No abstract

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No abstract

In a recent article appearing in The Journal of Politics, McCormick and Wittkopf (1990) argue that the Vietnam War did not exercise a significant impact on bipartisan presidential support in the U.S. Congress and that a bipartisan Cold War consensus on foreign policy and defense issues in the House and Senate was not as prominent as many had assumed. I develop a comprehensive model of bipartisan congressional support of presidents from 1947-1988 on foreign policy and defense roll-call votes in the House and Senate that test the impact of many factors, such as presidential influence and legislative processes not accounted for in McCormick and Wittkopf's analysis. Using probit analysis of individual roll-call votes, I show that before the Vietnam War, substantial consensus existed in both the House and Senate and after this conflict, such consensus has become much more infrequent. In addition, I find that forces originating in Congress exercise much more influence over the incidence of bipartisan support than presidential resources. The security of free peoples and the growth of freedom both demand a restoration of bipartisan consensus in American foreign policy.

This article examines the effects of civil wars on economies. The “war renewal” school of thought maintains that wars can produce beneficial effects as they improve efficiency in the economy, especially by reducing the power of special interests, bring technological innovation, and advance human capital. The “war ruin” school of thought sees mostly detrimental effects resulting from war. We seek to address two critical questions. First, which perspective on wars and economic growth is more accurate? Second, to what extent do policy choices at both the domestic and international levels exert influence on economic growth? We develop several hypotheses to assess these arguments, and utilizing a 2SLS model, test them on data for all nations for the period 1960–2002. We find that generally wars exercise negative economic effects and that economic fundamentals, as well as the response by the international community to civil wars, exert powerful effects on economic growth.

While the literature on the political use of military force by the USA has undergone tremendous growth in recent years, one crucial feature of this foreign policy activity has not been modeled - the conditions that give rise to the crises that precipitate a use of force. It is possible that many of the findings on the diversionary use of force obtain because of problems with selection effects. More uses of force may occur during certain periods simply because more crises occur during these times. Therefore, I explain how we may model crisis occurrence and the use of force to help us better understand the role of selection effects and the salience of domestic conditions in the decision to use force. I outline several hypotheses regarding the influence of domestic and crisis-specific factors to predict when opportunities to use force will occur and, given some opportunity, when a president will use military force. The results demonstrate that by not accounting for selection effects in the decision to use force by US presidents, we may have erroneously concluded that presidents use force to divert public attention.

Although researchers have recently made some progress in explaining the outputs of the US economic aid decision-making process, their efforts to explain the allocation of US military aid have been rather disappointing. In this article, we follow previous studies that have assumed a two-stage process leading up to the allocation of military aid, while making three significant improvements over those efforts. First we employ a better model, including a variety of political, strategic, economic, and humanitarian variables we hypothesize to be related to the allocation of military aid. Second, we solve the `low n' difficulty that plagued previous research, by employing an extensive dataset that covers a global sample of countries covering the 1983-8 period. And third, unlike previous research where a two-stage process has been assumed, we employ a methodology that solves the difficulties associated with selection bias, which arises when two interrelated decisions are modeled separately. As a result of these improvements our results are much stronger than those of previous studies. We find that strategic, political, and economic interests, as well as human rights concerns and economic development, have been considered in the US military aid decision-making process.

Given the myriad of human rights abuses that occur globally and daily, why are some nations on the receiving end of a substantial amount of international opprobrium, while others receive far less attention and condemnation? The authors contend that the increasing presence of human rights organizations in such states is the critical link between the local and the international. Increases in the number of such groups contributes significantly to the generation of Amnesty International urgent actions, one of the most-often-utilized tools in naming and shaming campaigns against human rights abusing regimes. The authors find strong support for nearly all their hypotheses.