How the 17th Amendment Changed Representation in State Politics

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Administration; Public Policy; & State Politics and Policy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: State Politics and Policy: Institutions and Representation in State Politics

Abstract

I assess whether passage of the 17th Amendment, which removed a key function of state legislatures in selecting US Senators, led to a decline in representation. While past studies suggest that the Amendment led to increased representation in the Senate, I evaluate whether these gains were offset by declines in state-level representation if voters were less attentive to state politics and legislators were less responsive to mass opinion. I conduct a battery of tests to evaluate this hypothesis. I first examine changes in voter participation by employing a two-way fixed effects framework with staggered adoption to measure changes in turnout in congressional and state legislative elections following the passage of the Amendment. I also measure changes in media coverage of federal versus state legislative elections before and after the passage of the Amendment, using US House and statewide races as placebos. Second, I look at changes in representation by examining the change in the gap between state legislative partisan composition and federal voting patterns following passage of the Amendment. Finally, I employ a novel dataset on mass preferences and legislative behavior using ballot propositions to compare issue-specific representation in the US Senate, House, and state legislatures before and after the Amendment. My findings suggest that changes in the capacities of institutions can cause corresponding changes in voter participation and, thus, representation from those institutions.

Author

• Arjun Vishwanath, Harvard University