Formal, Constitutional, Nuclear? Towards a Typology of Procedural Change in the United States Senate

The internal functioning of the United States Senate has recently been a topic of heated discussion in both the academic sphere and the wider public discourse. There have been several studies devoted to the filibuster as a tool of legislative obstruction since the 1990s, along with some treatments of the wider topic of trends of procedural change in the Senate. One common theme of recent scholarship on the topic is the striking terminological confusion across different scholarly works on Senate procedural change. Differences in the method deployed to change the chamber´s procedures can at first look seem negligible, but they can carry with them profound consequences for the future development of the legislative body´s procedural development. As a result, using different terms across academic treatments of the topic makes it extraordinarily difficult to aggregate their findings and use it to further the study of procedural change and its wider consequences on the separation of powers, policy-making, and even electoral prospects of individual legislators. This paper aims to address this shortcoming of the current academic debate by providing a unified, unambiguous typology of types of Senate procedural change in the United States Senate. The typology is to be constructed based on two dimensions. First, a distinction is made as to whether the given change of procedure requires a majority, or a supermajority of legislators to be enacted. The second dimension is based on what concrete steps legislators must undertake in order to achieve their procedural aims. The goal of the paper in a narrow sense is to contribute to the study of the Senate and the U.S. Congress more generally, by providing a clear set of categories of procedural change and their potential effects of the internal structure of the procedural environment in which legislators conduct themselves. Utilizing an unambiguous terminology based on typological distinctions allows better orientation across different academic works concerned with Senate procedures. In a wider sense, using the typology will allow for much better systematic comparison of the U. S. Senate with other legislative institutions. Comparative Political Science often dismisses the Senate as a unique institution that is hard to compare to any other legislative chamber, but this assertion is seldom strenghtened by truly convincing evidence. Systematically identifying what ways the Senate has to change and structure its procedures can serve as a useful tool for future research aimed at showing whether the nuts and bolts of the procedural environment really make the chamber so highly resistant to comparison with other parliamentary bodies across the world. The paper thus fits into a niche both in the fields of congressional studies, and that of comparative politics more generally.