Filibustering in the U.S. Senate By Lauren C. Bell

that even though the Senate filibuster may be a “defining feature” of the institution (Koger 2010), senators’ decisions about whether to filibuster are borne from the same motivations as their other legislative actions. Therefore, many extant theories of legislative behavior are particularly useful for explaining at both the macro- (institutional) level and micro- (individual) levels why filibustering occurs.

Institutional theories of legislator behavior suggest that senators’ filibustering can be attributed to opportunities and constraints provided by Senate rules, to changes in institutional design (e.g., increases in chamber size and modifications to the method of senator selection), to partisan pressure (Binder 1999) linked to the presence or absence of divided government, to internal Senate norms (Overby and Bell 2004), and to the timing of legislative proposals (Oppenheimer 1985, Binder et al. 2002). At the individual level, there is an entire body of literature that advances the perspective that members of Congress, generally, are thoughtful, deliberate actors interested in advancing a quartet of goals: reelection, advancement in national politics, the enactment of good public policy, and assisting those they represent (see, for example, Kingdon 1973, Mayhew 1973, Hall 1996, McCollum Gooch 2006). The robustness of these goals across time as illustrated by a plethora of studies on Congress suggests that they are real and prevalent, and my argument is that they provide good explanatory power for the question of why some senators filibuster—and filibuster frequently—but many, indeed most, other senators never filibuster even once during their careers in the Senate.

As useful as many existing theories are to understanding senators’ filibustering behaviors, until now the lack of available data on individual senators’ filibustering activities has made it difficult to refine theories of legislative behavior in order to understand more fully senators’ filibustering decisions. The shortcomings of existing data sources have compounded the problems inherent in common modes of analysis of filibustering, most notably, formal modeling of legislative behavior. In 1975 Morris Fiorina argued that “the major advantage of using formal models is the precision and clarity of thought which these models require, and the depth of argument which they allow” (Fiorina 1975, 138).