Impact of the 17th Amendment

Impact of the 17th AmendmentThe ordinal Amendment, Senate Ideology, and the Growth of government activityDanko TarabarAbstractThe 17th Amendment disturbed the existing electoral system in the United States by requiring direct elections for state Senators. Scholars have argued this made the Senate more than populist and contrisolelyed to the growth of government in the US post-1913. We exercise econometric tools to investigate whether the measure serial publication of mingy political theory of Senate and its harming policies go through a morphological change around the term of the enactment. We find no compelling bear witness of a morphological pall at that time but do find order for a change in the mid-to-late 1890s.Keywords S causaeenth Amendment, structural demolish, Senate political theory JEL codes D72, H19Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Edward J. Lopez and participants at the 2012 gray Economic Association meetings in New Orleans for helpful co mments and suggestions.The Seventeenth Amendment, Senate Ideology,and the Growth of Government1. IntroductionThe 17th Amendment to the US Constitution completed that Senators were to be directly elected by popular vote sort of than appointed by state legislatures. The amendment ended a generation of state-by-state battles attempting to ferment Senate elections under popular control. Although its 1913 passage is regarded by historians as enhancing democratic accountability, Zywicki (1994) argues that the amendment helped choke federalism and the separation of power. As Senator fidelity moved towards the electorate and away from protecting states interests, the Senate became as populist as the House, thus paving the way for government growth. In making this argument, Zywicki is attempting to contribute to superstar of the biggest questions in public economics the spectacular increase in government in the United States during the 20th cytosine (Higgs, 1987 Husted and Kenny, 1997 Lott and Kenny, 1998 Holcombe, 1999).This paper empirically investigates whether the Senate experienced an ideology invoke as the exit of the change in political allegiance. If the interests of state legislatures and the median voters sufficiently differed, we wear to find narrate of a structural change in Senator and agreeable polity outcomes on roll calls at or near the time of word sense of the 17th Amendment. We examine this hypothesis by subjecting the time serial publication of Senator and amiable policy ideology to a battery of structural push through tests. The evidence presented here suggest that a break most promising occurred during the 54th intercourse (1895-1897), suggesting that the 17th Amendment merely codified what had already occurred through different means.2. DataThe most widely used measure of Congress ideology today are the NOMINATE pull ahead, developed by Poole and Rosenthal in the eighties (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997). The haemorrhoid map House and Senate ideology outcomes onto a continuum, where negative scores denote liberal and positive denote conservative comforts ( in like manner akin to greater or less government intervention in the sparing). set implies centrist leanings, whereas score magnitudes reflect relative ideology strength. Each sleeping accommodation since 1789 receives a mean score for legislators and winsome policy outcomes, allowing for an overall judgment of ideology with respect to legislator behavior and the nature of enacted policies.We employ the DW-NOMINATE (dynamic, weighted) score subtype, estimated use normally distributed mistakes. The entire series contains 112 biennial observations, one for each Congress. The DW scores are comparable between Congresses, but comparisons only make ace at bottom one of the three stable devil-party periods in US history. We focus on the most recent such period, the Democratic-Republican (46th-112th Congress), since the formal adoption of the 17th Amen dment occurred during the 63rd Congress (1913-1915). The operational database thus contains 67 observations ranging from 1879 to 2013 (Fig. 1). We exploit this dataset to attend for structural changes in the series of mean Senator ideology and mean winning policy coordinates.3. MethodologyStructural change implies a sudden shift in any or all of the model disputations that control for the series mean and fluctuation. In the current context, a structural break in either series would be revelatory of mean jumps in bedroom or winning policy ideology, whereas a break in partition implies a volatility shift not unlike, for instance, the Great Moderation. If the 17th Amendment instigated high growth of federal government, one should observe a structural break in ideology in the 63rd Congress, presumably to the ideologic left. While a visual inspection offers little in terms of inference, the diagnostics indicate that the mean chamber ideology is lower (-0.056 versus +0.01), and S D is approximately two time larger pre-Amendment. For mean winning outcomes, the average is higher pre-Amendment (0.037 versus -0.07), and the adjudicate SD is scarce halved afterwards.We let both series evolve according to an AR(1) data generating treat with drift and a deterministic parameterar curl (1)where are serially uncorrelated errors and lag number is determined by Akaike and Schwarz Bayesian info criteria. The structural change in series mean comes from breaks in drift, trend and autoregressiveparameters, eon series volatility is largely dependent on error variance if is small. We estimate equation (1) using OLS.The econometrics of structural change underwent important development in recent decades. The classic chow chow (1960) test treats the breakdate as exogenous and a priori known. However, the current standard practice is to let the breakdate be an estimable endogenous parameter (Hansen, 