Introduction

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 not directly—but instead from state governments, acting through their state legislatures. The founders chose to elect members of the upper chamber of the people's branch indirectly. This suggests that they considered indirect election to be noble, functional, and practical. A century and a quarter later, in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified to provide for election by the public, which indicates that the public, acting through its legislators in Washington, D.C., and back home, eventually concluded that the indirect mode of election was unsavory, unworkable, and ineffective.

The journey of the Senate from exemplary protector of states' rights to corrupt seat of special interests during a period when senators were not directly elected by the public raises a number of interesting questions about U.S. political development—questions that have rarely been raised by political scientists or historians since the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted. In this book, we are interested fundamentally in the dynamics of indirect elections, but at the same time we seek to assess the consequences of the switch to direct elections with the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment. Measuring those consequences is not easy; given how much the federal government has expanded, and with it the responsibilities of a U.S. senator, it is nearly impossible to construct an absolute comparison between the indirect and direct elections eras. In the broadest terms, however, we aim to assess the extent to which the goals of the Seventeenth Amendment—empowering voters in the choice of U.S. senators, and reducing the corrosive effects of money and party machine power—have been met. In doing so, we provide a new opportunity to understand electoral design, legislatures, parties, and political ambition.

In particular, we examine the election of U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 based on where those elections occurred: the state legislatures. We have created a data set of these elections by searching the journals of the forty-eight state legislatures that were part of the Union as of 1913 in order to reconstruct the roll call history at the microlevel of nearly every Senate election during this period. This account, which surprisingly has never been told before, helps to ground empirical and normative judgments about the quality of representation in the Senate under indirect election.

The account we give is significant for four reasons. First, we are empirical political scientists who recognize a huge hole in our understanding of U.S. electoral history when we see it. There has never been a systematic account of how the upper chamber of Congress was actually elected in the forty-plus years before the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment. Evidence of the hole in our knowledge about these elections includes the fact that we do not know things such as the candidates who ran for the Senate before popular election, how candidates were identified and nominated, and what role factors like party played in these elections. Absent such basic facts as building blocks, it is simply impossible to grapple with the larger set of normative questions about the functioning of representative institutions in the United States across its long history.

Second, studying indirect elections reveals a tremendous amount about the role and power of political parties in shaping competition and policy choices through the indirect election process. Focusing on an era when both scholarly and public discourse was dominated by polarization and party government, we use our unique data set on the voting patterns in indirect Senate elections to show what happens to democratic processes when parties succeed in coordinating the rank and file behind a particular choice, and what happens when they fail. On a broader level, by providing a heretofore-unavailable basis for comparing the indirect to the direct elections process, we can demonstrate how the macro forces inherent in U.S. politics, such as regionalism, single-member district-based elections, elite ambition, and economic power, dominate electoral outcomes regardless of whether there are intermediaries or voters choose the electoral winner for themselves.

In locating the choice for U.S. senator in state legislatures, the founders expected, or at best hoped, that state legislatures would be filled with educated, diligent men who would choose senators and hold them accountable for serving the state as well as national interest. The founders did not want political parties to coordinate this choice, nor did they anticipate a decline in the education and experience of state legislators. Yet the end result of their choice to put Senate elections in the hands of state legislatures was to increase the power of state party organizations in that process and make Senate seats the focal point of partisan power struggles. Party factionalism along with the personal corruption exhibited in the buying and selling of votes for Senate spots by candidates and state legislators both exemplify the type of pernicious influence that the founders hoped to avoid in the U.S. democracy.

Third, in a related vein, our study provides us with a clear-eyed view of how elections are conducted in the United States when they are held away from the popular eye and dominated by elite institutions. Whether or not motivated by the general legal movement called originalism, some political commentators, politicians, judges, and members of the public have adopted a view of nineteenth-century politics that characterizes it as purer and less corrupt than the politics of today—precisely because they were more closely governed by the words that the framers agreed to in Philadelphia during summer 1787.

This perspective too readily equates "election by the state legislatures" with "election by the state," as if the will of a state is as unified as the will of an individual. Although some legal scholars argue that indirect elections were put in place to guarantee a voice for the states as units in the federal system, our work shows the ways in which partisanship overwhelmed the notion of state interest as the chief consideration in the choice of U.S. senators under this system. In other words, state legislators battled over who would control the choice and ultimate occupant of the seat, and the fights were centered within and...