No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The Prevalence of Bipartisanship in U.S. Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Important Congressional Votes
Abstract
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.
Research indicates that polarization has led to an increasing dispersion between moderate and more extreme voters within both parties. Intraparty polarization supposedly affects the nature of interparty competition as it creates political space for new political realignments and the rise of anti-establishment candidates. This chapter examines the extent and impact of intraparty polarization in Congress on U.S. trade policy. Specifically, the chapter examines whether (and which) trade policy preferences are distributed within and between both parties and how intraparty polarization has influenced the outcome of U.S. trade negotiations. It is theorized that intraparty polarization causes crosscutting legislative coalitions around specific trade policies and political realignments around ideological factions, with consequences for the outcome of trade negotiations. By relying on a unique dataset of congressional letters and co-sponsorship legislation, the chapter first derives trade policy preferences from members of Congress and computes their ideological means. Two contemporary cases of U.S. trade policy are examined: The Transpacific Partnership Agreement and the US-Mexico-Canada-Agreement. Via a structured-focused comparison of both cases, the chapter finally assesses under which combinations of preference-based and ideology-based intraparty polarization Congress manages to ratify trade agreements. Findings suggest that both parties are intrinsically polarized between free trade and fair trade preferences yet show variance in their degree of ideology-based intraparty polarization. These findings contribute to existing work on bipartisanship as well as factions in the foreign policy realm, as it shows under which circumstances legislators can build crosscutting coalitions around foreign policies.
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.
Bipartisan consensus on many US domestic and foreign policy priorities has seemingly collapsed in recent decades, and political parties have become qideologically polarized and divided. While some contend that these dynamics are narrowing the space for congressional foreign policy innovation, we argue that factionalism often fosters creativity in the foreign policy process. Specifically, this article explores the role of ‘free agent’ progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans in foreign policy decision-making. These members at the ideological extremes of their parties are finding common ground in anti-establishment views and concerns about executive excess, and they are aligning to challenge traditional foreign policy positions. This paper conducts a plausibility probe of a model of congressional foreign policy free agency based upon roll call voting on war powers-related decisions in the Obama and Trump administrations. During both presidencies, our findings suggest that the free agency model has predictive value for foreign policy maneuvering and offers a non-traditional way of thinking about contemporary US foreign policy development.
Recent work finds evidence that partisan calculations, not ideological preferences, drive congressional decisions on foreign policy. While legislators support the wars launched by their party’s presidents, they often oppose those by the other party’s presidents. However, it is unclear whether such partisan calculations are limited to a narrow set of security votes or whether they are part of a broad pattern of foreign policymaking in Congress. To examine the importance of partisan versus ideological motivations, we examine the substantive contributions legislators make to, and the votes they cast on, foreign policy measures. Specifically, we collect sponsorship and voting data on amendments that allow Congress to restrict presidential spending on defense programs and foreign aid. In analyzing data from 1971 to 2016, we find that ideology is the most consistent factor that determines whether legislators propose and support spending limits on security-related bills.
Research indicates that polarization has led to an increasing dispersion between moderate and more extreme voters within both parties. Intraparty polarization supposedly affects the nature of interparty competition as it creates political space for new political realignments and the rise of anti-establishment candidates. This article examines the extent and impact of intraparty polarization in Congress on US trade policy. Specifically, the article examines whether (and which) trade policy preferences are distributed within and between both parties, as well as how intraparty polarization has influenced the outcome of US trade negotiations. It is theorized that intraparty polarization causes crosscutting legislative coalitions around specific trade policies and political realignments around ideological factions, with consequences for the outcome of trade negotiations. By relying on a unique dataset of congressional letters and co-sponsorship legislation, the article first derives trade policy preferences from members of Congress and computes their ideological means. Two contemporary cases of US trade policy are examined: The Transpacific Partnership Agreement and the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement. Via a structured-focused comparison of both cases, the paper finally assesses under which combinations of preference-based and ideology-based intraparty polarization Congress manages to ratify trade agreements. Findings suggest that both parties are intrinsically polarized between free trade and fair trade preferences yet show variance in their degree of ideology-based intraparty polarization. These findings contribute to existing work on bipartisanship as well as factions in the foreign policy realm, as it shows under which circumstances legislators can build crosscutting coalitions around foreign policies.
