Restrained Majority Party Agenda Control in the U.S. House of Representatives Andrew O. Ballard American University aballard@american.edu James M. Curry University of Utah james.curry@utah.edu In contemporary scholarship, negative agenda control is understood as central to majority party power in the House of Representatives. However, scholars have no sought to understand the limits and restraints on the House majority party’s efforts to exercise negative agenda powers. Drawing on data about every bill introduced in the House from 1981-2016, and every amendment offered on the House floor from 1981-2012, we compare the majority party’s exercise of negative agenda control against several benchmarks of negative agenda dominance. Our results show that the majority party’s exercise of negative agenda control clearly falls short of these benchmarks. Taken together, the results suggest limits to majority party power that are typically underappreciated in congressional scholarship. Prepared for presentation at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Political Science Association, April 5, 2019, Chicago, IL