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

Historically, and in a variety of disciplines, students of leadership tend to approach the topic by looking at the power gathered by, awarded to, or exercised by leaders. A leader, in other words, is someone who holds power, and scholars have studied power to understand leadership. To understand the presidency, Richard Neustadt (1960) examined the power of the office. About the Senate, Randall Ripley (1969b) included party-leadership positions in a discussion of power distribution in the Senate, but stressed much more heavily the power of committee leaders—a distribution much changed in the postreform (or post-“transformation” [Sinclair, 1989]) Senate. Huitt (1961, p. 334) offered a glimpse at the power of party leaders in the Senate, acknowledging that the principal actors, including Senate majority leaders, had ignored academic prescriptions for congressional reform because they exhibited “too much violence to the political context in which members operate.” In other words, the balance of power was the focus of interest for practitioners and scholars. Still others have looked at leaders to understand the nature of power. Political theorists like Machiavelli to Hobbes have pointed to leaders in both their works, The Prince and Leviathan respectively, to understand the structures and functions of political power.

Contemporary scholars also have followed this line of inquiry. Although Robert Dahl's (1961) “theory of community power” broadened the object of inquiry to emphasize a plurality of leaders rather than a single leader, he still equated power with position and position with power.

This book, however, rather than being a tome about the leadership of power or the power of leadership, is an investigation of the limits of leadership. By looking at the context of Senate majority leadership in terms of the multiple constituencies it must satisfy, it is a study of constraints.

Balancing Constraints

The idea or concept of balance is an old one in political science, often formulated in terms of equilibrium (Russett, 1966). As either metaphor or concept, it captures interactions between the leader's discretion and the constraints imposed by the multiple constituencies and ambiguities of