The Constitution’s division of powers from which E. Corwin famously asserted an “invitation to struggle” in the making of US foreign policy (1957, 171) has become overshadowed by partisan conflict in the contemporary era. Although much of the extant literature points to Congress’s subsidiary role in foreign policy relative to the presidency-centered model, the appeal of partisanship has worked to further deepen congressional abrogation and extend presidential unilateralism (Lindsay in Congress and the politics of U.S. Foreign Policy. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994; Kriner in After the rubicon: congress, presidents, and the politics of waging war. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010; Potter in Pres Stud Quart 46(4):849–867, 2016). Our analysis illustrates a puzzle. On one hand, there are growing levels of majority support in the USA for political leadership on the world stage. But on the other hand, our analysis of congressional behavior such as voting, lawmaking, and oversight shows relatively clear patterns of congressional decline—Congress no longer exercises much of its power in foreign affairs, neither in form or substance. Partisan incentives for congressional abdication to the presidency carry at least one additional risk we point to: Congressional capitulation from its constitutional duty places democracy in the jeopardy that the Framers’ design was intended to prevent.
In 2018, the Texas National Security Network and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs surveyed foreign policy opinion leaders and compared that data to findings from the public using Chicago Council Survey data on political polarization, trade, NATO, US military bases, immigration, and international agreements.
Jordan Tama, an awardee of a Negotiating Agreement in Congress grant (a component of the SSRC’s Anxieties of Democracy program) identifies an intriguing anomaly: greater bipartisanship in the US Congress on foreign policy than domestic issues. Tama examines the different forms this aisle-crossing may take—sometimes in broad opposition to the president’s policy preferences, and at other times when intraparty factions unite across party lines. He sees ideology, interest group politics, and institutional incentives as the key sources for foreign policy bipartisanship, and concludes with how these dynamics are playing out in the Trump administration.
The positions of political parties in various foreign policy questions and how such ideological stances matter in foreign and security policy decision-making remain largely unexplored beyond the specific case of the United States. Reviewing the “state of the art” in foreign policy analysis and comparative politics, this introductory article discusses the changing nature of both international politics and party systems and cleavages in Europe and beyond. It puts forward reasons why we should see different patterns of coalitions and party behavior in security policy, on the one hand, and in international trade and foreign aid, on the other hand. The articles in this Special Issue have been deliberately chosen to capture different elements of “partyness,” from analyzing party positions to actual behavior by legislatures and governments to transnational party networks. Our main argument is that there are genuine ideological differences between political parties and that the impact of these competing ideologies is also discernible in foreign policy decision-making.
Recent studies on political ideology suggest the existence of partisan divides on matters of foreign and security policy – challenging the notion that “politics stops at the water’s edge”. However, when taken as a whole, extant work provides decidedly mixed evidence of party-political differences outside domestic politics. This article first conducts a systematic empirical analysis of the relationship between parties’ left-right positions and their general attitude towards peace and security missions, which suggests that right-leaning parties tend to be more supportive of military operations. Yet, the results also show that the empirical pattern is curvilinear: centrist and center-right parties witness the highest level of support for military missions, while parties on both ends of the political spectrum show substantially less support. The second part of our analysis examines whether the stronger support of rightist parties for peace and security missions translates into a greater inclination of right-wing governments to actually deploy forces to military operations. Strikingly, our results suggest that leftist governments were actually more inclined to participate in operations than their right-leaning counterparts. The greater willingness of left-wing executives to deploy military forces is the result of their greater inclination to participate in operations with inclusive goals.