2001). Quandt (1960) proposed taking the highest in the sequence of Chow F-statistics across all possible dates as the breakpoint, but the critical value asymptotic distribution for such a test was not getable until Andrews (1993). Andrews now-conventional approach to testing for structural break rests on the sup methodology, in which the maximal significant F- (supF) or Wald-statistic (supW) across all observations is the most possible breakdate. Andrews and Ploberger (1994) further consider the averages and exponents of these test statistics.We use the supW-statistic, which has the advantage over supF in that it allows for residual heteroskedasticity. All statistically significant supW-statistics represent possible breakdates, but only that which minimizes the model sum of squared errors ( south southeast) is the most probable medical prognosis (Hansen, 2001). In testing for and dating structural breaks in the series variances, the alike methodology follows for equation (2) (2).Finally, the existence of breakpoints could erroneously lead to t he conclusion that the series is nonstationary. We then use the Zivot-Andrews (ZA) (1992) test to distinguish between structural break and random walk disturbances. Conventional unit root tests tend to under-reject the profitless of nonstationarity in the presence of a break, while the ZA performance allows for existence of one endogenously determined structural break in trend or halt in testing unit root. Since neither series seem to be trending, we allow for an intercept break only, within 10% slashed data. most caveats are in order. First, the power of structural break tests is lower in smaller samples. Although a test statistic modification is possible, it is computationally costly (Antoshin et al., 2008). Second, the Quandt-Andrews procedure assumes regressor stationarity. As a solution for nonstationary regressors, Hansen (2000) proposes a fixed regressor bootstrap. Third, small sample size makes it impractical to search for multiple breaks simultaneously, even though an e vent such as womens suffrage would make for a plausible structural break from public select theory standpoint. Lastly, we recognize that structural break test results may be sensitive to model specification.4. Results tabularise 1 summarizes our findings. In the case of mean Senate ideology, none of the supW-statistics, in any form (level, average and exponential), are significant at usual levels within 5, 10 and 15% trimmed data, so we find no evidence of a structural break. We also find no significant variance shifts. The ZA test rejects nonstationarity in favor of an intercept break in the 54th Congress (1895-1897). Although this date comes closest to the breakdate in the Quandt-Andrews procedure, it remains statistically insignificant.For the mean of winning policy ideology, the maximal significant supW-statistic also falls in the 54th Congress. Plotting the SSE from equation (1) over time, we observe the global minimum to fall in the 64th Congress (1915-1917). The ZA test allo wing for an intercept break rejects nonstationarity at the 3% level, and also gives the breakdate as in the 54th Congress.Turning to variance shifts of mean winning ideology and repeating the same procedures on equation (2), we reject the null of no breakpoint at 4% level within 5, 10 and 15% trimmed data, with the maximal statistic during the 54th Congress. The SSE for variance breakdate (from equation (2)) exhibits multiple sharp drops indicative of a breakdate, with a global minimum in the 97th Congress (1981-1983). Overall, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the most probable breakpoint for mean and variance of winning policy ideology, as well as some evidence for chamber mean ideology, occurred between 1895 and 1897, in the 54th Congress.5. ConclusionIn his analysis of the political economy origins of the 17th Amendment, Zywicki (1994) notes that it was in the 1880s where dissatisfaction with the indirect system began to escalate. During this period, many states began to employ extra-constitutional means to move towards popular election of Senators (Riker, 1955). These approaches public canvass and pledge state legislators allowed for direct public participations in Senate elections. Our results provide some evidence that these approaches or other contemporary changes led to a change in ideology of the mean Senator, not the passage of the 17th Amendment. This finding suggests that while much the growth of in government occurred during the 20th century, the underlying ideological and institutional changes likely began in the Civil War and its aftermath (Higgs, 1997 Holcombe, 1999).ReferencesAndrews, D. W. K. (1993) Tests for parameter instability and structural change with unknown change point, Econometrica, 61, 821-856.Andrews, D. W. K. and Ploberger W. (1994) Optimal tests when the pain in the neck parameter is present only under the alternative, Econometrica, 62, 1383-414.Antoshin, S., Berg, A. and Souto, M. (2008) interrogation for structura l breaks in small samples, The International Monetary Fund, Working Paper Series no(prenominal) 08/75Chow, G. C. (1960) Tests of equality between sets of coefficients in two linear regressions, Econometrica, 28, 591-605.Hansen, B. E. (2000) Testing for structural change in conditional models, Journal of Econometrics, 97, 93-115.Hansen, B. E. 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(1992) Further evidence on the Great Crash, the oil scathe shock, and the unit-root hypothesis, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 10, 251-270.Zywicki, T. J. (1994) Senators and special interests a public choice analysis of the Seventeenth Amendment, Oregon Law Review, 73, 1007-55.Fig 1. Mean Senate and winning policy ideology over timeSource http//voteview.com/pmeans.htm Notes Vertical line denotes the 17th Amendment adoption1 Corresponding author.