POLITICAL GOALS AND PROCEDURAL CHOICE IN THE SENATE

Recent scholarship on the U.S. Senate attributes the protection of ext ended debate to senators' principled commitment to quality deliberatio n and Free speech. The persistence of rules protecting nearly unlimite d debate is said to reflect senators' collective interests in maintain ing an institution that protects free speech and minority rights. Such an explanation, we argue, understates the influence of political obje ctives in shaping senators' procedural choices. In this paper, we exam ine a sample of choices made about extended debate over the course of Senate history to test a more general theory about the politics of ins titutional change in the Senate. Both qualitative evidence about the d evelopment of extended debate and a multivariate model of senators' vo tes on procedural reform lead us to conclude that political interests- not collective concerns about protecting the role of the Senate-underp in senators' choices over institutional arrangements.