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

5/17/2010 focus on the men who have held the office of Senate majority leader clouds the office itself and the extent to which the office shapes the behavior of the man rather than how the personality of the man shapes the office. A focus on the position rather than its holder allows for a more systematic treatment of behaviors common to Senate majority leadership.

How to Study Senate Majority Leaders?

This brief review of congressional scholarship answers the question, “why study Senate majority leaders?” but the question, “how to study them?” still remains. A current approach to the study of leadership, legislative and otherwise, is what may be called the contextual view. This lens recognizes that leadership does not exist in a vacuum and thus emphasizes variables within the broader political environment. Among congressional researchers applying this lens, Lawrence Evans and Walter Oleszek (1999) identified multiple themes—among them, preferences of leaders and parties, prerogatives of the office, and interactions with members, chambers, and administrations—to contour congressional leadership.⁵ However, Randall Strahan (2002) found the contextual view to be insufficient to explain the development of House leadership in the 19th century. For him, the environment in which leaders operate is secondary to the “personal motivation and political skills” (p. 238) of the leader himself. Leadership, after all, depends on the variability of leaders. Recognizing the value of both influences, Matthew Green (2007) defined the legislative leadership of the speaker of the House by looking at such contextual variables as norms of behavior, presidential interests (both institutional and partisan), and congressional interests (both institutional and partisan), as well as by considering individual speaker interests.

The present study of Senate majority leadership similarly examines actors that contextualize leadership—namely, the multiple constituencies of the Senate majority leader—in addition to the personal proclivities of individual leaders. However, in the process of examining what have become familiar contextual variables, like party and president, this scholarship returns to considerations of power.