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Abstract. From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were indirectly elected by state legislatures; this electoral mechanism ostensibly girded U.S. senators against the instability of public opinion and insulated them from direct public pressures.
The Seventeenth Amendment (Amendment XVII) to the United States Constitution established the direct election of United States senators in each state. The amendment supersedes Article I, Section 3, Clauses 1 and 2 of the Constitution, under which senators were elected by state legislatures.
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When did electing the Senate change?
U.S. senators have not always been elected by the public. the popular stage on which U.S. senators walk, and their place in modern plebiscitary politics, makes it easy to forget that for the first half of the Senate’s history, senators did not derive their electoral mandates from the people—at least
Dec 1, 2014 · How U.S. senators were chosen prior to the Seventeenth Amendment—and the consequences of Constitutional reform. From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators.
Jan 23, 2023 · By 1912, 29 states elected senators either as nominees of their party's primary or in a general election. As representatives of a direct election process, the new senators supported measures that argued for federal legislation, but to achieve reform, a constitutional amendment was required.
The adoption of the 17th Amendment in 1913 replaced this system with the direct election of senators. In this article, we use an original data set of recorded ballots for U.S. Senate elections in state legislatures from 1871 to 1913 to illustrate the dynamics of indirect elections.
Electing the Senate Princeton University Press. This website acts as a supplement to our book: Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy Before the Seventeenth Amendment (Princeton University Press) which is an original and systematic account of how U.S. Senators were chosen – not by the people directly – but by their elected representatives ...
