Different Rules, Different Legislators? Direct and Indirect Elections to the U.S. Congress

Joel Sievert

Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2023, vol. 4, issue 1, 29–50

Abstract: I examine whether indirect and direct elections lead to the selection of different types of legislators. My research design, which compares senators to representatives who were elected from statewide districts, takes advantage of two unique features of the nineteenth century congressional districting process. First, some states elected their entire congressional delegation in at-large districts. Second, many states that gained a seat during reapportionment would elect the new representative in a statewide contest rather than redrawing district lines. As a result, there are not only more representatives elected statewide, but they also come from a more diverse set of states than in contemporary elections. Overall, I find that indirectly elected legislators were more comparable to directly elected legislators on some dimensions than prior studies suggest.

Keywords: Congress; institutional development; elections; electoral reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/113.00000071 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlpip:113.00000071

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().