Given the US president's leading role in many areas of American foreign policy, one might expect the president to prevail in executive-legislative clashes over economic sanctions. In this paper, I show that, with surprising frequency, US legislators overcome presidential opposition to their sanctions proposals and induce the president to take foreign policy actions that he or she would not otherwise take. My argument explains why the president often signs and implements sanctions legislation despite considering it inadvisable, as well as how sanctions legislation can influence foreign policy actions, the behavior of foreign governments, or international diplomacy in other ways. I support the argument with descriptive statistics based on an original data set of over a hundred legislative sanctions proposals and a case study of the effects of legislative initiatives targeting Iran over a period of two decades. The paper's findings show that legislative activity is more important than some previous research on sanctions and US foreign policy suggests.
This article contributes to a burgeoning literature on parliamentary war powers by investigating the case of the US Congress drawing on both International Relations (IR) research and traditional war powers studies. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and case study method, we examine the conditions shaping congressional assertiveness. The article shows that the lack of national security interests and divided government are important conditions for members of Congress to criticize presidential intervention policies. While previous US war powers studies focused on the influence of partisanship, this article holds that domestic as well as international factors influence congressional behavior. A short comparative case study of two US military interventions (Libya 2011, ISIS 2014–15) during the Obama presidency serves to illustrate the findings.
“It is the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. The balance of power between Congress and the president has been a powerful thread throughout American political thought since the time of the Founding Fathers. And yet, for all that has been written on the topic, we still lack a solid empirical or theoretical justification for Hamilton’s proposition.
For the first time, William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, and Jon C. Rogowski systematically analyze the question. Congress, they show, is more likely to defer to the president’s policy preferences when political debates center on national rather than local considerations. Thus, World War II and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq significantly augmented presidential power, allowing the president to enact foreign and domestic policies that would have been unattainable in times of peace. But, contrary to popular belief, there are also times when war has little effect on a president’s influence in Congress. The Vietnam and Gulf Wars, for instance, did not nationalize our politics nearly so much, and presidential influence expanded only moderately.
Built on groundbreaking research, The Wartime President offers one of the most significant works ever written on the wartime powers presidents wield at home.
This groundbreaking book challenges the dominant view of ideology held by both political scientists and political commentators. Rather than viewing ideological constructs like liberalism and conservatism as static concepts with fixed and enduring content, Professor Verlan Lewis explains how the very meanings of liberalism and conservatism frequently change along with the ideologies of the two major parties in American politics. Testing a new theory to help explain why party ideologies evolve the way that they do, this book traces the history of American political parties from the Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans of the 1790s to the liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans of today. Ideas of Power shows us how changing party control of government institutions, such as Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, influences how party ideologies develop.
Recent work finds evidence that partisan calculations, not ideological preferences, drive congressional decisions on foreign policy. While legislators support the wars launched by their party’s presidents, they often oppose those launched by the other party’s presidents. However, it is unclear whether such partisan calculations are limited to a narrow set of security votes or whether they are part of a broad pattern of foreign policymaking in Congress. To examine the importance of partisan versus ideological motivations, we examine the substantive contributions legislators make to, and the votes they cast on, foreign policy measures. Specifically, we collect sponsorship and voting data on amendments that allow Congress to restrict presidential spending on defense programs and foreign aid. In analyzing data from 1971 to 2016, we find that ideology is the most consistent factor that determines whether legislators propose and support spending limits on security-related bills.
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.
Bipartisan consensus on many U.S. domestic and foreign policy priorities has seemingly collapsed in recent decades, and political parties have become ideologically polarized and divided. While some contend that these dynamics are narrowing the space for congressional foreign policy innovation, we argue that factionalism often fosters creativity in the foreign policy process. Specifically, this chapter explores the role of ‘free agent’ progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans in foreign policy decision-making. These members at the ideological extremes of their parties are finding common ground in anti-establishment views and concerns about executive excess, and they are aligning to challenge traditional foreign policy positions. This chapter conducts a plausibility probe of a model of congressional foreign policy free agency based upon roll call voting on war powers-related decisions in the Obama and Trump administrations. During both presidencies, our findings suggest that the free agency model has predictive value for foreign policy maneuvering and offers a non-traditional way of thinking about contemporary U.S. foreign policy development.
