Abstract
Research on congressional leadership has been dominated in recent decades by contextual interpretations that see leaders’ behavior as best explained by the environment in which they seek to exercise leadership—particularly, the preference homogeneity and size of their party caucus. The role of agency is thus discounted, and leaders’ personal characteristics and leadership styles are underplayed. Focusing specifically on the speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives from the first to the 110th Congress, we construct measures of each speaker’s commitment to comity and leadership assertiveness. We find the scores reliable and then test the extent to which a speaker’s style is the product of both political context and personal characteristics. Regression estimates on speakers’ personal assertiveness scores provide robust support for a context-plus-personal characteristics explanation, whereas estimates of their comity scores show that speakers’ personal backgrounds trump context.
Highlights
The dominant contemporary approach to studying congressional leadership is contextualist—or contextual determinist
Following Cooper and Brady (1981) and Jones (1981; see Aldrich & Rohde, 2000, 2001; Rohde & Shepsle, 1995; Sinclair, 1995), the most widely accepted formulations see the partisan context in which leaders seek to provide leadership as determining their leadership behavior
It is difficult to imagine a leader with a heterogeneous caucus and a bare chamber majority operating in the same fashion as one at the head of a more ideologically homogeneous caucus with a more comfortable chamber advantage
Summary
The dominant contemporary approach to studying congressional leadership is contextualist—or contextual determinist. To evaluate our context-plus-personal characteristics interpretation of congressional leadership, we use multiple regression analysis to estimate the extent to which individual speakers’ differentiated commitments to House comity and personal assertiveness are related to their pre-legislative careers, prior legislative experience, personal characteristics, party affiliation, and geographical location, as well as to several contextual variables, notably the prevailing partisan context in the chamber during their tenure as speaker.
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