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

via interpersonal interactions. Party cloakrooms have for decades been the places where deals are made, bargains are struck, and votes are traded. A handshake in the hallway counts for more than a formal discourse on the floor. These norms and mores that contribute to and thrive on a sense of egalitarian membership made leadership offices, and the study of them, late to emerge. Senate leadership is hard to grasp, hard to model, and impossible to ascertain without knowledge of the individuals that fill the roles. It is in this way, via a multimethod approach, that this book makes a contribution to understanding and to scholarship.

Statistical inferences have been derived from the DW-NOMINATE scores (Poole & Rosenthal, 1997) of individual leaders; these scores are systematic measures of ideology which gauge movement over time, comparing behaviors of senators before and during tenures of leadership. But undoubtedly the most original part of this study is its reliance on archival data.²¹ In the process of researching this project, I have made use of four paper collections of former Senate majority leaders.²² My work began at the Howard Baker Jr. Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From there, I looked into the mammoth compilation at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, University of Texas, Austin, after which I searched the collection of Senator Mitchell housed in the Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine. I examined the papers of Senator Mansfield at the Michael J. Mansfield Library at the University of Montana, Missoula. These are perhaps the most extensive papers, given Mansfield's extraordinarily lengthy tenure both in the Senate and especially as majority leader. In addition to these archival collections, I have relied on numerous transcripts of oral-history interviews with leaders, staff, and relevant participants in the Senate and in presidential administrations.²³

Archival materials, unlike any other data set, show the politics of political interactions. Memos, hand-jotted notes, phone slips, letters, and reports provide evidence of “who got what, when, and how” (Lasswell, 1936). These and other documents detail interactions with constituents—state, party, and Senate alike. An examination of these papers for the years prior to leadership and for those years as leader also shows noticeable