The political parties in Congress are as polarized as they have been in 100 years. This book examines more than 30 years of congressional history to understand how it is that the Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have become so divided. It finds that two steps were critical for this development. First, the respective parties' constituencies became more politically and ideologically aligned. Second, members ceded more power to their party leaders, who implemented procedures more frequently and with greater consequence. In fact, almost the entire rise in party polarization can be accounted for in the increasing frequency of and polarization on procedures used during the legislative process.
Trust in International Cooperation challenges conventional wisdoms concerning the part which trust plays in international cooperation and the origins of American multilateralism. Brian C. Rathbun questions rational institutionalist arguments, demonstrating that trust precedes rather than follows the creation of international organizations. Drawing on social psychology, he shows that individuals placed in the same structural circumstances show markedly different propensities to cooperate based on their beliefs about the trustworthiness of others. Linking this finding to political psychology, Rathbun explains why liberals generally pursue a more multilateral foreign policy than conservatives, evident in the Democratic Party's greater support for a genuinely multilateral League of Nations, United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Rathbun argues that the post-World War Two bipartisan consensus on multilateralism is a myth, and differences between the parties are growing continually starker.
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.
A common explanation for the increasing polarization in contemporary American foreign policy is the absence of external threat. I identify two mechanisms through which threats could reduce polarization: by revealing information about an adversary that elicits a bipartisan response from policymakers (information mechanism) and by heightening the salience of national relative to partisan identity (identity mechanism). To evaluate the information mechanism, study 1 uses computational text analysis of congressional speeches to explore whether security threats reduce partisanship in attitudes toward foreign adversaries. To evaluate the identity mechanism, study 2 uses public opinion polls to assess whether threats reduce affective polarization among the public. Study 3 tests both mechanisms in a survey experiment that heightens a security threat from China. I find that the external threat hypothesis has limited ability to explain either polarization in US foreign policy or affective polarization among the American public. Instead, responses to external threats reflect the domestic political environment in which they are introduced. The findings cast doubt on predictions that new foreign threats will inherently create partisan unity.
Lawmaking is crucial to American democracy because it completely defines and regulates the public life of the nation. Yet despite its importance, political scientists spend very little time studying the direct impact that the politics surrounding a particular issue has on lawmaking. This book draws on a vast range of historical and empirical data to better understand how lawmaking works across different policy areas. Specifically, the book introduces a theoretically grounded method for parsing policy issues into categories, and shows how policymaking varies in predictable ways based on the specific issue area being addressed. The book examines the ways in which key factors that influence policymaking matter for certain types of policy issues, and it includes an exhaustive look at how elite political polarization shifts across these areas. The book considers how Congress behaves according to the policy issue at hand, and how particular areas—such as war, sovereignty issues, and immigration reform—change legislative performance. Relying on records of all Congressional votes since Reconstruction and analyzing voting patterns across policy areas from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries, the book provides a comprehensive historical perspective on lawmaking in order to shed light on current practices. Giving a clear picture of Congressional behavior in the policymaking process over time, this book provides insights into the critical role of American lawmaking.
To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legislative trench warfare. A zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to congressional politics has replaced the bipartisan comity of past eras. If the parties cannot get everything they want in national policymaking, then they prefer gridlock and stalemate to compromise. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom.
In The Limits of Party, James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee challenge this conventional wisdom. By constructing legislative histories of congressional majority parties’ attempts to enact their policy agendas in every congress since the 1980s and by drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, the authors analyze the successes and failures of congressional parties to enact their legislative agendas.
Their conclusions will surprise many congressional observers: Even in our time of intense party polarization, bipartisanship remains the key to legislative success on Capitol Hill. Congressional majority parties today are neither more nor less successful at enacting their partisan agendas. They are not more likely to ram though partisan laws or become mired in stalemate. Rather, the parties continue to build bipartisan coalitions for their legislative priorities and typically compromise on their original visions for legislation in order to achieve legislative success.
