Americans’ Attitudes About the Senate Filibuster

Abstract

We examine public attitudes about one of the most visible procedural features of Congress, the Senate’s filibuster and cloture practice. We measure the stability of those attitudes during an important legislative episode, relate them to more abstract attitudes about majority rule and minority rights, and draw inferences about the importance of those attitudes for evaluations of the parties and vote intention for the 2010 elections. We find that filibuster attitudes change in ways predicted by respondents’ partisan and policy preferences. Moreover, controlling for party identification, ideology, policy views, and attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in the abstract, filibuster attitudes have modest, asymmetric effects on party evaluations but no effect on vote intention.