Douglas Price, the lack of incentives for Members to retain their seats explains the high turnover in those early years of the House. Power was fluid in the House. The Speaker controlled committee appointments, changes in party control were common, and seniority in the chamber was not yet as valuable as it would later become.
After the Civil War, circumstances changed and precipitated a rise of careerism in Congress. Other scholars have pointed to institutional changes in congressional operations, such as the rise of the seniority system, the development of the committee system, and new advantages of incumbency that allowed Members to generate publicity, serve constituents, and receive support in organizing their offices and forming agendas that help them be effective legislators.
Finally, the emergence of national problems raised a legislative career to a new level of importance. As the federal government took on new responsibilities, both after the Civil War and in the early 20 th century, Members may have begun to view congressional office as relatively more desirable than state office, and this may have contributed to many Members' desire to remain in Congress. Examining the aggregate average years of Member service in a given Congress reveals little about the underlying distribution of service among individual Members.
Figure 4 and Figure 5 present the distribution of service experience of Representatives and Senators, respectively, from the 1 st through th Congresses. For each Congress, the figures plot the percentage of each chamber made up of the following four categories of Members: first-term Members with no prior chamber service, returning Members with six years of chamber service or fewer, returning Members with between 6 and 12 years of chamber service, and Members with more than 12 years of chamber service.
Still, despite a general increase over time in longer-tenured Members, more than half the House was made up of Members with six or fewer years of chamber experience during each of the last four Congresses. Long-term trends in the distribution of Senate service generally mirror those in the House. In contrast to the House, the Senate has generally had a smaller proportion of Members with no prior chamber experience, even during Congress's earlier history.
The comparatively smaller proportion of freshman Senators can be explained by the Senate's staggered terms; because only one-third of the chamber's seats are up for election at a time, the amount of turnover resulting from a single election year is limited.
As can be seen in Figure 5 , for much of congressional history, the single largest group of Senators has been those with six years or fewer spent in the chamber. However, the percentage in this category grew during the next few Congresses, and despite some fluctuation, generally increased over much of the 20 th and to date 21 st centuries.
Figure 4. Distribution of Member Tenure, House of Representatives. Figure 5. Distribution of Member Tenure, Senate. A second issue related to patterns of congressional service is cross-chamber experience of Senators and Representatives. While Senators have infrequently gone on to serve in the House, Representatives who subsequently serve in the Senate have been common throughout U. Figure 6 plots the percentage of Representatives and Senators with previous experience in the other chamber from the 1 st through th Congress.
Figure 6. Percentage of Members with Cross-Chamber Experience. As shown in Figure 6 , throughout American history, a sizable proportion of Senators have arrived with prior service in the House, and the proportion has remained within a fairly constant range over time.
In recent history, more than half of Senators serving at the start of the th , th , and th Congresses had previous House experience. Historically, a small but declining number of Members have served in the House of Representatives after serving in the Senate. Figure 6 also plots the percentage of Representatives in each Congress who had previously served in the Senate. As can be seen in Figure 6 , prior to the s, it was common for several Representatives to have previously served in the Senate.
Over time, it became less common for Representatives to have Senate experience. The last Representative to have previously served in the Senate was Claude Pepper, who served in the Senate from until , and in the House from until A related question is how much prior House experience, on average, Senators have. Figure 7 plots the average years of House service among Senators, by Congress.
The bottom line is the average amount of House service among all Senators who began a given Congress; the top line is the average amount of House service among Senators who previously served in the House. Figure 7. As shown in Figure 7 , Senators with prior House experience typically averaged between five and nine years in the House prior to serving in the Senate.
In the th Congress, the 49 Senators with prior House service spent an average of 9. Aggregate statistics on Member service tenures tend to disguise the variety of congressional service records found among individual Members. Some Members have very short tenures of service and choose not to seek reelection; other Members have long tenures that end after reelection defeat.
At the aggregate level, average careers have become longer, but a great deal of variation in the length of congressional careers still persists. Additionally, the institutional and policy contexts that have shaped Member decisions to seek or not seek reelection, and succeed or fail when seeking reelection, are not static factors. Just as the institutional contexts of elections and congressional operations have developed since the 19 th century, they continue to change in the contemporary Congress.
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