Building careers and courting constituents: U.S. senate representation 1889-1924

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 185-197

  Schiller, Wendy J ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33845895731     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X06000095     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. The first Senate election held in a state legislature was held on 30 Sept. 1788 in Pennsylvania (Richard A. Baker, The Senate of the United States: A Bicentennial History [Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishers, 1988]).
2. John S. Lapinksi, "Representation and Reform: A Congress Centered Approach to American Political Development" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2000).
3. See George H. Haynes, The Senate of the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1938);
4. Charles Stewart III, "Responsiveness in the Upper Chamber: The Constitution and the Institutional Development of the Senate," in The Constitution and American Political Development, ed. Peter F. Nardulli (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 63-96;
5. Stewart and Barry R. Weingast, "Stacking the Senate, Changing the Nation: Republican Rotten Boroughs, Statehood Politics, and American Political Development," Studies in American Political Development 6 (1992): 223-71;
6. Ronald F. King and Susan Ellis, "Partisan Advantage and Constitutional Change: The Case of the Seventeenth Amendment," Studies in American Political Development 10 (1996): 69-102;
7. Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler, Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
8. Early studies in this area include Haynes, Senate of the United States, David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The United States Senate 1869-1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966);
9. Leonard White, The Republican Era, 1869-1901, (New York: MacMillan Company, 1958);
10. and Douglas Price, "Careers and Committees in the American Congress: The Problem of Structural Change," in The History of Parliamentary Behavior, ed. William O. Aydelotte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
11. More recently, William Bernhard and Brian Sala explored this topic in their "The Remaking of an American Senate: The 17th Amendment and Ideological Responsiveness," Journal of Politics 68 (2006): 345-57.
12. In addition, for a discussion of House representation and career building during this period, see Samuel Kernell, "Toward Understanding Nineteenth Century Congressional Careers: Ambition, Competition, and Rotation," American Journal of Political Science 21 (1977): 669-93.
13. In some cases, governors tried to appoint senators to sit during the interim, but the U.S. Senate usually denied the appointed senator a seat when the appointment was made because of deadlock in the state legislature. During the years 1891 to 1905, state legislatures were deadlocked on choices for the Senate 46 times, leaving literal vacancies in the Senate; 6 senators were refused their seats during this period either due to contested elections or a failure to qualify (George H. Haynes, The Election of Senators [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1906], 38-39;
14. and Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, Senate Manual [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988], 731-78).
15. Haynes, Election of Senators, 166-67.
16. Rothman, Politics and Power.
17. William H. Riker, "The Senate and American Federalism," American Political Science Review 49 (1955): 463.
18. th amendment, is overstated. See Wendy J. Schiller and Charles Stewart III, "Party Conflict, Factionalism, and Extended Balloting in U.S. Senate Elections before the Adoption of the 17th Amendment," paper presented at the History of Congress Conference, Yale University, 2006.
19. Lapinksi, "Representation and Reform."
20. Walter S. Sanderlin, "Arthur P. Gorman and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: An Episode in the Rise of a Political Boss," Journal of Southern History 13 (1947): 337.
21. Denton Journal, 11 Mar. 1899.
22. Denton Journal, 1899. Ibid.
23. See William G. Shade, Stanley D. Hopper, David Jacobson, and Stephen E. Moiles, "Partisanship in the United States Senate: 1869-1901," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1973): 185-205;
24. and Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, "D-NOMINATE after 10 Years: A Comparative Update to Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting," Legislative Studies Quarterly 26 (2001): 5-29.
25. White, Republican Era.
26. David T. Canon and Charles Stewart III, "Parties and Hierarchies in Senate Committees," in U.S. Senate Exceptionalism, ed. Bruce Oppenheimer (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 171.
27. Staff, Nevada State Journal, 18 Dec. 1906.
28. Sept. 12, 1912 speech at Charlotte, NC (Fred J. Rippy, ed., F. M. Simmons: Statesman of the New South [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1936], 154-55).
29. For a broader discussion of the use of river and harbor bills (in the House) as distributive pork barrel, see Rick K. Wilson, "An Empirical Test of Preferences for the Political Pork Barrel: District Level Appropriations for River and Harbor Legislation, 1889-1913," American Journal of Political Science 30 (1986): 729-54.
30. Canon and Stewart, "Parties and Hierarchies," 179.
31. Price, "Careers and Committees in the American Congress," 43.
32. Cosponsorship was not practiced in the Senate during this time, and it was explicitly prohibited by a Senate ruling in 1913; however, in 1937 a senator was allowed to be named as a cosponsor of a resolution and cosponsorship was subsequently permitted (Floyd M. Riddick and Alan S. Frumin. Riddick's Senate Procedure (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992) 233-34;
33. James T. Campbell, "Cosponsorship Legislation in the U.S. Congress," Legislative Studies Quarterly 7 [1982]: 415-22).
