James M. Lindsay

Congress, Foreign Policy, and the New Institutionalism

New institutionalists argue that analysts are mistaken to separate process from policy in studying Congresss role in policy making. Rather, Congress changes the structure and procedures of decision making in the executive branch in order to influence the content of policy. Attempts to substantiate this claim have examined procedural changes in domestic affairs. This paper extends the argument by assessing the impact of five procedural changes in the area of defense and foreign policy: the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, the legislative veto on arms sales, legislative participation in trade negotiations, the conditions attached to U.S. security assistance, and the reporting requirements imposed on the intelligence community. The five case studies suggest that procedural changes do at times enable Congress to build its preferences into U.S. foreign policy, but the successes are partial rather than total. Procedural changes meet only partial success because of executive branch opposition and the cost of monitoring and punishing noncompliance. The findings point to the need to incorporate more sophisticated assumptions about Congress and the bureaucracy into future research.

The Determinants of Presidential Foreign Policy Choice

What explains presidential decision making on foreign policy? This question is addressed by assessing the relative influence of the international and domestic environments on presidential foreign policy choice. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on the relatively small number of presidential decisions to use force, the authors look at the broad range of conflictual and cooperative policies that presidents have pursued. Using data from the Conflict and Peace Data Bank, they estimate a model of presidential foreign policy choice over the years 1948 through 1978. The results indicate that presidents respond mostly to the rhythms of international events and not domestic politics when making foreign policy. In particular, little evidence is found to support the findings or earlier research that public approval influences presidential decision making on foreign policy.

The "Two Presidencies" in Future Research: Moving Beyond Roll-Call Analysis

The two presidencies literature ostensibly seeks to determine whether presidents exercise more power over foreign policy than over domestic policy. In a laudable effort to be rigorous, scholars have sought to answer the question by examining roll-call voting in Congress. Doing so, however, changes the question from the power of the president versus Congress to the success of the president in Congress. Because presidents act without the approval of Congress far more often on foreign policy than they do on domestic policy, the two questions are not identical. Even with the narrower question of presidential success in Congress, several methodological problems cast doubt on the validity of previous studies. Future research needs to confront the problems plaguing roll-call analysis, and it needs to revisit the original question of how presidential influence varies across policy domains.

Congressional Oversight of the Department of Defense: Reconsidering the Conventional Wisdom

Observers often complain that Congress slights defense oversight. Their conclusions, however, are typically based on the assumption that the House and Senate will act like bureaucracies capable of comprehensive, systematic, and dispassionate oversight. Yet Congress is a political institution, and its ability to oversee defense issues is limited by its institutional makeup and by the nature of defense policy. As a result, the tendency to treat Congress as if it were a bureaucracy produces inflated expectations about congressional oversight. It also obscures the incentives that encourage legislators to conduct oversight-namely, parochialism, ambition, and duty. Although Congress does more oversight than critics acknowledge, congressional oversight is not flawless. Most reform proposals focus on structural changes at the Pentagon or on Capitol Hill. The key to improving congressional oversight, however, lies in reducing the ideological bias of the defense committees.