Despite popular resistance in each party, Congress just reached wide bipartisan agreement on military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan along with a forced sale of TikTok. Even in a polarized age, Congress has managed bipartisan votes on controversial issues in an election year. Jordan Tama finds that bipartisan coalitions are quite common in congressional consideration of foreign policy—from overlapping competing alliances to broad support for internationalism, Congress is far less polarized on foreign policy than domestic policy. William Bendix finds that legislators are consistent in how they sponsor foreign policy bills based on their ideological views even across administrations of different parties. He also finds that hawks usually lead and win congressional votes over doves, regardless of who is president.
Guests: Jordan Tama, American University; William Bendix, Dakota State University
Studies: Bipartisanship in US Foreign Policy; “Beyond party: ideological convictions and foreign policy conflicts in the US congress”
Transcript
Matt Grossman: Why foreign policy is still bipartisan? This week on the science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman. Despite popular resistance in each party, Congress just reached wide bipartisan agreement on military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan, along with a forced sale of TikTok. Even in a polarized age, Congress has managed bipartisan votes on controversial issues in an election year, and it doesn’t seem to be due to electoral incentives. So when and why does Congress remain bipartisan on foreign policy? This week I talked to Jordan Tama of American University about his new Oxford University Press book, Bipartisanship in US Foreign Policy. He finds that bipartisan coalitions are quite common in congressional consideration of foreign policy. From overlapping competing alliances to broad support for internationalism, even to opposition to presidential initiatives, Congress is far less polarized on foreign policy than domestic policy.
I also talked to William Bendix of Dakota State University about his new international politics article with Gyung-Ho Jeong, Beyond Party: Ideological, Convictions and Foreign Policy Conflicts in the US Congress. He finds that legislators are consistent in how they sponsor foreign policy bills based on their ideological views, even across administrations of different parties, though there is partisanship in final voting. He also finds that hawks usually lead and win congressional votes over doves, regardless of who is president. They both say foreign policy and national security remain arenas for different types of political alignments even in a polarized age. Let’s start with Tama, who has tracked voting in specific cases over decades.
Jordan Tama: The main takeaway of the book is that bipartisanship still occurs pretty often on foreign policy more often than you might think given how polarized American politics are today. In fact, my data shows that it’s more common for a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans in Congress to vote together on important foreign policy issues than it is for the two parties to be strongly polarized on foreign policy. And I think that’s counterintuitive because polarization is the dominant lens through which we view American politics today. And here’s the nuance, and this is I think what makes the book most interesting, bipartisanship today in my understanding is not what you think it is. So we tend to think about bipartisanship as involving unity. Everybody is rallying together. Both parties in Congress are supporting the president. This is what I would call the classic understanding of bipartisanship.
And in foreign policy, that’s often in an instance of the President is say, taking the country into war, democrats and Republicans in Congress are rallying around the President. That’s our classic understanding of bipartisanship. Today what we see most often is there are bipartisan coalitions in Congress. There are some Democrats and some Republicans who are on the same page, but at the same time, there are intra-party divisions, sometimes in one party, sometimes in both parties. And so you have bipartisanship coexisting with division rather than there being either unity or polarization. So I’m trying to move us away from a binary understanding of polarization and bipartisanship to see where there’s some nuance, a combination of cooperation across the aisle and divisions within the parties.
Matt Grossman: So let’s try to put some scope or metrics on this. How common is bipartisanship in foreign policy? How do we know that it’s more bipartisan than domestic policy and that it’s not in decline?
Jordan Tama: Sure. So for the book, I created a data set of important congressional votes. I limited this to important votes because a lot of votes in Congress are on issues that are purely symbolic, don’t have any real significance for US role in the world. And so I created a data set that just involves important congressional votes from 1991 to 2020, covering all issue areas. And there are a few patterns from these votes. One, bipartisanship occurs more often on foreign policy than on domestic policy. Two, the rates of bipartisanship remain fairly impressive even in recent years. But the trend line is going down, the trend line of bipartisanship is going down, or conversely, the trend line of polarization is going up. That’s what we would expect, and that’s true in both foreign and domestic policy. So to make it a little more concrete, let’s just take the Senate.
