Note 15. Centralization
Is Senate Policy Making as Centralized as House Policy Making?
The Congress of the last quarter century appears to have the same formal organization of the Congress of the mid-20th century. Committees, parties, and the parent chambers are the major organizational features. Yet, the flow policy ideas is now very different, particularly on the most important issues. Rather than committees or even subcommittees initiating most legislative efforts, the initiative is now far more likely to reside in the majority parties and their leaders. On major legislation, the reliance on decentralized committees to set the agenda and draft policy has given way to reliance on centralized party leaders to do so, at least when it comes to the most significant legislation.
Does this characterization of a highly centralized Congress fit the House and Senate equally well? The answer is: sorta, but the degree of centralization and decentralization tends to be much greater in the House than in the Senate. To understand this, let me work through three issues, at least briefly: what is meant by centralized and decentralized policy making, how parties and committees relate to each other in each house to create a centralized or decentralized process, and how partisan forces generate changes in policy-making processes within each house. This requires some theorizing about congressional policy making. I think it is worth the effort—understanding the issues at stake provides some insight about how past institutional developments affect today’s House and Senate.[1]
Centralized and Decentralized Policy Making
In a centralized policy making process. the ability to make policy choices rests with one or a few legislators. In a decentralized process, the ability to make policy choices is rests with small groups of legislators, each with an issue or set of issues for it makes choices. These alternative distributions of power may be created and reinforced by formal rules and informal practices, including the rules and practices of the two parties.
Neither house of Congress has ever had a fully centralized or decentralized policy-making process. Enacting legislation requires a majority of the parent chamber. It is with that majority that the ultimate power lies, at least on most questions of public policy. The parent bodies, or least a majority of their members, may defer to a central leader or specialized subgroups, but either a highly centralized or highly decentralized process relies on the tolerance of the parent bodies.
Because the parent bodies are the ultimate source of power, the distinction between centralized and decentralized processes, or even a continuum from one to the other, is somewhat inadequate for capturing the ways in which influence is distributed within a legislative body. A third alternative—collegial policy making—should be taken into account. In a collegial policy making process, the ability to make policy choices rests with all legislators in a meaningful way.
To see this, we might think of a legislative body as having two dimensions—the number of legislators involved in meaningful policy making and the number of organizational units with policy making responsibility (see Figure 15-1). Some key features:
A collegial body keeps all legislators involved in a plenary session. In Congress, we can think of all decisions being made on the House floor or Senate floor.
A decentralized body divides legislators into groups, each with the ability to set policy for a small sets of issues. In Congress, the primary groups are standing committees.
A centralized body reserves policy choices for a top leader. In Congress, we can think of the speaker of the House, as majority party leader and presiding officer for the chamber, in this role.
Party Leaders and Committees
Each house of Congress is organized around three major entities: parent body, committees, and parties. The parent bodies meet in their large chambers (the Hall of the House of Representatives and the Senate Chamber). Committees are organized under the standing rules of the two houses. Parties organize the legislators who share a party label or are invited to attend one party caucus or the other. Parties elect leaders and compete to elect the officers of their houses. Since the mid-19th century, the speaker is the recognized leader of the majority party of the House. Since the early 20th century, the majority leader is the recognized leader of the majority party of the Senate.
We often think of an ideal legislature as one in which every legislator has an effective voice in policy making without regard to his or her party affiliation or committee membership—that is, a collegial body. Broad deliberation is valued and feasible. In practice, nearly all legislatures vary from that ideal in one way or another. Over the decades, Congress has developed parties that compete for office and over policy and committees to handle a large work load.
Parties, committees, and parent chambers relate to each other in somewhat complicated ways. Much of the activity of party leaders and committees is in collaboration with each other. Nevertheless, whether the policy agenda and the content of legislation is set more frequently by majority party leadership or by leaders and members of the many committees varies from issue to issue and over time. We can generalize about the typical pattern. When policy initiative rests with committees, even on important issues, the process is called more decentralized; when policy initiative rests with the leadership of the majority party, the process is called more centralized. However, if majorities of the parent chamber defer to neither the majority party leadership nor committees, new proposals will receive consideration and occasional approval on the floor—what I have called a more collegial process.
House vs. Senate
It is difficult to offer a simple generalization about whether the House or Senate is more centralized. The primary reason is that the centralization-decentralization continuum does not fit the Senate very well.
Look back at Figure 15-1. Over the decades, the smaller Senate preserved more opportunities for legislators to challenge the recommendations of committees and party leaders by offering amendments and conducting lengthy debate on the floor. The Senate lacks a general rule requiring that debates and amendments be germane to the bill on the floor; it has no general rule that limits the length of debate except by supermajority cloture; even the motion to consider a bill (the motion to proceed) can be filibustered and blocked by a large minority of senators. As a result, as senators often observed, the Senate had a more collegial, floor-oriented decision-making process than the House.
