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Everything Old Is New Again: The Persistence of Republican Opposition to Multilateralism in American Foreign Policy
Abstract
The last two Republican presidents’ hostility to multilateralism has produced striking departures from postwar American foreign policy, but this position is not as new as it sometimes appears. It has deep historical roots in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Using data on congressional voting and bill sponsorship, we show that Republicans, especially those from the party's conservative wing, have tended to oppose multilateral rules for more than a century. This position fit logically into the broader foreign policy that Republican presidents developed before World War I but posed problems in light of the changing conditions during the mid-twentieth century. The importance of multilateral cooperation for U.S. national security during the Cold War and the growing international competitiveness of American manufacturing split the party on multilateral rules, but it did not reverse the conservative wing's longstanding skepticism of them. Congressional leaders’ efforts to keep consequential choices about multilateral rules off the legislative agenda for most of the postwar era contributed to the persistence of this position. This move spared conservative members of Congress from confronting the costs of opposing multilateral institutions, giving them little incentive to challenge ideological orthodoxy.
... Evidence from Anglophone democracies also shows that they are more likely to vote similarly to other countries in the world (Hanania, 2018). By contrast, right-wing governments are more likely to express more nationalist views, which then translate into views opposed to multilateralism and multilateral cooperation (Fordham & Flynn, 2023), more negative views of other countries (Gries, 2014), but also privileging military spending (Wenzelburger & Böller, 2020). ...
The existing literature argues that the left is generally more supportive of multilateralism in foreign policy than the right. However, the impact of ideology on state commitment to multilateral cooperation have not yet been empirically tested adequately. We assess the presence of such a left–right divide on state commitment to multilateral treaties employing an original dataset, containing all the available information about the ratification of the multilateral treaties deposited with the UN Secretary General since 1945. Our results indicate that indeed countries led by left-wing leaders are generally faster at ratifying treaties than those led by right-wing leaders. However, the association between leader ideology and commitment to multilateral treaties is substantially conditioned by regime type and the international context. In fact, we find robust evidence of a significant gap in ratification duration between states led by left-wing and right-wing leaders in democracies but not in other regime types, and during the Cold War but not after. Through such findings, this article provides a contribution to the debate on the impact of ideology on international relations and the drivers of global support for multilateralism.
... For quite a long time, US oreign policy was based on the understanding that "politics stops at the water's edge. "¹¹ This has been largely a myth, since liberal internationalism and principled multilateralism as key pillars o the LIO have always been contested by conservative Republicans (Fordham and Flynn 2023). Moreover, Kupchan and Trubowitz already harped on the "demise o liberal internationalism" in 2007 (Kupchan and Trubowitz 2007) ascribing it to the growing polarization o US politics (also Trubowitz and Harris 2019). ...
This book explores the deep contestations of the liberal script in the contemporary United States from a variety of perspectives. The US is today confronted with a crisis of democracy because of a profound ideological and affective polarization. The book argues that Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is a symptom as well as a catalyst rather than the cause of the contemporary contestations of the liberal script in the US. To discern their major drivers from a longue durée perspective, each chapter takes a step back, asking: How can we best describe the current contestations of the liberal script in the US, exploring the extent to which the US is unique in comparison to other liberal democracies facing similar contestations? What are the main drivers and root causes that explain the current contestations and the crisis of American democracy they may precipitate? What have been and what are the likely consequences for the future of American democracy? The various authors discuss—among other topics—the US public sphere, populism, polarization, the Supreme Court, Christian evangelicalism, African-American contestations, as well as the consequences of the deep contestations for US foreign policy.
... Key features of the political environment beyond Congress, such as the ideological and interest group landscape of American politics, provide reasons to expect strong polarization to be relatively uncommon on foreign policy and less prevalent on international than on domestic issues. With respect to ideology, there certainly exist important left-right divides over foreign policy, on issues ranging from multilateral cooperation to defense spending (Rathbun 2012;Gries 2014;Jeong and Quirk 2019;Wenzelburger and Böller 2019;Bendix and Jeong 2020;Haesebrouck and Mello 2020;Raunio and Wagner 2020;Smeltz et al. 2020;Flynn and Fordham 2021). But overall liberals and conservatives do not have opposing views on international issues to the same extent that they do on domestic matters. ...