In the Senate during the 1990s, a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans voted together on important foreign policy issues 73% of the time. And a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans voted together on important domestic policy issues 67% of the time. In the most recent decade the 2010s in the Senate, a majority of Democrats, a majority of Republicans voted together on foreign policy issues, important foreign policy issues, just 54% of the time. So that’s a drop from 73 to 54%. And a majority of Democrats and majority Republicans voted together on important domestic policy issues only 38% of the time. That’s a drop from 67% in the 1990s to 38% in the 2010s. That’s a pretty big drop. And the pattern’s been similar in the House, so the rates of bipartisanship are generally a bit lower in the House than in the Senate.
And so these data can be interpreted either from a glass half full or a glass half empty perspective. I think most people who look at Congress have the glass half empty perspective. They see the trend line of increased polarization or declining bipartisanship. And the kind of takeaway they draw is that everything is polarized. Congress is totally dysfunctional, and there’s a lot of truth to that. Yes, Congress is becoming more polarized. Yes, it’s becoming more dysfunctional, but we are still far from reaching 100% polarization or 0% bipartisanship. And that’s the glass half full side. And that’s what I emphasize a bit more in the book because I think that’s not been appreciated, that there are still many votes that remain bipartisan. And in particular, this is the case in foreign policy.
Matt Grossman: And to clarify, this isn’t like votes where we call it the bipartisan infrastructure package because it got eight Republican senators. These are real things involving like party leaders and major factions within each party. Is that right?
Jordan Tama: Yeah. So I mean, the data I just recounted is based on me defining bipartisanship as a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans voting together. So yes, that’s a robust version of bipartisanship. I do also think it’s significant when, say 10 Republican senators vote with a majority of Democrats on a bill. That’s what I call cross-partisanship. When you have some members of Congress, a significant number breaking with the majority of their party and voting with the other party. Because the margins in Congress are so small generally these days, that’s quite important because if you have say 10 Republicans vote breaking with their party on an issue that often makes the difference between passing or not passing legislation. I consider that to be a form of bipartisanship as well, but it’s a weaker form of bipartisanship than when you have a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans voting together.
Matt Grossman: So in looking at potential explanations, you talk about the difficulty translating traditional left-right ideology to foreign policy. You talk about the role of advocacy groups or other external actors. You talk about institutional incentives, and then you just talk about individual members may just have idiosyncratic preferences. So which of those play the greatest role and how do they work together?
Jordan Tama: Yeah, I think they’re all important. And of course it’s nice when you have a mono-causal explanation of something. I think the reality is there is not a mono-causal explanation of congressional behavior, either in general or when it comes to foreign policy. So this does make the argument a bit complex, but I think that captures the reality of what goes on in Congress. I’ll just briefly say a word about each of these factors. So ideology matters to me when it comes to explaining why there’s variation in political alignments across issues, because as you just mentioned, some issues break down on a left-right ideological spectrum, and others don’t. And when issues don’t break down on a left-right ideological spectrum, it gives more leeway for politicians to take different positions, and that makes bipartisanship more possible. It’s a similar logic for advocacy groups. So there are some issues where major advocacy groups that have close ties to one party or close ties to the other party have opposing positions, and then they’re a force for polarization.
If you have… Take an issue like abortion, you’ve got anti-abortion groups closely tied to the Republican Party, pro-choice groups closely tied to the Democratic Party. They’re going to push the two parts apart. But many foreign policy issues are not like that. You don’t have advocacy groups on opposing sides pushing the two parties apart. Either advocacy groups are not that important on the issue, or to the extent they are involved, they may have ties to both parties. In foreign policy, for instance, there are a lot of ethnic diaspora communities in the United States that have ties to both parties, and then they can be a force for bipartisanship. The institutional incentives piece is that members of Congress have different incentives when it comes to foreign policy than the president. So the president is generally held accountable by the American public for the overall effectiveness of US foreign policy, overall state of national security, overall welfare of the country. Voters blame or credit the president for that.
Members of Congress are not held responsible for the outcomes of US foreign policy for what’s actually going on in the world. They’re held accountable by voters just for the positions they take. And so this often leads them to take positions that are popular with their constituents, even if those positions might create problems for US foreign policy. And the president will sometimes have to say, “Well, that might sound good, but it’s going to make it harder for me to reach an agreement with this country that I’m trying to negotiate with.” And so that can lead to inter-branch clashes. And then individual agency of lawmakers is also important. I think there are some members of Congress who have real deep-seated views about foreign policy. They’re acting based on principle often when they get involved in foreign policy. That’s not most members of Congress, but it’s some of the ones who are most active. So which of these are most important? None of them is the most important across the board.
