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.
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Note: This graph only includes tabulations from roll call votes. The bars represent the average strength of bipartisanship measure for votes during a given period of years, with the total number of votes in parentheses. Strength of bipartisanship represents 1—[the absolute value of (the proportion of Republicans voting in favor of the legislation—the proportion of Democrats voting in favor of the legislation)]
Note: This figure only reports tabulations from roll call votes. Points on the graph represent the average strength of bipartisanship measure for domestic or foreign policy during a given presidency. Strength of bipartisanship represents 1—[the absolute value of (the proportion of Republicans voting in favor of the legislation—the proportion of Democrats voting in favor of the legislation)]
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Notes
Cross-partisanship is not mutually exclusive with pro-presidential or anti-presidential bipartisanship.
CQ Almanac articles highlight important congressional votes in a given year in two ways—first, in a list of about 20–30 “key votes,” which represent the most important votes of the year; and second, in articles summarizing congressional activity in various issue areas during that year, which typically list the most important votes in each issue area in a text box labeled “Box Score.” The data set includes any votes listed as “key votes” or directly referenced in one of these box scores. For articles lacking a box score, the data set includes any votes directly referenced in the body of the article. We incorporate all of these important votes into our analysis, rather than only examining the CQ “key votes,” because the number of foreign policy “key votes” is relatively small.
We only coded domestic policy votes from every third year because of the amount of time involved in coding a large number of votes. Given that constraint, coding votes from every third year, rather than every other year or every fourth year, prevents the introduction of bias that could be associated with overrepresentation or underrepresentation of presidential or congressional election years, which might feature different patterns of bipartisanship than non-election years. Accordingly, the tabulations presented in this chapter incorporate important domestic policy votes from 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. We started this set of years in 1992, rather than 1991, so that the set as a whole would be temporally balanced between the start and end of the full data set, which runs from 1991 to 2017.
Among a random sample of 25 of the 72 immigration votes in the data set, we found that 12 principally concerned domestic dimensions of immigration policy, 10 principally concerned cross-border dimensions of immigration policy, and 3 concerned both to a large degree.
Unless otherwise noted, differences in all comparisons presented in this chapter are statistically significant at the 1 percent level. We determined the statistical significance of differences for dichotomous measures using chi-squared tests. We determined the statistical significance of differences for continuous measures using t-tests.
More specifically, strength of bipartisanship represents 1—(the absolute value of (the proportion of Republicans voting in favor of the legislation—the proportion of Democrats voting in favor of the legislation)).
CQ Almanac lists votes on which the president took a clear public position in tables entitled “Presidential Position Votes,” which are located within an “Appendix” section entitled “Presidential Support.”
We separately compared patterns of bipartisanship when the chamber of Congress where the vote occurred was controlled by the President’s party with patterns when it was controlled by the opposition party. Interestingly, as can be seen in Appendix Table 10, the percentage of foreign policy votes that are bipartisan is almost identical when the chamber is controlled by the President’s party and when it is not. Appendix Table 11, however, shows that anti-presidential bipartisanship is far more likely when the chamber is controlled by the opposition party. In other words, party control does not alter the likelihood of foreign policy bipartisanship within the chamber, but it does impact the chamber’s relationship with the President.
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Funding was provided by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Social Science Research Council.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Fig. 3 and Tables 9, 10, 11, and 12.
Note: This graph only reports tabulations from roll call votes and excludes procedural and amendment votes. The bars represent the average strength of bipartisanship measure for votes during a given period of years, with the total number of votes in parentheses. Strength of bipartisanship represents 1—[the absolute value of (the proportion of Republicans voting in favor of the legislation—the proportion of Democrats voting in favor of the legislation)]
Average strength of bipartisanship over time—procedural and amendment votes excluded.
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Bryan, J.D., Tama, J. The prevalence of bipartisanship in U.S. foreign policy: an analysis of important congressional votes. Int Polit 59, 874–897 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-021-00348-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-021-00348-7