Assessing the Effects of Personal Characteristics and Context on U.S. House Speakers’ Leadership Styles, 1789-2006

Research on congressional leadership has been dominated in recentdecades by contextual interpretations that see leaders’ behavior as best explained bythe environment in which they seek to exercise leadership—particularly, the preferencehomogeneity and size of their party caucus. The role of agency is thus discounted, andleaders’ personal characteristics and leadership styles are underplayed. Focusingspecifically on the speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives from the first to the110th Congress, we construct measures of each speaker’s commitment to comity andleadership assertiveness. We find the scores reliable and then test the extent to whicha speaker’s style is the product of both political context and personal characteristics.Regression estimates on speakers’ personal assertiveness scores provide robust supportfor a context-plus-personal characteristics explanation, whereas estimates of theircomity scores show that speakers’ personal backgrounds trump context