It really depends on the particular issue. So for instance, on issues that are highly salient, ideology tends to matter a lot because voters and elected officials are more likely to have strong views on those issues, and those views may be shaped by ideology. When issues aren’t salient. Advocacy groups have more space to drive what politicians are doing, because the elected officials don’t have to worry so much about what voters think about the issue. They may instead just take their cue from advocacy groups. The different institutional incentives of Congress and the president tend to matter on issues where the exercise of executive power is central. So there are issues where it’s very important for the president to preserve flexibility, so the president can engage in negotiations with other countries, for instance. And Congress may be advancing positions that would constrain the President’s flexibility. That’s when you’re more likely to have tensions between the two branches. So it really depends on the kind of nature of the issue, the salience of the issue can matter, and the way in which executive power is at stake in a given debate.
Matt Grossman: So you do also try to look for steady differences across issue areas, and you find, I think, for example, that immigration is consistently more polarized than other foreign policy issues. So what are the main patterns there? And is there anything that accounts for them?
Jordan Tama: Yeah, so I’ll give some more examples. Immigration is significantly more polarized than other foreign policy issues. Some people wouldn’t even think of immigration as a foreign policy issue. I do because it involves people coming from other countries. But because it connects so much to things happening within the United States, that generates some more polarization on it. But just to give some other examples, and then I’ll offer some general comments about why some issues are more polarized than others. So another highly polarized issue is climate change. Again, an issue that spans foreign and domestic policy, but very polarized. Some issues that involve pretty strong bipartisanship today, China policy. Democrats and Republicans are broadly speaking, hawkish toward China today. Hawkishness is shared across the parties.
Democrats and Republicans favor tough stances to counter Chinese influence in a variety of different areas. Biden and Trump don’t have very different policies on China and neither do Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Trade is another area where there’s a lot of bipartisanship. Again, not huge differences between Biden and Trump. They both are relatively protectionist. Trump more so. There’s differences of degree, but not of the general direction of policy. In Congress, there’s also very strong support for things like industrial reshoring, bringing manufacturing back to the United States. Of course, that is an issue that spans domestic and international affairs. And then there are issues where there are big intra-party divisions. So we’ve seen that recently on Ukraine, the Republican Party, very divided over Ukraine between the kind of traditional Reaganite internationalist stance of we’ve got a counter Russia, support allies and partners, and the Trump worldview, which is more kind of America first questioning why we really have a stake in a far away conflict in a place like Ukraine and Israel, which is dividing the Democratic Party between the kind of more traditional pro-Israel stance of Biden and many other Democrats. And the view of many progressive Democrats that the US should separate itself more from Israel and have a much more strongly pro-Palestinian position. So in general, looking at these issues and others, the issues that are more polarized are ones that are more closely connected to core differences between liberalism and conservatism.
That’s the ideology piece. So for instance, on climate change, the core debate is over government regulation of the economy, and generally liberals favor government regulation of the economy more than conservatives do. So it’s natural following from that, that liberals would be more supportive of government steps to address climate change than conservatives would. Advocacy groups also kind of push in the same direction of polarization because the key advocacy groups on climate change themselves have strong ties to one or the other party. On the Republican side, business groups, which tend to be anti-climate change regulations. And then on the democratic side, environmental groups which are closely tied to Democrats and favor action to address climate change.
So their ideology and advocacy groups are working in the same direction. Another issue like that is immigration, where from an ideological standpoint, liberals are more supportive of multiculturalism than conservatism, than conservatives are. So naturally liberals are more supportive of high levels of immigration than conservatives are. And again, that’s reinforced by advocacy groups that are closely tied to each party. By contrast on an issue like China or Ukraine, there’s not this clear left-right divide. If you take US policy toward Ukraine, whether to provide military aid to Ukraine and try to map that on a left-right ideological spectrum, I don’t think you can do that. There is no kind of distinct liberal or conservative position on that. So I think those variables largely explain the differences.