To what extent are U.S. elected officials polarized on foreign policy? And how do patterns of polarization and bipartisanship differ across policy areas? Using an original data set of nearly 3000 important congressional votes since the end of the Cold War, we find that severe polarization remains the exception rather than the norm in U.S. foreign policy debates and that the U.S. Congress is still less polarized on international than on domestic issues. We also show that foreign policy bipartisanship regularly takes several forms, including bipartisan agreement in support of the president’s policies, cross-partisan coalitions, and even bipartisan opposition to the president’s policies. Collectively, our findings provide a more nuanced portrait of the politics of U.S. foreign policy than many recent accounts, point to persistent differences in the political alignments associated with different policy areas, and highlight the importance of conceiving of polarization and bipartisanship as more than binary categories.
... A large literature has documented important differences between how liberals and conservatives view the world. Whereas liberals favor a cooperative approach to international politics and prefer non-military to military instruments of national power, conservatives are warier of multilateral mechanisms and more supportive of military might (Wittkopf 1990;Holsti 2004;Broz 2011;Rathbun 2012;Gries 2014;Milner and Tingley 2015;Jeong and Quirk 2019;Wenzelburger and Böller 2019;Raunio and Wagner 2020;Smeltz et al. 2020;Flynn and Fordham 2021). At the same time, US debates over some foreign policy issues, including international alliances, economic sanctions, humanitarian intervention, and human rights, do not break down consistently along left-right lines (Cutrone and Fordham 2010;Maxey, 2020;Busby et al. 2020;Tama 2020;Kertzer et al. 2021). ...
Polarization in the USA has been on the rise for several decades. In this context, few observers expect politics today to stop “at the water’s edge,” as the old cliché goes. But key questions about the relationship between polarization and US foreign policy remain to be fully answered. To what extent are American ideas about foreign policy now polarized along partisan lines? How is polarization changing the foreign policy behavior of the US Congress and President? And how is polarization altering the effectiveness of US foreign policy and influencing America’s role in the world? In this introductory article to our special issue “Domestic Polarization and US Foreign Policy: Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Implications,” we provide an overview of key debates and existing knowledge about these questions, highlight important new findings from the contributions to the special issue, and suggest avenues for further research on this increasingly important topic.
... Key features of the political environment beyond Congress, such as the ideological and interest group landscape of American politics, provide reasons to expect strong polarization to be relatively uncommon on foreign policy and less prevalent on international than on domestic issues. With respect to ideology, there certainly exist important left-right divides over foreign policy, on issues ranging from multilateral cooperation to defense spending (Rathbun 2012;Gries 2014;Jeong and Quirk 2019;Wenzelburger and Böller 2019;Bendix and Jeong 2020;Haesebrouck and Mello 2020;Raunio and Wagner 2020;Smeltz et al. 2020;Flynn and Fordham 2021). But overall liberals and conservatives do not have opposing views on international issues to the same extent that they do on domestic matters. ...
To what extent are U.S. elected officials polarized on foreign policy? And how do patterns of polarization and bipartisanship differ across policy areas? Using an original data set of nearly 3000 important congressional votes since the end of the Cold War, we find that severe polarization remains the exception rather than the norm in U.S. foreign policy debates and that the U.S. Congress is still less polarized on international than on domestic issues. We also show that foreign policy bipartisanship regularly takes several forms, including bipartisan agreement in support of the president’s policies, cross-partisan coalitions, and even bipartisan opposition to the president’s policies. Collectively, our findings provide a more nuanced portrait of the politics of U.S. foreign policy than many recent accounts, point to persistent differences in the political alignments associated with different policy areas, and highlight the importance of conceiving of polarization and bipartisanship as more than binary categories.
Polarization in the United States has been on the rise for several decades. In this context, few observers expect politics today to stop “at the water’s edge,” as the old cliché goes. However, key questions about the relationship between polarization and U.S. foreign policy remain to be fully answered. To what extent are American ideas about foreign policy now polarized along partisan lines? How is polarization changing the foreign policy behavior of the U.S. Congress and President? And how is polarization altering the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy and influencing America’s role in the world? This edited volume provides an overview of key debates and existing knowledge about these questions, highlights important new findings from recent research, and suggests avenues for further study of this increasingly important topic.
