Majority Leadership in the U.S. Senate: Balancing Constraints By ...

mean that there is no standard for Senate majority leadership. There is no blanket concept, no regularized measure of what a majority leader does or should do. The purpose of this book is to explain Senate majority leadership as the balancing of multiple constituencies—state, party, senate, president—which act to constrain behaviors of the leader.

Expectations for This Research

To Focus on the Senate Majority Leader

Rather than studying congressional leadership by looking at the speaker of the House, which has been the trend among political scientists (Green, 2004, 2006, 2007; Peters, 1995, 1997), this research focuses on the Senate majority leader. As head of the upper legislative chamber, the Senate majority leader lacks a constitutional mandate but does not lack expectations, as this study will show. That the majority leader carries them with the burden of the chamber's egalitarianism and without the aid of majoritarian procedures demonstrates the merit of studying the office and counters the conventional wisdom that the Senate majority leader is less important—in government and for scholars—than the speaker.

Rather than a broad study of Senate leadership, which may consider majority and minority leaders, whips, policy and steering committees, and so forth, this inquiry focuses exclusively on the Senate majority leader. Although the leaders of the two major parties in the Senate share many similar tasks and responsibilities, they differ by their structural placement and purpose. For example, although there are sure to have been and to be many exceptions to this rule of thumb, consider the majority leader to be active and the minority leader reactive. As the leader of the majority, the majority leader bears an expectation to push his party's agenda and policy. Since he does not command a majority of membership, the minority leader carries no such expectation. Instead, he is to check the will of the majority, to respond to its agenda with alternatives of his own. Moreover, the majority leader is the leader of the entire Senate. This institutional position requires him to protect the institution on the way to advancing his state and party interests. And while his tasks as leader of the Senate