Matt Grossman: So the other interview for this episode is about the pattern that some journalists see that people switch sides on foreign policy issues between the parties to support or oppose the current president, but they actually find that although you can see partisanship on final voting of foreign policy restrictions, that the actual kind of sponsorship and policy process behind these is pretty explainable more by consistent ideological views by members of Congress rather than switching sides based on who’s president. So how do you think that fits in at all to the bipartisan patterns that you find?
Jordan Tama: Ideology does matter a lot in shaping the positions of members of Congress on foreign policy. In general, republicans are more hawkish than Democrats. Republicans are more supportive of the military. Democrats are more supportive of multilateral institutions like the UN. Democrats are more supportive of foreign aid. Those are all issues where liberal and conservative ideology naturally map onto the foreign policy space. If you take multilateral institutions support for the UN, well in general terms, conservatives are more skeptical of governmental authority than liberals, right? That’s true at the local level, it’s true at the state level, it’s true at the national level. So that naturally carries over to the international level. Conservatives are more skeptical of international organizations, just like they’re more skeptical of domestic government and that carries over. So there are a lot of issues where ideology does matter a lot, and so that shows up in analyses of congressional voting.
But there are also other issues where ideology is really co-sponsorship and voting. But there are a lot of issues still that ideology really does not explain the decisions, the behavior of members of Congress. When it comes to voting, partisanship does matter more than it does for co-sponsorship because voting is what’s going to be most noticed by all the activists, key people who are following what Congress does. That’s going to affect the electoral standing of the parties much more than co-sponsorship. So some members of Congress will fall into the party line when it comes to the voting stage because they want to be good team players when it comes to voting because that’s what their party leaders, party activists really are paying attention to and care about. That’s where they’re going to get pressure from party activists and party leaders. But that’s not so much the case when it comes to sponsoring legislation.
Matt Grossman: So there also are patterns to who tends to win these votes. And some of them involve this bipartisanship, but you might say are kind of evidence of if you want to be charitable, kind of a foreign policy consensus or what sometimes people derisively call the blob or a group in DC that kind of has its own preferences that are more militaristic, that are more for international advancement, international involvement of the United States that are more for foreign aid is public opinion. So how much of this bipartisanship is in the service of an elite consensus that might be out of step with the public or the party coalitions?
Jordan Tama: So a couple thoughts on that. One is that the public is actually more internationalist than we tend to think. It’s more internationalist than elites tend to think. And actually, I’m co-author of a paper with several other scholars, Josh Kertzer, Josh Busby, and Jonathan Monten based on data that we’ve collected on public opinion and elite attitudes on foreign policy working with the Chicago Council on global affairs. And we asked what we call foreign policy elites, people in the Washington blob, basically what their guess is about public attitudes on foreign policy issues. And we compare that to what the public’s attitudes actually were. It turns out that the public’s actual attitudes are more internationalist than elites tend to think. So to take one kind of core question, most Americans favor an active US role in the world. If you ask them that basic question, the majority of Americans favor an active US role in the world.
And then in other kinds of questions, NATO, international trade, military presence in places like Japan or South Korea, the public is actually quite internationalist on many issues. So that’s one thing. So I think there’s a misperception if we think that the Congress is going against public opinion when it does something like support foreign aid for Ukraine or Israel and Taiwan. And in fact on those specific questions, the majority of Americans do support aid to Ukraine. The majority of Americans do support aid for Israel, and the majority of Americans support aid for Taiwan. The Ukraine one got tricky because Republican voters are split on aid for Ukraine. And a majority of Republican voters have become opposed to aid to Ukraine. But looking at the public as a whole, most voters support aid to Ukraine. So I don’t think there’s actually such a kind of paradox here or tension between what Congress is doing and what the public thinks.
Matt Grossman: So you mentioned that we just had a series of votes in Congress where we supported and had bipartisan support for military aid, for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. This took a long time because there was a lot of resistance among house Republicans, and they set up this process where people would get to vote individually and would just be voting to combine them in the rule that set up the initial votes. That allowed us to see that there was division on Ukraine funding among Republicans, some division on Israel funding among Democrats, but maybe not quite as much as we might have expected on either side. What did you make of those votes and how consistent are they with the historical patterns?
