Are Congressional Leaders Middlepersons or Extremists? Yes.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 35(3

Influential theories of legislative organization predict that congressional leaders should be selected from the center of their parties. Yet, the extant literature has generally rejected the “middleperson hypothesis, ” finding that leaders are extremists. We reexamine these findings by testing more appropriate null hypotheses via Monte Carlo simulation. We find that congressional leaders (and leadership candidates as a whole) tend to be closer to the party median than would occur by chance, but also tend to be selected to the left of the median for Democrats and to the right for Republicans. Compared to the pool of announced candidates for leadership positions, winners are not ideologically distinctive, suggesting that factors affecting the ideology of leaders tend to operate more at the candidate emergence stage. 1 A large body of scholarship has highlighted the significance of party leaders in the U.S. Congress, underscoring the importance of understanding their ideological characteristics. Leaders are responsible for managing the cartels that dole out rewards and punishments, compelling rank-and-file members to act in a cohesive manner (Cox and McCubbins 1993). Others have argued that leaders provide the brand image presented to the electorate in congressional elections (Bibby and Davidson 1967; Cox and McCubbin