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

The effort goes further to explain how Senate majority leaders fulfill their representational obligations to state or electoral constituencies with “distributive benefits,” or those federal funds or projects distributed by members of Congress to a particular locality or constituency. In addition to service to party and state, Senate majority leaders, as the functional head of the upper chamber of the legislative branch, maintain institutional service to the Senate. Moreover, demands to maintain the institutional prestige of the Senate are heightened under divided government and, at the least, complicated by unified government. Thus, the president introduces an extra-branch constituency to the electoral, partisan, and institutional audiences of the Senate majority leader.

Each of these lines of inquiry is not entirely without precedent in the literature of Congress. Nevertheless, they have not been asked of Senate majority leaders and leadership, and an examination of what we know about congressional leadership makes the omission of knowledge about Senate majority leaders glaring.

What Do We Know About Senate Leadership?

While leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives has been studied extensively (e.g., Sinclair, 1983, 1995) and intensively (e.g., Peters, 1995, 1997), there exists no comparable body of research of U.S. Senate leadership, in general, and of the Senate majority leader, in particular. Indeed, much of what we know is House-bound, but if the Senate is an “exceptional” body (Oppenheimer, 2002), meriting a different understanding, so too should we expect the leader of that body, with his multiple constituencies, to merit specialized attention. To be sure, many of the prominent findings of congressional research have been extended to the Senate, albeit mostly in a piecemeal fashion.

A Senate Framed by the House

Because we know more information about the House, scholars tend to generalize those findings to the Senate, treating the Senate as an addendum to the House (for evidence of this, look no further than any standard