Jordan Tama: Yeah. Well, I think those recent votes are very consistent with my way of understanding what’s going on in terms of political alignments on foreign policy, and that we see in those votes bipartisan cooperation in that large numbers of Democrats and Republicans did vote together in support of these aid packages. But we also see intra party divisions, as you noted on Ukraine for the Republicans and on Israel for the Democrats. On Ukraine in the house, Republicans were split almost 50/50 between support and opposition. While all the Democrats voted for the aid to Ukraine. On the Israel aid in the house, the large majority of Democrats voted for aid to Israel, about 80%, but about 20% of Democrats voted against the aid to Israel. So there the intra party division was less substantial, but still notable. And that’s certainly a shift from what we would’ve seen say 10 or 20 years ago.
If an analogous set of votes was occurring let’s say 10 years ago, I would’ve expected aid to Ukraine to be getting basically unanimous support among Republicans and aid to Israel to be getting essentially unanimous support among Democrats. So the fact that there were these intra party divisions does reflect a kind of growing debate within each party over foreign policy. This is most evident in the Republican Party where there’s now, I think, a very clear debate going on between the kind of traditional Reaganite internationalists people like Mitch McConnell, Nikki Haley advocated for this in the presidential campaign as a candidate. Now, Mike Johnson has come out on this side who are… And many of the committee leaders, so people like Mike McCaul, not a household name, but he’s the Republican Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. These are kind of traditional Republican and then the kind of Trump worldview, which is more inward-looking, more nationalistic.
And that’s an open debate. And what’s interesting is that even as Trump has asserted his dominance over the Republican Party in so many ways, his foreign policy worldview has not yet kind of won out. Like Mitch McConnell is still making the case for internationalism and now Mike Johnson, this is the policy area where there’s still a debate. And I think what that points to is that foreign policy positions are more fluid than domestic policy positions. There’s no debate in the Republican Party over taxes whether the party should support higher or lower taxes, but in foreign policy, there is this debate. The other thing that I think is striking about the recent set of votes in the Congress on aid for Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan, is how much there was not just some Democrats and Republicans voting together, but Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress working together.
So Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer have locked arms on this issue for the last nine months. I mean, they were working together very closely. Schumer said in one interview that he was talking to McConnell every other day about this issue for the last several months. And in the house, Mike Johnson, according to media reports, was talking to Hakeem Jeffries and talking to the Biden administration about this issue over the last few months regularly. And so that’s a hopeful story that these people who we mainly see as very partisan figures and whose public image usually is as partisan figures, actually are working together on some issues.
Matt Grossman: So on the rules vote, which it was I guess the most important vote in the end, on passing this legislation, we saw kind of an ins against the middle ideological spread where the most liberal Democrats and the most conservative Republicans were voting against the bill, perhaps for different reasons, for different parts of the bill, and even on foreign aid, maybe for different reasons, just how involved America should be in the world on the right versus America’s more militaristic role in the world, or objections to it on the left. How common is that kind of pattern, and do you see a possibility for that kind of ends against the middle going forward?
Jordan Tama: Yeah, this kind of ends against the middle dynamic occurs a lot on foreign policy and definitely much more on foreign policy than on domestic issues. And it occurs especially on issues related to US military involvement overseas, US military presence overseas, or the scope and reach of what we call the national security state, or governmental institutions that are prominent in foreign policy, like the Military Intelligence Community. And on these sets of issues, you often see progressive Democrats aligned with the most conservative Republicans, or Libertarians often. To give a couple of examples, Bernie Sanders, one of the most well-known progressives, is often on the same page with someone like Rand Paul, one of the most conservative Libertarian Republicans in the Senate when it comes to some of these types of issues of military involvement overseas, or authorities for the defense department or the intelligence community.
I think the reasons are different for these two people on these two different ends of the spectrum, but they intersect. So for both progressives and some on the far right, they want to restrict defense spending. For conservatives, it’s based on wanting to restrict government spending generally, Rand Paul wants to cut spending as much as possible across the board. For someone like Bernie Sanders, it’s based on a view that the US uses the military too much, and we should shift resources from the military to other aspects of government. But that puts them in the same place.
And they also share an anti-establishment orientation, skeptical of Washington institutions, especially giving national security institutions more authority to do things like intelligence surveillance. This came up recently, not just on the foreign aid vote, but there was a vote over reauthorizing FISA, the law that provides intelligence agencies with certain authorities for intelligence surveillance to identify possible terrorists. And on that issue, you get centrists voting in support, and the far left and far right voting in opposition regularly. So that’s a frequent strange bedfellows dynamic. I think we’re going to continue to see that, and it may only become more significant over time as if each party fractures even more. On the democratic side, I think that’s becoming more salient right now with the Israel debate, where the progressive left is becoming further separated from the centrist Democrat Biden orientation.