According to a widely shared notion, foreign affairs are exempted from democratic politics, i.e., party-political divisions are overcome—and should be overcome—for the sake of a common national interest. This book shows that this is not the case. Examining votes in the US Congress and several European parliaments, the book demonstrates that contestation over foreign affairs is barely different from contestation over domestic politics. Analyses of a new collection of deployment votes, of party manifestos, and of expert survey data show that political parties differ systematically over foreign policy and military interventions in particular. The left/right divide is the best guide to the pattern of party-political contestation: support is weakest at the far left of the spectrum and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to green, social democratic, liberal, and conservative parties; amongst parties of the far right, support is again weaker than amongst parties of the centre. An analysis of parliamentary debates in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom about the interventions in Afghanistan and against Daesh in Iraq and Syria shows that political parties also differ systematically in how they frame the use of force abroad. For example, parties on the right tend to frame their country’s participation in the US-led missions in terms of national security and national interests whereas parties on the left tend to engage in ‘spiral model thinking’, i.e., they critically reflect on the unintended consequences of the use of force in fuelling the conflicts with the Taliban and Daesh.
This book argues that the United States now has, for the first time in American history, a genuine two-party system, with two fully-sorted, truly national parties, divided over the character of the nation. And it is a disaster. It is a party system fundamentally at odds with our anti-majoritarian, compromise-oriented governing institutions. It threatens the very foundations of fairness and shared values on which democracy in the United States depends. The book tells the story of how American politics became so toxic and why the country is now trapped in a doom loop of escalating two-party warfare from which there is only one escape: increase the number of parties through electoral reform. As it shows, American politics was once stable because the two parties held within them multiple factions, which made it possible to assemble flexible majorities and kept the climate of political combat from overheating. But as conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Northeastern Republicans disappeared, partisan conflict flattened and pulled apart. Once the parties became fully nationalized—a long-germinating process that culminated in 2010—toxic partisanship took over completely. With the two parties divided over competing visions of national identity, Democrats and Republicans no longer see each other as opponents, but as enemies. And the more the conflict escalates, the shakier America’s democracy feels.
This book is an original study of the contemporary debate over U.S. foreign policy between the president, members of Congress, and political parties. Specifically, it examines how factions at the ideological extremes within parties such as the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and Progressive Democrats can play significant roles in shaping U.S. foreign policy. In today’s polarized atmosphere whereAmericans seem increasingly divided, factions are emerging as powerful insurgents, innovators, and engines of change. The book develops a minority theory of influence that recognizes the importance of traditional and nontraditional strategies including persuasion, legislation, and issue framing. Original case studies explore factions at work in foreign policy development during the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations, including struggles over immigration policy, trade agreements, development aid, and foreign policies toward Iran and Syria. The Battle for U.S. Foreign Policy captures the spirit of ideological and practical party struggles and fills a substantial gap in foreign policy analysis literature.
This article contributes to a growing literature that questions the traditional ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ paradigm. Left- and right-wing parties hold diverging ideologies and articulate specific party programmes regarding policy priorities in the realm of foreign and security affairs. The impact of partisan contestations over foreign policy priorities can be traced in defence and foreign aid spending. We understand this ‘bomb-or-build’-balance as two sides of a coin which shapes the international posture of democracies. Our quantitative analysis of 21 OECD countries (1988–2014) reveals that the ideological positions of the parties in government influence the relative importance of military expenditures versus foreign aid. The more the ideological position of a government is tilted towards the military (and against internationalism), the more the ‘bomb-or-build’-balance shifts in favour of military spending (and in disfavour of foreign aid).