How does partisan polarization in the United States affect foreign perceptions of its security commitments and global leadership? In a survey experiment fielded to 2000 adults in the United Kingdom, I demonstrate that priming respondents to think about US polarization negatively impacts their evaluations of the US-UK bilateral relationship. These impacts are stronger for the long-term, reputational consequences of polarization than for immediate security concerns. While foreign allies do not expect the United States to renege on existing security commitments, perceptions of extreme polarization make them less willing to engage in future partnerships with the United States and more skeptical of its global leadership. I find that these negative reputational consequences of polarization are driven by perceptions of preference-based, ideological polarization rather than identity-based, affective polarization. The results suggest that American allies anticipate that increasing divergence between the Republican and Democratic Party will create future uncertainty around US foreign policy.
How does partisan polarization in the United States affect foreign perceptions of its security commitments and global leadership? In a survey experiment fielded to 2000 adults in the United Kingdom, I demonstrate that priming respondents to think about US polarization negatively impacts their evaluations of the US-UK bilateral relationship. These impacts are stronger for the long-term, reputational consequences of polarization than for immediate security concerns. While foreign allies do not expect the United States to renege on existing security commitments, perceptions of extreme polarization make them less willing to engage in future partnerships with the United States and more skeptical of its global leadership. I find that these negative reputational consequences of polarization are driven by perceptions of preference-based, ideological polarization rather than identity-based, affective polarization. The results suggest that American allies anticipate that increasing divergence between the Republican and Democratic Party will create future uncertainty around US foreign policy.
We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by industry to other high-income countries. Rising exposure increases unemployment, lowers labor force participation, and reduces wages in local labor markets. Conservatively, it explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. Transfer benefits payments for unemployment, disability, retirement, and healthcare also rise sharply in exposed labor markets.
Scholars generally agree that most congressional decision-making behaviour has become characterised by partisan polarization. One area to which this consensus does not extend, however, is decision-making on foreign and national security issues. While a majority of scholars believe congressional foreign policy voting is now polarized, others insist that bipartisanship remains the norm. Examining roll-call votes in the House of Representatives from 1970-2012, this paper brings three new elements to bear on the dispute. Using a more comprehensive range of indicators, we re-examine the longitudinal data previously presented by scholars; we add an analysis of the roll-call data for the 2004-13 period, and we utilize a static measure of polarization. Our analysis of the data reveals a cyclical trend of increasing and decreasing polarization and we conclude that it is too simplistic to characterize congressional voting on foreign and national security issues since 1970 as either partisan or bipartisan.
The influence of partisan politics on public policy is a much debated issue of political science. with I respect to foreign policy, often considered as above parties, the question appears even more problematic. This comparison of foreign aid policies in 16 OECD countries develops a structural equation model and uses LISREL analysis to demonstrate that parties do matter even in international affairs. Social-democratic parties have an effect on a country's level of development assistance. This effect, however, is neither immediate nor direct. First, it appears only in the long run. Second, the relationship between leftist partisan strength and foreign aid works through welfare state institutions and social spending. Our findings indicate how domestic politics shapes foreign conduct. We confirm the empirical relevance of cumulative partisan scores and show how the influence of parties is mediated by other political determinants.
: Recent research, including an article by Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz in this journal, has argued that the United States’ long-standing foreign policy orientation of liberal internationalism has been in serious decline because of rising domestic partisan divisions. A reanalysis of the theoretical logic driving these arguments and the empirical evidence used to support them suggests a different conclusion. Extant evidence on congressional roll call voting and public opinion surveys, which is often used to support the claim that liberal internationalism has declined, as well as new evidence about partisan divisions in Congress using policy gridlock and cosponsorship data from other studies of American politics do not demonstrate the decline in bipartisanship in foreign policy that conventional wisdom suggests. The data also do not show evidence of a Vietnam War or a post–Cold War effect on domestic partisan divisions on foreign policy. Contrary to the claims of recent literature, the data show that growing domestic political divisions over foreign policy have not made liberal internationalism impossible. It persists as a possible grand strategy for the United States in part because of globalization pressures.
