Abstract
The Seventeenth Amendment transferred responsibility for selecting senators from state legislatures to voters. Scholars argue that voters’ ability to sanction performance ex post altered senators’ legislative activities. I focus on voters’ ex ante screening of senators. Using original data on senators’ political experiences, I show that direct elections increased the professionalization of pre-Senate careers. I then use sequence analysis methods to identify career paths to the Senate. Pre-Senate career paths help explain which senators received important committee assignments. These findings challenge claims that direct elections had minimal effects on the Senate’s composition and that recruitment is unrelated to legislative behavior.
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