The article examines the professional/occupational profiles of Brazilian senators from 1826 to 2010, intending to appraise contingent relations between the Senate's professional composition and the country's respective historical periods. Little variation was observed in the short run, reinforcing the perception of the Senate as a House where prevails stability and the maintenance of the status quo. In the long run, however, one can observe important changes: from the predominance of public servants, magistrates and landowners during the Empire, the Senate became a much more diversified House in recent decades, with little predominance of specific groups. The research also verified that the rules of selection of senators caused some impact over the distribution of professions, with emphasis on two types of constitutional change: the transformation of the representation from proportional to egalitarian, establishing a fixed number of two senators per state, undertook by the 1891 Constitution; and the creation of new states in the last decades of the twentieth century, what provoked an increase in the participation of representatives of the rural sector.
Elites; Political career; Senators' profiles; Legislative; Professions
