ALBANY – After losing as many as four seats to the Democrats on Election Day, the Republican majority leader of the state Senate, Joseph Bruno, is proposing to change the way Albany does business.

At a combative session with reporters at the Capitol yesterday, Mr. Bruno called for public hearings on various government reforms, ranging from changes in legislative rules to a constitutional amendment that would allow voters to decide hot-button issues in statewide referendums.

His comments came after Democrats campaigning on a reform platform ousted two incumbent Republicans, in New York City and Syracuse, and forced a recount in a Westchester County election that was too close to call.

The Democrats also claimed an open Senate seat in the Bronx and Westchester that had been held by a Republican, Guy Velella, for 18 years before he went to jail on bribery charges in May.

Mr. Bruno’s majority, which was 38-24 earlier this year, could shrink to 35-27 or 34-28 come January 1 – putting the Democrats four or five victories away from ending several decades of GOP control.

In the Assembly, majority Democrats defeated two upstate Republicans, in Broome and Albany counties, but also lost an Erie County seat formerly held by a Democrat who is retiring. The result was a net gain of one seat, giving Speaker Sheldon Silver of Manhattan a 104-96 advantage.

“We had a great night,” the chairman of the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee, Assemblyman Ronald Canestrari of Albany County, said yesterday. “With our gains and the Senate [Republicans’] losses, it’s a setback for Governor Pataki’s Republican agenda statewide.”

The Senate results – along with the defeat of a majority Democrat from the Assembly in a party primary two months ago – are galvanizing proponents of reform in the Legislature, which was recently characterized as the most dysfunctional in the nation by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Mr. Paterson said his caucus would promote rules changes to curtail the centralized control of legislative leaders, such as the unilateral authority to hand out committee assignments, award members with extra pay for leadership jobs, and distribute pork-barrel grants.

“The leaders in Albany have too much power,” he said. “Everybody shuts up and does what the leader says. … That’s not what we should be doing – in the majority, or anyplace else.”

Mr. Bruno, who initially rejected the Brennan Center report as “nonsense,” agreed to appoint a task force on reform after the September primaries and promised yesterday to follow through with concrete recommendations.

“We have to open the process,” he said. “We have to have public hearings and then we have to take action.”

The legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, Blair Horner, said politicians are taking the election results as a mandate for change.

“Even though it was in many ways a typical election – the vast majority of incumbents were re-elected, they won by huge margins – there was one issue that everyone wanted to talk about and there was one issue that incumbents who faced tough races wanted to clutch onto,” Mr. Horner said. “And that was the issue of reform.”

Another Albany analyst, E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute, disagreed, noting that both of the incumbent Republicans, Olga Mendez of East Harlem and Nancy Larraine Hoffmann of Syracuse, were former Democrats who switched parties, and the third in a close race, Nicholas Spano of Westchester, is one of the Senate’s most liberal Republicans.

“To me what this points out is how dangerous is it for senators to think they can protect themselves by being more Democratic than the Democrats,” Mr. McMahon said.

He argued that Ms. Hoffmann most likely would have won had she not also faced a challenger from the right, Thomas Dadey, who lost the Republican primary but stayed on the ballot as a third-party candidate.

According to unofficial returns, Ms. Hoffmann lost to the Democratic candidate, David Valesky, by a little more than 1,000 votes, 49,147 to 48,087. Republicans were not conceding the race yesterday, noting that about 7,000 absentee ballots remain to be counted, but Mr. Paterson joked that Mr. Bruno could announce her victory “at the inauguration of President Kerry.”

In the Westchester race, Mr. Spano was leading his Democratic challenger, county legislator Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Yonkers, by less than 600 votes, 51,669 to 50,096, according to returns that were still incomplete yesterday. Mr. Paterson said there were “highly disturbing” irregularities in that race, including what he described as intimidation of voters and votes counted by some machines before the polls opened.