Party Power in the U.S. Senate: Shaping the Ideological Content of the Legislative Agenda.

The study of party power in Congress (or the lack thereof) is a rich and well-developed literature. But research on this subject in the Senate has lagged behind comparable studies in the House. This project deepens our understanding of the nature of party power in the Senate by asking the question: what mix of policies (be they liberal or conservative) would be passed by a majority party-influenced Senate? I propose a simple spatial model which makes several predictions. I then test these predictions empirically using Senate roll call vote data from 1953-1996. I suggest that the majority party attempts to control the status quo policies that are brought to the floor, thereby enacting bills that the move policy in the majority’s party’s most-preferred direction (i.e. Democrats prefer bills that cause liberal policy movement, Republicans prefer bills that cause conservative policy movement). In this paper I also propose a unique measure of policy movement, that helps us get a handle on whether a bill made policy more conservative or more liberal. Both the theoretical question and the empirical measure employed in this paper provide a useful step forward in the research of majority party power in the Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]