Eugene R. Wittkopf

Bipartisanship, Partisanship, and Ideology in Congressional-Executive Foreign Policy Relations, 1947-1988

This paper examines two perspectives on the nature of congressional-executive relations in the making of American foreign policy: the bipartisan perspective, which says that politics stops at the waters edge, and the political perspective, which sees foreign policy as subject to the same partisan and ideological disputes that characterize domestic policy-making. The results demonstrate that the bipartisan perspective applies best to the Cold War years, and that the political perspective applies throughout the postwar era. The Vietnam War, hypothesized to have been a major catalyst in the breakdown of a bipartisan approach to foreign policy, cannot be shown to have produced a major watershed in the postwar record.

Faces of Internationalism in a Transitional Environment

In the post-Vietnam Cold War environment, two dimensions—cooperative internationalism and militant internationalism—came to characterize the foreign policy beliefs of American leaders and the mass public. Although grounded in Cold War concepts and challenges, evidence from opinion polls in the transitional period to a post-Cold War world suggests that the cooperative and militant faces of internationalism persist. Furthermore, because they parallel realism and idealism, as competing orientations toward global problems, the two dimensions and the fourfold typology of foreign policy beliefs they define may help to understand the intersection of attitudes toward traditional security issues and the welfare issues that may dominate future global and national agendas. Preliminary evidence is used to probe the argument that hard-liners on national security issues will evince nationalistic and protectionist sentiments on environmental and trade issues. Contrariwise, accommodationists on security issues are hypothesized to be semisovereigns on environmental issues and half loafers on trade issues. Internationalists are most likely to embrace free trade, and isolationists will continue to shun U.S. involvement across all security and nonsecurity issues areas.

Politics and Bipartisanship at the Water's Edge: A Note on Bush and Clinton

This research extends an earlier study of the bipartisan and political perspectives for evaluating congressional-executive relations on foreign policy to cover the Bush administration and the first Clinton term. As expected, the end of the Cold War accelerated the decline of bipartisanship and accentuated the continuing relevance of the political perspective. The level of bipartisan accord was relatively low during both administrations, particularly compared with other administrations since 1947. Ideological and partisan divisions occurred during both presidencies, with the former more pronounced under Bush and the latter under Clinton. Whether control of the presidency and Congress was divided or unified also bears on our findings, as each eroded bipartisanship in different ways. Divided government undermined bipartisanship by heightening ideological differences, while unified government contributed to its erosion by fostering partisan divisions.

At the Water's Edge: The Effects of Party, Ideology, and Issues on Congressional Foreign Policy Voting, 1947 to 1988

This research evaluates two different perspectives on congressional-executive relations across four major foreign policy issue areas using congressional voting from 1947 to 1988. Both a bipartisan perspective and a partisan/ideological perspective are evaluated across high politics issues-national security and foreign relations votes—and low politics issues-foreign aid and trade votes. In addition, we examine the impact of the Vietnam War on voting in each issue area. In general, we find that although high politics issues elicit more bipartisanship than low politics, party and ideology seem to account better for congressional voting across all four issue areas. The effect of the Vietnam War is to lessen bipartisanship and to exacerbate partisan and ideological divisions, especially on national security votes and somewhat less so on foreign aid votes.

The Cold War Consensus: Did It Exist?

A bipartisan consensus about the means and ends of American foreign policy is generally thought to have been part of the American political environment during the Cold War era. This consensus is also commonly thought to have been a casualty of the Vietnam War, when disagreements arose about the threat of communism, the use of American troops abroad, and relations with the Soviet Union. This article uses public opinion data from the decades following World War II pertaining to these areas of assumed change to measure whether a consensus ever existed and whether it eroded in the wake of Vietnam. The authors conclude that evidence of change can be found but that it is less dramatic in some respects than might be expected.