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 water's 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. We need a new engagement . . . between the Executive and the Congress. . . . There's grown a certain divisiveness . . . And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other. It's been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still . . . A new breeze is blowing-and the old bipartisanship must be made new again.
This study examines in a comparative foreign policy framework the relationship between bilateral foreign aid allocations and pairwise voting agreements between developed and developing nations in the UN General Assembly. The foreign aid donors considered include the United States, the Soviet “bloc,” and the twelve other UN members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. Two different measures of aid allocations in two three-year periods (1962–1964 and 1965–1967) are correlated with two different measures of the percentage of agreements in the UN between each aid donor and its aid recipients, with both indices calculated on the basis of all roll calls taken in the 1963 and 1966 General Assemblies.In general, the results of the analysis were found to be consistent with the hypothesized positive association between aid and votes only in the case of the United States. For many of the remaining donors the association was found to be negative rather than positive, suggesting either that enemies are rewarded more than friends, or, alternatively, that there is little relationship of substantive interest between aid and votes for most donor countries. Even in the case of the U.S., however, which of the two variables should be considered a cause and which a consequence remains unresolved.
Many analysts believe that the end of the cold war will spark greater conflict between Congress and the president on foreign issues, thus further undermining the nation's political mythology that politics stops at the water's edge. The authors test that hypothesis using House of Representatives' support of presidents' foreign policy bids on prerogative power and defense budgeting issues during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Congresses (1983-1996). They also examine the votes of members of Congress whose careers bridged the cold war divide, asking whether the cold war's end shocked them into new forms of behavior. The authors conclude that conflict between Congress and the president has heightened in the post-cold war era, but the impact of the cold war's end is a less important explanation of executive-congressional contestation than members' role responsibilities and ideological preferences. Thus, the agenda of foreign policy issues may have changed with the end of the cold war, but the process of policy making has not.
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