Like many scholarly enterprises, ours revolves around a puzzle: how do we reconcile the Senate majority party's presumed inability to bias outcomes in its favor with empirical findings that the Senate majority party does bias outcomes in its favor? In this chapter we present our take on literature related to this question. We draw insights from traditional Senate scholarship and from the literature on House parties.

Conventional Views of the Senate

A long line of Senate scholarship either explicitly or implicitly assigns little significant policy-making influence to parties. Going back to the earliest and most influential postwar studies of the Senate, the literature focuses on questions regarding how the Senate makes decisions and how power is distributed within the chamber, but at least in passing, such works tend to minimize the role of parties. Though rich in contextual scholarship, this literature offers little in the way of general explanations of Senate behavior.

Matthews (1960: 8), for example, explicitly raises the question of power within the chamber: “Officially, all senators are equal. Yet if the Senate is similar to other groups, some have far more influence than others. What are the patterns of influence in the Senate? Who is influential and why?”