34. See Joseph Cooper and Cheryl D. Young, "Bill Introduction in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Institutional Change," Legislative Studies Quarterly 14 (1989): 67-105;
35. and Cooper and Elizabeth Rybicki, "Analyzing Institutional Change: Bill Introduction in the Nineteenth-Century Senate," in U.S. Senate Exceptionalism.
36. Cooper and Rybicki, "Analyzing Institutional Change," 198.
37. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
38. Haywood T. Sanders, "Paying for the "Bloody Shirt": The Politics of Civil War Pensions," in Political Benefits, ed. Barry S. Rundquist (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1980).
39. William H. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1918), 273.
40. Cooper and Young, "Bill Introduction in the Nineteenth Century";
41. and Cooper and Rybicki, "Analyzing Institutional Change."
42. For a more elaborate discussion of the utility of private bill introduction - a practice that continued well into the late twentieth century until casework took its place as the primary source of individualized constituent service - see Jeffrey S. Hill and Kenneth C. Williams, "The Decline of Private Bills: Resource Allocation, Credit Claiming, and the Decision to Delegate," American Journal of Political Science 37 (1993): 1008-31.
43. The ICPSR data set on popular elections is missing data for DE, PA, WI, ND, LA, NC, KY, MD, NV, and WA for various years in this decade. Archival searches of the Washington Post and the New York Times did not fill these gaps, and local newspapers are only sporadically available electronically for this time period.
44. Senator Higgins (R-DE), Senator Gorman (D-MD), Senator Blackburn (D-KY), Senator Quay (R-PA) and Senator Spooner (R-WI) each lost a reelection bid and then came back to win a Senate seat in a subsequent election. Senator Kenney (D-DE), Senator Turner (D-WA), Senator Eustis (D-LA), and Senator Casey (R-ND) each lost a bid for reelection and tried to win a subsequent Senate seat but failed.
45. One caveat should be mentioned about using the number of legislative ballots to predict margin of victory. Legislatures that were conflicted over the Senate election had to record that conflict every day in a ballot until a candidate garnered a majority so legislators cast votes each day they were in session even though there might not have been any hope of reaching consensus on a candidate. Prior to this law, the state legislatures would engage in informal and private negotiations over their choice for U.S. Senate but there was no required public record of legislators' preferences for specific Senate candidates prior to the ballot where the winning candidate was chosen.
46. In rare cases, minority party candidates won or stayed in office because of the inability of the majority party to rally around a candidate, e.g. the North Dakota Senate election of 1893.
47. The results presented in Table 3 do not address the impact of bicameral elections for senators during the period of indirect elections. We might have expected that a senator would devise a specific strategy to win a majority in the state house and state senate, and that dynamics in a joint session election would be different from elections held in the house and senate separately. A large victory in the state house would be more valuable than in the state senate because it would guarantee more votes when members of the two chambers met together in joint session. Because of the high degree of contentiousness of U.S. Senate elections, there was always a good possibility that the election could be thrown into joint session. In this sample, 65 elections were decided by majority votes in the state house and state senate, and 48 elections were decided in joint session. In a separate analysis, I tested for the effects of bicameral elections and the results of the model yielded statistically insignificant coefficients for the bicameral variables, while the coefficients for the other variables remained relatively unchanged. This result reinforces the impression that senate elections were highly contentious within majority parties - because there were multiple candidates within the majority party, having a high number of seats held by the majority party in the state house or senate did not guarantee of a unified coalition of support for one specific Senate candidate.
48. Wendy J. Schiller, "Senators as Political Entrepreneurs: Using Bill Sponsorship to Shape Legislative Agendas," American Journal of Political Science 39 (1995): 186-203.
49. Rick K. Wilson and Cheryl D. Young, "Cosponsorship in the U.S. Congress," Legislative Studies Quarterly 22 (1996): 25-43;
50. and William D. Anderson, Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, and Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, "The Keys to Legislative Success in the U.S. House of Representatives," Legislative Studies Quarterly 28 (2003): 357-86.
51. A model using the log of Bill sponsorship as the dependent variable and logs of Years, State population, and Prior margin of victory did not yield substantively different results.
52. Even a different specification of the model that included interactive terms (region*party) showed little effect on relief bills but a strong effect on pension bills in that Democrats from the North, South, and Midwest introduced fewer pension bills than their Republican counterparts.
53. I also ran the model with the number of committee assignments a senator held but the coefficient was not substantively or statistically significant.
54. Surprisingly, the number of seats held by the senator's party is not a significant predictor of the margin of victory. This result may be due to the different composition of the sample used in the regression which includes both senators who won reelection and senators who lost reelection whereas the first model only included senators who won election to the Senate.
55. Wawro and Schickler, Filibuster.