There is a glaring and potentially important discontinuity surrounding discussions of U.S. defense expenditure policy making. On the one hand, a growing body of empirically-based research questions whether the U.S. reacts in any significant fashion to the military expenditures of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, defense policy makers routinely justify defense increases as a response to similar increases by the Soviet Union. The discontinuity is resolved in the context of a multistep model of the defense expenditure policy-making process that incorporates a new estimate of Soviet defense spending and mass public opinion. Once formulated, the model provides answers to the following two questions: (1) Does the U.S., insofar as defense spending is concerned, react to the military expenditures of the Soviet Union? (2) If so, what is the magnitude of the reaction? The answers indicate that not only does the U.S. react to estimated Soviet defense spending, but that the reaction is directly responsible for a very substantial portion of the post-1978 increases in U.S. military expenditures.

This research is designed to generalize a referendum voting model and investigate its ability to account for the aggregate outcomes of elections for the House, Senate, governorships, and upper and lower chambers of state legislatures. Our analysis shows that these outcomes are influenced by the same systematic short- and long-term forces. In addition to this common referendum structure, the analysis reveals that there is a common response to random shocks, a subtle form of interdependence found in systems of seemingly unrelated regressions.

No abstract

Variations in public support for the president have been explained in three different ways. First, approval has been viewed as controlled by the law of inevitable decline. Second, public support has been characterized as a function of an “environmental connection” between chief executives and macrofeatures of the political and economic landscape. Finally, some view “political drama” (e.g., speeches, trips, diplomatic agreements, and so on) as an important role in determining the popularity of the president. The present analysis offers a comprehensive model of public support for the president which draws on all three explanations and partitions the presidentially relevant factors into domestic and foreign policy subsets. The comprehensive model is operationalized and estimated using 573 Gallup presidential approval polls from January 1949 through December 1984. Empirical analysis demonstrated that factors derived from all three explanations contribute to the prediction of public support. In addition, the analysis evaluated the relative impact of domestic and foreign influences and located potential levers that presidents might pull to influence this popular support.

No abstract