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Abstract: Over the past two decades the literature on parties in the U.S. House and Senate has clearly demonstrated that parties can affect outcomes, both by pushing the enactment of certain policies and by suppressing action on others. However, the extant literature has given little attention to the strategic question of when should parties employ the tools at their disposal to affect outcomes. In this paper, I begin to lay the foundations for a theory of party leadership effectiveness, which revolves around the idea that effective party leadership teams are those that successfully balance two party goals: (1) retain (gain) majority status by working to get like-minded individuals elected and re-elected, and (2) enact (block) policies that are (in)consistent with party members' preferences and/or the party's name brand. I use data on the size and scope of the majority party's agenda and election returns to test my expectations.