Since 1944, United States financing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been appropriated and approved in Congress
by roll-call vote. If voting to increase funds to the IMF is viewed as an observable signal of “support” for the IMF, these
votes provide a historical record of legislative support for the IMF in the United States. I analyze roll-call voting on IMF
financing from 1944 to 2009 at both the aggregate (congressional) and the micro (legislator) levels. At the aggregate level,
I show that support for the IMF has fallen over time in the House of Representatives but not in the Senate. In the micro-analysis,
I use a “natural experiment” to establish that this intercameral difference is the result of the Senate’s larger and more
heterogeneous constituencies, as opposed to other modeled and unmodeled factors. I also find that legislator support for the
IMF is shaped strongly by ideology: regardless of chamber, left-wing legislators are as much as 31 percentage points more
likely to support the IMF than right-wing legislators. Yet controlling for ideology, senators are more likely to support the
IMF than representatives, and representatives are more sensitive to constituency pressures than senators. I attribute these
differences to chamber-specific rules governing the size of constituencies.
KeywordsInternational Monetary Fund–IMF–United States Congress–U.S. congress–IMF quotas
During the nineties, Europe became a major recipient of FDIs but Italian regions have been largely excluded from this process. Was it due to their characteristics, or were Italian regions “doomed” by a negative country effect? In this paper we address this issue by estimating the determinants of multinational firms’ location choices in 52 EU regions. We find that Italian regions indeed attracted significantly less than their observable potential, and that this could be explained by the inefficiency of the bureaucratic apparatus and of the legal system. The effect of taxes is instead strongly sensitive to the inclusion of agglomeration variables and is asymmetric across regions.
Political conservatism has been characterized by resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, with liberalism characterized by the polar opposite of these values. Political attitudes are heritable and may be influenced by basic personality traits. In previous research, conservatism (vs. liberalism) has been associated positively with Conscientiousness and negatively with Openness-Intellect, consistent with the association of conservatism with resistance to change. Less clear, however, are the personality traits relating to egalitarianism. In two studies, using a personality model that divides each of the Big Five into two aspects, the present research found that one aspect of Agreeableness (Compassion) was associated with liberalism and egalitarianism, whereas the other (Politeness) was associated with conservatism and traditionalism. In addition, conservatism and moral traditionalism were positively associated with the Orderliness aspect of Conscientiousness and negatively with Openness-Intellect. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of personality's relation to political attitudes and values.
Age of Iron attempts to describe the past, present, and possible future of conservative nationalism in American foreign policy. It argues that a kind of conservative US nationalism long predates the Trump presidency, and goes back to the American founding. Different aspects of conservative American nationalism have been incorporated into the Republican Party from its creation. Every Republican president since Theodore Roosevelt has tried to balance elements of this tradition with global US foreign policy priorities. Donald Trump was able to win his party’s nomination and rise to the presidency in part by challenging liberal internationalist assumptions. Yet in practice, he too has combined nationalist assumptions with global US foreign policy priorities. The long-term trend within the Republican party, predating Trump, is toward political populism, cultural conservatism, and white working-class voters—and this has international implications. Republican foreign policy nationalism is not about to disappear. The book concludes with recommendations for US foreign policy, based upon an understanding that the optimism of the post–Cold War quarter-century is over.
There is no unified theory that can explain both voter choice and where choices come from. Hinich and Munger fill that gap with their model of political communication based on ideology. Rather than beginning with voters and diffuse, atomistic preferences, Hinich and Munger explore why large groups of voters share preference profiles, why they consider themselves “liberals” or “conservatives.” The reasons, they argue, lie in the twin problems of communication and commitment that politicians face. Voters, overloaded with information, ignore specific platform positions. Parties and candidates therefore communicate through simple statements of goals, analogies, and by invoking political symbols. But politicians must also commit to pursuing the actions implied by these analogies and symbols. Commitment requires that ideologies be used consistently, particularly when it is not in the party’s short-run interest. The model Hinich and Munger develop accounts for the choices of voters, the goals of politicians, and the interests of contributors. It is an important addition to political science and essential reading for all in that discipline.
