This study of 364 leadership selections in the U.S. House from 1789 through 1977 discovered that Democrats have a higher proportion of appointed leaders than Republicans; their leaders move between posts in an ordered succession; their appointed leaders are often “removed from above” by their elected ones; and their leaders are subjected to infrequent and unsuccessful caucus challenges. Republicans rely upon election to choose their leaders; their leaders' rate of interpositional mobility is very low; their appointed leaders were never removed by their elected ones; and their leaders face the contests at the same rate as the Democrats do, but the incidence of successful challenges is much greater. They are “removed from below.”Majority vs. minority status had little statistically significant impact upon leadership contests and what variation appeared indicated that challenges were more frequent in the majority party where the stakes are higher and the rewards are greater than in the minority. Regardless of electoral consequences, however, Republican leaders are more vulnerable to caucus defeat than Democratic ones, which lends further support to the contention that party identity is more important than party status.

This study of 364 leadership selections in the U.S. House from 1789 through 1977 discovered that Democrats have a higher proportion of appointed leaders than Republicans; their leaders move between posts in an ordered succession; their appointed leaders are often “removed from above” by their elected ones; and their leaders are subjected to infrequent and unsuccessful caucus challenges. Republicans rely upon election to choose their leaders; their leaders' rate of interpositional mobility is very low; their appointed leaders were never removed by their elected ones; and their leaders face the contests at the same rate as the Democrats do, but the incidence of successful challenges is much greater. They are “removed from below.”Majority vs. minority status had little statistically significant impact upon leadership contests and what variation appeared indicated that challenges were more frequent in the majority party where the stakes are higher and the rewards are greater than in the minority. Regardless of electoral consequences, however, Republican leaders are more vulnerable to caucus defeat than Democratic ones, which lends further support to the contention that party identity is more important than party status.

For a quarter-century, conservative Republicans have used the “San Francisco liberal” label to place Democrats as outside the American mainstream. Imagine their dismay as the 110th Congress opened in January 2007 and Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat well to the left of most of her party, ascended to the podium as speaker of the United States House of Representatives. This was, to be sure, a departure. Traditionally, House Democrats had selected ideological “middlemen” for top leadership posts (Truman 1959), particularly those from the “Austin-Boston alliance” that held unbroken sway in House Democratic leadership selection from the initial teaming of Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas and Majority Leader John McCormack of Boston in 1940 to that of Tip O'Neill of Boston and Texan Jim Wright in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, Democrats “almost never” selected “‘Americans for Democratic Action-type’ liberals” as leaders (Peabody 1976, 470).

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