Floor Proposals and Minority Leverage in the House and Senate

The literature on congressional decision-making largely ignores the influence of the minority party in the legislative process, particularly in the House of Representatives. This omission follows from the widely held belief that the majority party dominates the agenda setting process, and thus is primarily responsible for guiding legislative outcomes. Though we agree that the minority party rarely achieves major policy success in Congress, we argue that the minority has significantly more influence over the legislative agenda than is appreciated in the literature – and begin establishing a foundation for a broader theory of minority-party influence. We posit that, under some conditions, the minority has enough bargaining leverage to get floor votes on their proposals, in the form of both amendments and bills. To investigate this claim, we look at patterns of votes on minority-sponsored bills and amendments, as well as minority-party disappointments and majority-party rolls, across several decades of the post-World War II era