The United States' 1890–91 decision to begin building a battleship fleet, an important point in its development as a world power, can illuminate the domestic sources of foreign policy ambition. An analysis of roll-call votes in the House of Representatives indicates that socioeconomic divisions arising from industrialization strongly influenced support and opposition to the battleship fleet. This relationship worked mainly through trade policy interests: members of Congress from import-competing states tended to support the effort, while those from export-oriented states tended to oppose it. The patriotic symbolism of battleships at a time of labor unrest also helped motivate support for the program, though evidence of this pattern is less conclusive. Although party affiliation was crucial, it was also partly a function of economic structure, which shaped the two parties’ electoral fortunes. The impact of trade interests during this period is a mirror image of what previous research has found concerning the post-World War II era, when export-oriented interests tended to support American global activism and import-competing interests to oppose it. The reason for the difference is the Republican Party's commitment to trade protection, which strongly influenced both the goals of the policy and the identity of its supporters.
Between 1890 and 1914, the United States acquired overseas colonies, built a battleship fleet, and intervened increasingly often in Latin America and East Asia. This activism is often seen as the precursor to the country's role as a superpower after 1945 but actually served very different goals. In contrast to its pursuit of a relatively liberal international economic order after 1945, the United States remained committed to trade protection before 1914. Protectionism had several important consequences for American foreign policy on both economic and security issues. It led to a focus on less developed areas of the world that would not export manufactured goods to the United States instead of on wealthier European markets. It limited the tactics available for promoting American exports, forcing policymakers to seek exclusive bilateral agreements or unilateral concessions from trading partners instead of multilateral arrangements. It inhibited political cooperation with other major powers and implied an aggressive posture toward these states. The differences between this foreign policy and the one the United States adopted after 1945 underscore the critical importance not just of the search for overseas markets but also of efforts to protect the domestic market.
As far as members of the hugely controversial John Birch Society were concerned, the Cold War revealed in stark clarity the loyalties and disloyalties of numerous important Americans, including Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Earl Warren. Founded in 1958 as a force for conservative political advocacy, the Society espoused the dangers of enemies foreign and domestic, including the Soviet Union, organizers of the US civil rights movement, and government officials who were deemed "soft" on communism in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Sound familiar? In The World of the John Birch Society, author D. J. Mulloy reveals the tactics of the Society in a way they’ve never been understood before, allowing the reader to make the connections to contemporary American politics, up to and including the Tea Party. These tactics included organized dissemination of broad-based accusations and innuendo, political brinksmanship within the Republican Party, and frequent doomsday predictions regarding world events. At the heart of the organization was Robert Welch, a charismatic writer and organizer who is revealed to have been the lifeblood of the Society’s efforts. The Society has seen its influence recede from the high-water mark of 1970s, but the organization still exists today. Throughout The World of the John Birch Society, the reader sees the very tenets and practices in play that make the contemporary Tea Party so effective on a local level. Indeed, without the John Birch Society paving the way, the Tea Party may have encountered a dramatically different political terrain on its path to power.
The Ohio ballot of 2004 featured a vote on an amendment banning gay marriage. It passed by a large margin. And the same was true in Arkansas, in Georgia, in Mississippi, in Montana, in North Dakota, in Oklahoma, and in Utah. All of these states, most conservative leaning, had ballot measures, and all were lopsided victories for the anti side of the gay marriage debate. The average vote was about 70% for the ban, 30% against. There was never a large prospect that legal gay marriage was imminent in these states. The bigger story was the possible impact on the election for the president of the United States. The theory was that the ballot measures would mobilize large numbers of culturally conservative usual nonvoters to make a rare trip to the polls and then incidentally vote for George W. Bush, whose campaign was tightly linked to the opposition to gay marriage. The ballot measures did coincide with increased turnout, particularly in more culturally conservative areas. And in Ohio, critical to Bush's Electoral College victory and won with a margin of just over a hundred thousand votes, the increased conservative turnout might have been enough to put Bush over the edge.
Most research on congressional consideration of foreign and defense policy concludes that ideology is the most important influence on roll-call voting and that constituent economic interests are not very important. This article challenges this conclusion on two grounds. First, most previous research conceives of constituent economic interests on these issues very narrowly, examining only the benefits constituents obtain from providing military goods and services rather than their economic stakes in the broader goals of national security policy. Second, the effect of ideology on congressional voting has changed enormously over time, a fact that poses difficulties for research that has stressed this consideration. The effects of broader economic interests and the changing implications of ideology are tested using a sample of key Senate votes on military resource allocation, intervention, and foreign aid from 1947 through 2000.
