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

textbook on American government or legislative processes). Accordingly, much of what is known, or thought to be known, about the demands and constraints of Senate leadership comes from auxiliary chapters or even briefer token comparison paragraphs in House studies.³ A conference sponsored by the Dirksen Congressional Center noted this disparity in interest and research between the House and Senate and suggested increasing knowledge about the Senate as a next step in understanding congressional leadership (Mackaman, 1980). That suggestion has yet to yield a groundswell of research.

Two decades later, Bruce Oppenheimer (2002) reinforced the “exceptionalism” of the Senate, emphasizing that apportionment and size differences make an altogether different body from the House. In addition, the Senate's norms, processes, and its party leadership operate in different institutional and political contexts than are found in the House. Therefore, if assumptions about the Senate are based on studies of the House, conclusions may be flawed. Furthermore, initial premises may be misdirected. Rather than using findings from the House as a benchmark for findings on the Senate (e.g., “Does Y also apply to the Senate?”), scholars should tailor research questions specific to the institution that is the Senate (Oppenheimer, 2002, pp. 6–7). Because of the structural and political context in the Senate, members’ goals are specialized to produce institutionally specific conditions for the Senate majority leader and thus shape behaviors unique to those demands.

Leadership Selection

There have been a handful of studies examining the selection of congressional leaders. Garrison Nelson (1977) provided perhaps the most comprehensive review of partisan influences on leadership selection. Robert Peabody's work (1967, 1976), which devoted half a volume to descriptions of select battles for whip or minority leadership positions in the Senate, stands as a benchmark for cross-sectional analyses of specific races. His finding of “leadership ladders,” or a hierarchical ascension up leadership ranks (Brown & Peabody, 1992), obscures other individual-level factors that contribute to the emergence of certain members of Congress