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

emerged and became institutionalized. Yet, there still is a lacuna in the literature about how individual senators emerge as leaders, specifically the unique office of majority leader.

A focus on the distinctive selection processes of the majority-leader post, which this study undertakes, will help us understand not just the processes involved in becoming but also those involved in being majority leader. Being majority leader entails different goals, and thus different behaviors, than being whip or minority leader. As leader of the majority party, he must fulfill the expectation to pass legislation whereas minority leaders are expected to thwart the agenda of the majority—a task made easier by the minority-oriented rules of the Senate. And it is this partisan distinction that informs so much about how Congress works.

Theories of Leadership

In the form of conditional party government (Aldrich & Rohde, 2001) and party cartel theories (Cox & McCubbins, 1993), political scientists have a strong theoretical grasp of how the majority party works to produce preferred outcomes. These works derive from the contemporary cycle of House leadership studies that began with Barbara Sinclair (1983).⁴ Sinclair (1983, 1995), describing majority leadership in the House, relied on principal-agent theory to frame majority leadership's influence on lawmaking in the House after the adoption of several reforms in the 1970s. With the strengthening of parties in Congress, she noted a more active and centralized leadership. She argued that since leaders are agents of the membership that chooses them, leadership styles derive from principals’ expectations, which in turn are shaped by changing political and institutional contexts.

David Rohde also concentrated on the postreform period, noting the distinct changes in parties and leadership that reforms brought. He, too, traced a bottom-up and somewhat circuitous development of centralized leadership, beginning with the class of 1958. This influx of junior Democratic members was almost immediately frustrated by the lack of movement on key policies and thus reclaimed much individual power from both committee chairs and party leaders. With the reforms of the