This paper investigates how changes in both institutional incentives and economic interests are important for securing durable changes in economic policy. We study how bipartisan support developed to sustain the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934, which fundamentally transformed U.S, trade policy. The durability of this change was achieved only when the Republicans, long-time supporters of high tariffs who originally vowed to repeal the RTAA, began to support this Democratic initiative in the 1940s. We find little evidence of an ideological shift among Republicans, but rather an increased sensitivity to export interests for which the institutional structure of the RTAA itself may have been responsible. We conclude that the combination of greater export opportunities and the institutional change that strengthened exporters' lobbying position was required to bring about Republican support for trade liberalization.
Three hypotheses suggesting why senators might adopt or change positions on such an issue as the ABM are compared. The empirical analysis clearly substantiates the contention that position reflects ideology, not party commitment or potential state economic benefits. Furthermore, the influence of ideology is seen to have grown more apparent each year the issue was contested in the Senate. Virtually all the senators who changed position between 1968 and 1970 had initial positions that did not accord with their ideology, and they moved so as to bring them in accord. Virtually all those senators whose initial position was in accord with their ideology maintained that position.
Foreign policy scholars have long emphasized bipartisanship in foreign policymaking, particularly in the context of presidential appointments to the foreign policy bureaucracy, emphasizing the role of international crises and national security in affecting bipartisanship. In spite of their enduring nature, few systematic analyses of these claims exist. This study addresses these gaps using new data on appointees to the foreign policy bureaucracy. The results challenge the conventional wisdoms emerging from the foreign policy literature regarding the importance of factors like war, instead pointing to the importance of domestic political factors in affecting bipartisanship in appointments to the foreign policy bureaucracy.
BEFORE he became President, international peace was at best a perfunctory concern of William Howard Taft. In Political Issues and Outlooks, a collection of speeches delivered between August 1908 and February 1909, Taft’s fleeting References to foreign policy were flat and unimaginative. His speech of March 1910 proposing to arbitrate even questions of national honor, he confessed to his aide, Major Archie Butt, had really been intended to offset the opposition of "Carnegie and other peace cranks" to four new battleships provided for in the Naval Appropriations Bill.’ Yet paradoxically this very speech marked the beginning of a change in the views of the President, who in the wake of the political commotion of his years in the White House published another volume of speeches on what had become by then one of his favorite topics, The United States and Peace? Both the occasion and cause of this change were the treaties of international arbitration with Great Britain and France signed on August 3, 1911.
Debunking the common laissez-faire myth surrounding turn-of-the-century American foreign relations allows for a reconceptualization
of American imperialism from 1890 to 1913. The Republican Party, the party of protectionism, found itself riven by internal
disagreements over the future of the protectionist system and U.S. imperial expansion. From within Republican protectionist
ranks arose a progressive wing that increasingly looked beyond the home market for the country’s growing American agricultural
and manufacturing surpluses. They did so against staunch anti-imperial opposition not only from American free-trade independents,
but also from the Republican Party’s isolationist home-market protectionists, who yet feared or disdained foreign markets
and colonial acquisitions. These progressive Republican proponents of empire combined coercive trade reciprocity with protectionism—an
expansive closed door—and worked hard to extend American imperial power through informal means of high tariff walls, closed
U.S.-controlled markets, and retaliatory reciprocity if possible, by formal annexation and military interventionism when necessary.
The American Empire thus arose owing to the imperialism of economic nationalism, not the imperialism of free trade.
Theory: Constituent pressures on senators vary by party and heterogeneity of state. Studies of representation based on analysis of roll call voting which fail to take these factors into account will underestimate constituency influence and overemphasize the impact of party and interest group ratings. Hypotheses: (1) The greater the heterogeneity of the electorate, the less predictable will be the relationships between constituency characteristics and roll call votes. (2) The effects of some constituency characteristics on roll call votes are party-specific. Methods: Ordered probit analysis of Senate voting on international trade issues in 1993-94 was conducted for the whole Senate and for the Senate split into homogenous and heterogeneous states. Results: For homogenous states, general and party-specific constituency characteristics perform very well, while party and interest group ratings perform poorly. For heterogeneous states, general and party-specific constituency characteristics perform poorly, while party and interest group ratings perform well. These results indicate, first, that heterogeneity of state electorates and party strategies is an important factor in determining roll call votes and, second, that there is strong evidence of dyadic representation on roll call voting.
