Compiling a manual of parliamentary practice in 1801, Thomas Jefferson emphatically recognized the importance of procedure in securing the rights of minority party members in the U.S. Congress. In a democratic political institution, majority parties would achieve their favored outcomes by taking advantage of their superior size, and minority parties would resist by availing themselves of protective rules to amend, delay, or obstruct the majority's agenda. Yet, the portrait of congressional rules as stable guarantors of the minority's right to participate meaningfully in the legislative process is deceptive. Far from rigidly securing the rights of the opposition, congressional rules are themselves the object of choice. Just as policy outcomes are contested by coalitions within each chamber, so too are the formal rules of the legislative game.

What leads members of Congress – in theory entitled to full and equal participation as members of a democratic legislature – to alter the procedural rights afforded members of the minority party? I shall articulate and test several competing explanations to account for formal changes in the rules of the House of Representatives that have created or suppressed minority rights from 1789 to 1990.