Conventional wisdom assumes the best way to mobilize public support for military action is through the lens of national security. Humanitarian justifications provide a helpful substitute when US interests are not at stake, but are less reliable. However, US presidents have provided humanitarian explanations for every military intervention of the post-Cold War period. What, if any, power do humanitarian justifications have in security-driven interventions? The article answers this question by developing a domestic coalition framework that evaluates justifications in terms of whose support matters most in the build-up to intervention. Survey experiments demonstrate that humanitarian narratives are necessary to build the largest possible coalition of support. However, presidents risk backlash if they stretch humanitarian claims too far. Data from thirteen waves of Chicago Council surveys and an original dataset of justifications for US interventions confirm that humanitarian justifications are a common and politically relevant tool. The findings challenge both the folk realist expectation that the public responds primarily to threats to its own security and the constructivist tendency to limit the power of humanitarian justifications to cases of humanitarian intervention. Instead, humanitarian justifications are equally, if not more, important than security explanations for mobilizing domestic support, even in security-driven interventions.
Can the United States continue to shape international politics as it has done for the past 70 years, or is the era of US preponderance coming to an end? Most attempts to answer this question focus on the concept of relative power—that is, the balance of material capabilities between the US and its geopolitical competitors. From this perspective, the ‘American era’ will be over when rival powers are able to muster the military capability to counteract US ambitions on the world stage. In this article, we argue that the most pressing checks on US leadership come not from foreign competitors, but rather from domestic politics. While America's relative power as measured by its military arsenal vis-à-vis those of its rivals has held steady, its ‘usable power’ has declined. We attribute this decline in usable power to three domestic-level factors: the emergence of hyper-partisanship, the absence of a compelling strategic narrative, and the erosion of a social contract of inclusive growth. Our analysis suggests that US leaders will find it difficult to implement a programmatic grand strategy of any description—liberal internationalism, offshore balancing, retrenchment or even President Trump's ‘America First’ strategy—so long as domestic-level dysfunction goes unattended and until usable power is restored.
While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party. Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines. This phenomenon of animosity between the parties is known as affective polarization. We trace its origins to the power of partisanship as a social identity, and explain the factors that intensify partisan animus. We also explore the consequences of affective polarization, highlighting how partisan affect influences attitudes and behaviors well outside the political sphere. Finally, we discuss strategies that might mitigate partisan discord and conclude with suggestions for future work. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science Volume 22 is May 11, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Severe party conflict, not a high-minded suspension of politics, now prevails “at the water’s edge.” Democrats and Republicans fight pitched battles over foreign affairs. But are the two parties polarized in their substantive preferences on foreign policy, or mainly jockeying for partisan advantage? Are they polarized on foreign policy less sharply than on domestic policy? What are the sources of party polarization over foreign policy? Using a new measure of senatorial foreign-policy preferences from 1945-2010, we explore party polarization over foreign policy. We find that foreign-policy preferences have had varying relationships with party politics and general ideology. Since the 1960s, however, the parties have become increasingly polarized on foreign policy. Using a multilevel analysis, we show that foreign-policy polarization has developed in response to partisan electoral rivalry, foreign-policy events, and general ideological polarization. The analysis indicates an increasing influence of domestic politics on foreign policy.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama criticized the George W. Bush administration for its unrestrained actions in matters of national security. In secret Justice Department memos, President Bush's officials had claimed for the executive branch total authority to use military force in response to threats of terrorism. They set aside laws made by Congress, even criminal laws prohibiting torture and warrantless surveillance. Candidate Obama promised to restore the rule of law and make a clean break with the Bush approach. President Obama has not done so. Why? In a thorough comparison of the Bush and Obama administrations' national security policies, Chris Edelson demonstrates that President Obama and his officials have used softer rhetoric and toned-down legal arguments, but in key areas-military action, surveillance, and state secrets-they have simply found new ways to assert power without meaningful constitutional or statutory constraints. Edelson contends that this legacy of the two immediately post-9/11 presidencies raises crucial questions for future presidents, Congress, the courts, and American citizens. Where is the political will to restore a balance of powers among branches of government and adherence to the rule of law? What are the limits of authority regarding presidential national security power? Have national security concerns created a permanent shift to unconstrained presidential power?. © 2016 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.