Over the past two decades, political polarization has shaken the domestic foundations of U.S. grand strategy, sorely testing bipartisan support for liberal internationalism. Stephen Chaudoin, Helen Milner, and Dustin Tingley take issue with this interpretation, contending that liberal internationalism in the United States is alive and well. Their arguments, however, do not stand up to careful scrutiny. Their analysis of congressional voting and public opinion fails to demonstrate the persistence of bipartisanship on foreign policy. Indeed, the partisan gap that widened during George W. Bush's administration has continued during the presidency of Barack Obama, confirming that a structural change has taken place in the domestic bases of U.S. foreign policy. President Obama now faces the unenviable challenge of conducting U.S. statecraft during an era when consensus will be as elusive at home as it is globally.
According to mainstream opinion, the George W. Bush administration's assertive unilateralism represents a temporary departure from the traditional foreign policy of the United States, one that will be rectified by a change of personnel in the White House in 2009. This interpretation of recent trends in U.S. policy is illusory. The Bush administration's foreign policy, far from representing an aberration, marks the end of an era; it is a symptom, as much as a cause, of the unraveling of the liberal internationalist compact that guided the United States for more than half a century. The geopolitical and domestic conditions that gave rise to liberal internationalism have disappeared, eroding its bipartisan political foundations. In today's partisan landscape, the challenge is devising a grand strategy that not only meets the country's geopolitical needs but also is politically sustainable. A strategy that is as judicious and selective as it is purposeful offers the best hope for moving the United States toward a more stable and solvent political equilibrium.
Foreign aid is a complex international institution which, over the years, has experienced a number of transformations. Most of these changes, however, cannot be understood outside the ideological environment in which they were engendered. Building on this analytical insight, the article argues that the debate on development assistance has always been framed in terms of an opposition between forces of the Right and forces of the Left. The first part of the article explains how the very definition of aid has been influenced by the Right-Left opposition. The second section uses the Right-Left distinction to re-examine the key stages in the history of the aid regime. The third part summarises the assessment that the Right and the Left each make of a half-century of development assistance. Finally, the conclusion discusses the significance of this contribution to the study of aid and international relations.
Although skeptics continue to doubt that most people are “ideological,” evidence suggests that meaningful left-right differences do exist and that they may be rooted in basic personality dispositions, that is, relatively stable individual differences in psychological needs, motives, and orientations toward the world. Seventy-five years of theory and research on personality and political orientation has produced a long list of dispositions, traits, and behaviors. Applying a theory of ideology as motivated social cognition and a “Big Five” framework, we find that two traits, Openness to New Experiences and Conscientiousness, parsimoniously capture many of the ways in which individual differences underlying political orientation have been conceptualized. In three studies we investigate the relationship between personality and political orientation using multiple domains and measurement techniques, including: self-reported personality assessment; nonverbal behavior in the context of social interaction; and personal possessions and the characteristics of living and working spaces. We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized.
This article seeks to overturn the conventional wisdom that World War II forced a decisive, bipartisan break in American grand strategy. As they had after World War I, American political elites debated the relative merits of unilateralism and multilateralism. Assessments of the relative costs and benefits of a cooperative and multilateral solution to American security depended on judgments about the likelihood of opportunism by America’s partners. Democrats were more trusting than Republicans, expecting cooperation where the latter anticipated defection. This led to different preferences for the creation and design of the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty. Drawing on theories of “social orientation” and political ideology, I explain why the left is more trusting than the right. Rationalist accounts of the creation and design of the UN and NATO overstate the case for ideological convergence and therefore the importance of structure because they largely ignore behind-the-scene bipartisan consultations that allowed for a compromise prior to the votes on the respective treaties. My social psychological theory of international cooperation demonstrates that multilateralism is a dispositional trait, not a simple functional response to some objective security situation.
