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While there has been a good bit of scholarly attention paid to career dynamics in—including retirements from—the U. S. House of Representatives, relatively less attention has been paid to the Senate. The few studies of career decisions in the upper chamber (e.g., Bernstein and Wolak 2002; Masthay and Overby 2017) have focused on the more or less modern Senate. In this study, we extend the time series back to the early 1900s, taking in the entire century of the popularly elected Senate. In doing so, we increase our analytical leverage to explore dynamics in the frequency, ratio (compared to electoral defeats), and direction (i.e., progressive ambition or retirement from public life) of voluntary departures from the upper chamber. We are particularly interested in the ability of the parties to retain Senate seats opened up by voluntary departures and focus our multivariate analysis on that question. Among our most noteworthy findings are 1) that the partisan differential in retirements so obvious in the House (with Republicans outpacing Democrats in voluntary departures) is absent not only in the modern Senate but over the entire history of the elected chamber, and 2) that the GOP is systemically better at retaining open seats in the upper chamber, a finding consistent with other work on party asymmetries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: In this article, we explore the deaths in office of U.S. senators between 1919 and 2015, examining both historical trends at the aggregate level and at the individual level searching for partisan and other patterns in mortality rates. Methods: We employ Cox proportional hazard models to examine the effects of factors such as age, tenure in office, electoral factors, and legislative engagement, as well as partisanship and ideology. Results: Notably, we find no significant partisan or ideological effects. When we examine the parties separately, we find that other institutional factors (tenure in office, vote share, bill sponsorship) matter for Democrats, while expectation of who would replace them in office matters for Republicans. Conclusion: Our findings contribute to previous work on legislative turnover in Congress by taking the first step to analyze deaths among U.S. senators from almost the entire history of the elected Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although discharge petitions lie at the confluence of personal preferences, committee prerogatives, and party leadership in Congress, these procedures have received little scholarly scrutiny. We capitalize on the public nature of petition signatures since 1993 to examine the behavior of the most cross-pressured members in discharge battles: bill sponsors and cosponsors belonging to the majority party who personally prefer the bills they have sponsored but who face party pressure not to sign the petitions that threaten the leadership's control of the legislative agenda. After controlling for personal preferences, we find a statistically significant partisan effect in the U.S. House, which further illuminates the "Where's the party?" debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from a 1996 pre-election survey, the causes and consequences of public approval of Republican congressional leaders in the 1990s are examined. Specifically, this article explores the extent of opinion formation regarding House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and then attempts to account for the sources of these attitudes using multivariate models. Comparing and contrasting these findings as appropriate with what is known regarding public attitudes toward other political entities, the article reveals in particular that economic evaluations work differently for congressional leaders than for either the president or Congress as an institution. In a second section, the electoral ramifications of public attitudes toward Speaker Gingrich in the1996 elections are examined, determining that even in the presence of a host of powerful controls public evaluations of the speaker exercised a significant influence on respondents' vote choice, not just in congressional races also far down-ticket, a finding that supports a party-oriented model of legislative organisation. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the ability of these results to be generalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the growing empirical literature on filibusters by examining the factors that are associated with individual-level filibustering behavior. We focus particularly on the behavior of senators in the latter part of their careers, using impending retirement as analytical leverage to determine whether decisions to engage or not in dilatory parliamentary practices are driven more by narrowly drawn considerations of instrumental utility or by compliance with institutional norms of deference and cooperation. Using data from 1975 to 1993 and employing multivariate models that allow us to control for other relevant factors, we find only limited support for a narrowly rational model of Senate “followership.” In the course of our enquiry, we clarify the notion of legislative norms, integrate our study with recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the evolution of cooperative behavior and consider how leadership can be exercised in environments largely bereft of formal leadership resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses reelection constituencies and the politics of Supreme Court confirmation votes in the United States. Conceptualization of constituency; Impact of geographic and reelection racial race; Insights on cross pressures facing senators as they decide for Clarence Thomas confirmation.