What influences senators to use the filibuster?

During the past month, the U.S. Senate reached an agreement on the use of filibusters regarding President Bush's judicial nominees. Filibustering, a tactic used by the minority party to thwart the will of the majority party, has been used more commonly in the Senate over the past 30 years. In fact, by the mid-1990s more than half of the bills identified by Congressional Quarterly as "major" were subject to tactics that included filibusters, holds, and threats of filibusters. A new study by a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher examined the trends in filibustering over the past 30 years and determined if certain types of senators use the tactic more than others.

"This study allows us not only to paint a more accurate description of filibustering in the contemporary Senate, but also to focus in greater depth on the individual-level characteristics associated with filibuster behavior," said L. Marvin Overby, professor of Political Science, who conducted the study with Lauren Bell, assistant professor of political science at Randolph-Macon College.

"One of the key questions we wanted to answer was whether senators who are on the verge of retirement, who are able to see the 'last play' of the legislative game in their careers, filibuster more," Overby said. "This is important because it can give us insights into what motivates senators' behavior. Are they motivated more by narrow considerations of short-term self-interest, in which case they might filibuster more as they see retirement approaching? Or do longer-term forces, such as compliance with Senate norms, condition their behavior?"

The researchers compiled a list of all senators who served in the U.S. Senate from 1975, when the Senate last instituted major changes to its filibuster rules, to 2002. From that list, they identified 99 senators who retired from the Senate during the period. They also examined each senator's ideology to determine whether they were deemed extreme in their views.

Overby and Bell found that 50 of the 99 senators in their sample led at least one filibuster during the period from 1975 to 2002, but only 19 did so during their final Congress. Overby believes that senators who are older at the time of their retirement from the chamber are more likely to be limited by age-related infirmities and less likely to have the physical energy necessary to lead a filibuster. Also, those senators whose post-Senate employment plans include positions where they might have ongoing relationships with former colleagues still in the chamber may be less inclined to alienate them with obstructionist behavior during their last months of office.

They also found that ideological extremism and minority party status were statistically significant factors when determining whether a senator would lead a filibuster. State size, though, did not matter.

"Our major finding is that cooperation does not break down completely as senators approach retirement," Overby said. "The fact that roughly only one in four or five senators engage in the most obstructive form of dilatory behavior as they prepare to retire from the chamber indicates to us that while purely rational considerations certainly enter into senators' behavioral calculations, they do not necessarily predominate. We think this is important in an institution where the minority is so powerful, where leaders have so few institutional powers, where individual senators are so independent, and where so much depends on the ability of senators to get along with each other."

Overby and Bell currently are extending their study, which originally appeared in the August 2004 issue of the Journal of Politics, to cover the entire history of the Senate, which includes one of the most comprehensive efforts ever to identify and code each filibuster or threatened filibuster in history.

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L. Marvin Overby
Department of Political Science

Lauren Bell, Randolph-Macon College

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