In the US House and Senate, each piece of legislation is sponsored by a unique legislator. In addition, legislators can publicly express support for a piece of legislation by cosponsoring it. The network of sponsors and cosponsors provides information about the underlying social networks among legislators. I use a number of statistics to describe the cosponsorship network in order to show that it behaves much differently than other large social networks that have been recently studied. In particular, the cosponsorship network is much denser than other networks and aggregate features of the network appear to be influenced by institutional arrangements and strategic incentives. I also demonstrate that a weighted closeness centrality measure that I call ‘connectedness’ can be used to identify influential legislators.
Using large-scale network analysis I map the cosponsorship networks of all 280,000 pieces of legislation proposed in the U.S.
House and Senate from 1973 to 2004. In these networks, a directional link can be drawn from each cosponsor of a piece of legislation
to its sponsor. I use a number of statistics to describe these networks such as the quantity of legislation sponsored and
cosponsored by each legislator, the number of legislators cosponsoring each piece of legislation, the total number of legislators
who have cosponsored bills written by a given legislator, and network measures of closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector
centrality. I then introduce a new measure I call “connectedness” which uses information about the frequency of cosponsorship
and the number of cosponsors on each bill to make inferences about the social distance between legislators. Connectedness
predicts which members will pass more amendments on the floor, a measure that is commonly used as a proxy for legislative
influence. It also predicts roll call vote choice even after controlling for ideology and partisanship.
The domestic politics of American military spending during the Cold War confronts scholars with an important but often overlooked puzzle: the two major parties appear to have switched positions on the issue. During the early Cold War era, Democrats were generally supportive of increased military spending, while Republicans were critical. After the mid-1960s, Democrats increasingly tended to oppose larger military budgets, while Republicans more often favored them. This article presents evidence about the process through which this change took place. It identifies several developments in the domestic and international environments that may have contributed to this party switch and evaluates preliminary evidence about each of them.
Are America and global governance on a collision course? And if so, with what consequences? I make two arguments in this chapter. First, unlike the situation in 1945, when the U.S. truly was the world's political Archimedean point, global governance in the 21st century is being stitched together by a multiplicity of actors and interests - in considerable measure reflecting the success of America's own postwar transformational agenda. Indeed, the very system of states is becoming embedded within an increasingly mobilized and institutionalized global public domain that includes not only states but also non-state actors involved in the promotion and production of global public goods. While the American state remains by far the most powerful force among them, platforms and channels for transnational action that it does not directly control have proliferated - and are deeply entwined with American society itself. Enacting a strict exemptionalism posture, therefore, has become much harder than it seems. Second, although the debate fueled by the recent upsurge of U.S. resistance to global governance involves highly technical questions of constitutional law, on which I, a non-specialist, touch only lightly, it is also fundamentally a political debate, requiring us to make political choices. For on close inspection, many of the solutions proposed by the exemptionalists not only are unnecessary, but also impose a greater burden on us than the problems they seek to solve. In the conclusion I spell out some implications for the future of global governance of the continuing dialectic, if you will, between the two forms of American exceptionalism, acknowledging that the path ahead does not promise to be smooth, but noting that neither has it been getting to where we are today.
Although it is widely acknowledged that economic interests influence the politics of trade policy, most research on international relations treats security issues differently. Do conflicting economic interests shape political debate over foreign policy even when security issues are highly salient? To answer this question, I test a range of hypotheses about conflicting interests in the economic stakes of U.S. foreign policy during the early Cold War era. I present evidence that economic interests in their home states were closely related to senators' voting patterns on foreign policy issues. These patterns hold across economic and security issues. I also find that political parties play an important mediating role, making senators more or less receptive to various economic interests.
The Jacksonian Revolt
- Mead
The Arbitration Treaty with Great Britain
- Roosevelt
The Last Hurrah of Conservative Isolationism: Eisenhower, Congress, and the Bricker Amendment
- Nolan
The Bricker Amendment Controversy
- Grant
Philip A. Grant, "The Bricker Amendment Controversy," Presidential Studies
Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1985): 572-82, 573-74.
Seeking World Order: The United States and International Organization to
- Kuehl
- F Warren
Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations
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