s delegation.
The authors show that these expectations are borne
out empirically. First, U.S. senators from moderate states exhibit
less extreme roll-call behavior after the 17th Amendment. Second,
differences in roll-call records for senators from the same state
are greater after the 17th Amendment. The authors argue that this
change is one factor that has made the Senate a less polarized
body since passage of the 17th Amendment.
Sean Gailmard, Department
of Political Science, Northwestern University
Jeffery A. Jenkins, Department of Political
Science, Northwestern University
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