President Obama, the Senate, and the Polarized Politics of Treaty Making*

Abstract

Objective We examine President Obama's use of international agreements as he pursued his foreign policy agenda during his first three years in office. While President Obama uses executive agreements at similar levels as previous presidents, he has used the treaty mechanism far less often. This presents an interesting puzzle: Why has Obama used so few treaties when his own party controls the Senate? Methods We address this puzzle by analyzing Obama alongside other presidents in analyses of treaty use and in presidents’ experience with treaty delay employing ordinary least squares (OLS) and maximum likelihood estimation regression techniques. We also utilize the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and Obama's use of treaty priority lists as qualitative case studies. Results The various findings together suggest that the rise of partisan polarization, including conservatives’ propensity to oppose significant treaties, factors into Obama's decisions to use treaties when completing major diplomacy. Conclusions The partisan context of the Senate provides a substantial constraint on presidents looking to cement important new foreign policies through international agreements.

Is Divided Government a Cause of Legislative Delay?

“…Similarly, there is a small literature on the amount of time it takes Congress to complete key actions. This work uses duration analysis to show that the presence of divided government slows down legislative tasks such as the confirmation of judges, ratification of treaties, and the adoption of important bills (Binder and Maltzmann 2002;Shipan and Shannon 2003;Woon and Anderson 2012;Peake, Krutz, and Hughes 2012;Hughes and Carlson 2015). Like the existing work on late budgets, however, these efforts do not address issues of causality.…”

Spatial Fragmentation of, and US Support for, the Main Multilateral Institutions of the Western Order

“…Indeed, partisan polarization, and conservatives' propensity to oppose treaties has led to a higher propensity of the Obama administration to use executive agreements (Voeten 2012;Peake et al 2012;Peake 2016). However, this stealth multilateralism (Kaye 2013) signals a feeble domestic support that weakens the US position when it comes to reforming multilateral institutions.…”

Nonproliferation and Norm Discourse: An Agentic Constructivist Model of U.S. Nuclear Export Policy Changes

“… Historically, committee chairs held near absolute power and controlled the legislative process (Peake, Krutz, and Hughes ; Prins and Marshall 2009).…”