One result is that even an assertive Senate majority leader who is backed by his party may be stymied by an assertive minority leader who is backed by his party. A partisan standoff may make it more important that each party enabled its leader to nimbly pursue parliamentary strategies to exploit the rules and counter the moves of the other party, but the ability of the majority leader, even when his or her party is unified behind a piece of legislation, is no guarantee that the leader’s legislative goals can be achieved.
In contrast, the Speaker of the House, when backed by her party and a House majority, can set the agenda and control outcomes. In the Senate, the possibility of minority obstruction limits the set of measures that the majority leader can expect to bring to the floor and pass. Therefore, centralizing power within the majority party of the House can effectively centralize policy making in the majority party leadership; centralizing power within the majority party of the Senate may or may not centralizing policy making in the majority party leadership, depending on the size and cohesiveness of the minority opposition.
The Effects of Partisan Forces
To one degree or another, members of a congressional party share common electoral and policy goals. At a minimum, nearly all of them prefer to be in a majority party rather than a minority party so they have an interest in the party’s reputation and in the electoral prospects of their party colleagues. They also may share an interest in passing or blocking certain legislation. How to further define and pursue these common interests are what leadership elections and intra-party debates are about. They confront decisions about how much to coordinate the efforts of their members and how much to tolerate party colleagues who are not cooperative.
Congressional parties, seen in this light, are both electoral and policy coalitions, but the breadth and depth of the common interests of members of congressional parties varies over time. As those common interests intensify and broaden, the incentives to develop effective party strategies and coordinate the behavior of fellow partisan grows stronger. When majority control of the House or Senate is in doubt, fellow partisans have a powerful incentive to coordinate their efforts to improve their chances of gaining or maintaining majority status. When the two parties are deeply polarized over questions of public policy, fellow partisans also have strong incentives to coordinate their efforts to win legislative battles.
As the value of coordinated party strategies increases, congressional parties are likely to empower central party leaders to set and implement those strategies. That is, the strength of common interests influences the degree of centralization. In the House, this is readily translated into a more powerful speaker, who is the elected leader of the majority party, and into policy achievements. In the Senate, however, the same forces that encourage a more centralized effort in the majority party—that is, a small but cohesive party—produce the conditions that generate effective minority obstruction. A large and cohesive Senate minority party can block a small and cohesive majority.
Today’s Congress
In recent Congresses, the floor leaders have indeed taken charge of party strategy on major issues. The electoral and policy incentives to orchestrate party strategy are strong; senators expect and accept an assertive central leader. However, the leader’s ability to guide Senate action continues to be conditioned on the effective decision threshold.
The importance of the decision threshold is illustrated by the success of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the struggles of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in 2021. Pelosi, with only 222 Democrats (218 is a House majority if all seats are filled), managed to have the House pass at least a dozen bills important to her party in the first five months of the 117th Congress. These included measures on voting rights, gender identity and orientation under civil rights laws, gun control, foreign farm labor legalization, equal pay, and a commission to investigate the January 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill. By mid-year, the Senate had taken up none of these measures. The House and Senate managed to enact the COVID-19 stimulus package, but that was possible only because the package was treated as a reconciliation bill, which allowed the bill to pass the Senate on a 50-49 vote. Schumer guided action on that package, but Schumer and the Democrats made no progress on the other House-passed bills by the end of June. At that time, after giving senators an opportunity to devise infrastructure legislation on a bipartisan basis, Schumer instructed the Budget Committee to proceed devising a reconciliation bill as a vehicle for infrastructure and social program proposals recommended by the president.
Schumer’s experience is similar to Mitch McConnell’s in the previous Congress. With the Republicans in the majority but lacking votes to invoke cloture, McConnell and the Republican treated a large tax-cutting measure as a reconciliation bill and were able to pass it on a 51-49 vote. McConnell directed nearly all action on the bill from committee to the floor and to conference. But on other issues, issues that could not be addressed in a reconciliation bill, McConnell could not move most legislation and he usually did not bother to try.
The Senate majority party simply faces an obstacle that its House counterpart does not. An assertive majority leader does not necessarily have the ability to guide his party to legislative successes even if it is united. The party may place considerable discretion over strategy to its leader but that is not readily translated into legislative success. The majority party can be centralized without the Senate’s policy-making process being centralized.
[1] In this Note, I am borrowing from earlier essays. See Steven S. Smith, "New Patterns of Decisionmaking in Congress," in P. Peterson and J. Chubb, eds., A New Direction in American Politics (Brookings, 1985) and Steven S. Smith and Gerald Gamm, ““The Dynamics of Party Government in Congress,” in L. Dodd and B. Oppenheimer, eds., Congress Reconsidered, 12th ed. (Sage, 2021).