Matt Grossman: So your book just came out, and at least the first few votes afterwards have continued to be bipartisan, but what should we look for in signs that things might change under, say, a second Trump administration, or moving forward? What would be the signs that we’re in a new era?
Jordan Tama: I’m going to be looking for a couple of things. I think the most interesting thing that happened recently, in conjunction with Congress passing this big set of legislation of foreign aid, is Mike Johnson’s apparent conversion to internationalism. If you look at the statements that he made over the last couple of weeks and compare them to things he said last year, it’s quite remarkable how different the statements are. He sounded like Ronald Reagan, or to give more recent examples, Mitch McConnell or Mike Pence or Nikki Haley, who are these traditional internationalists in the Republican Party, in his recent statements.
So what I’m looking to see now is, do other Republicans in the house follow his lead as other issues come up? Especially since it looks like he’s going to preserve his speakership. He took this risky step, and it doesn’t look like he’s going to get punished for it. It looks like he may have called the bluff, in a sense, of the Marjorie Taylor Greene faction, managed to survive, and now he can say to other Republicans in the house, “Look, you can join me in supporting Ukraine, and this is safe, the water is fine here.” Whether other Republicans join him or not will be an interesting thing to watch, because Trump is going to be lurking in the background saying, “No, no more to Ukraine.” Ukraine aid is done for this year anyway, so that’s not going to come up this year, but other issues will come up, I think, where this question of where to position yourself on this, say, Reaganite-Trumpist spectrum for Republicans is going to be salient.
Looking further ahead, past the election, certainly if Trump gets elected, I’m going to be looking to see whether Trump’s worldview does finally take over the Republican Party entirely, whether the Mitch McConnell perspective is just totally silenced and disappears. I think there’s a good chance that that could happen, because Trump’s power within the party will be so great if he’s elected again. If he’s not elected, I’ll be looking to see whether the debate in the Republican Party over foreign policy entirely opens up and Trump’s view is somewhat discredited, then the Mitch McConnells and the Nikki Haleys and the Mike Johnsons can say, “Look, Trump lost. That’s not the right direction for the party, let’s return to the Ronald Reagan worldview.” And there’ll be, I think, a very interesting debate, and I’ll be looking to see how that debate plays out.
Matt Grossman: So there’s plenty of examples of bipartisan working relationships on foreign policy, we shouldn’t be surprised. But aren’t legislators hypocrites, supporting their party’s president and then opposing others for taking similar action? Not according to William Bendix, who says, “Looking at sponsorship shows similarly influential actors with consistent views.”
So tell us about the main findings from your recent paper on the role of party and ideology in congressional foreign policy voting.
William Bendix: Broadly, we find that lawmakers don’t reflexively seek to thwart the foreign policies of presidents from the opposite party. So put another way, we find that the ideological preferences of lawmakers are much more important than their immediate partisan interests, at least in the foreign policy domain. So if you’re a hawk, you’re going to be much more inclined to support increased defense spending, regardless of who’s in the White House, and if you’re a dove, you’re going to be inclined to support generous humanitarian spending, again, regardless of who’s in the White House. So those are the basic findings of the study.
Matt Grossman: So to set it up, you review several instances where at least the news coverage or popular history was that opposing parties to the president were trying to restrict their presidential actions, and then would turn around and do something different when another party was in power. So tell us about the canonical examples there and what we usually draw from them.
William Bendix: Right. So the canonical examples emphasize congressional hypocrisy. So in the 1980s, if Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who wants to support the right wing Contras in their efforts to overthrow the pro-communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, Democrats in Congress are concerned that if military aid goes to the Contras, it will eventually lead to a full-scale US invasion, and so take efforts to block any aid to the Contras. Jump to the 1990s, the Democrats are advocates of Bill Clinton’s efforts to intervene in Yugoslavia, specifically Bosnia and Kosovo, but Republicans now are opposed to any efforts to deploy US troops to the region, and so propose all kinds of funding blocks to prevent US deployment in the region.
And so, this flip, where you see Democrats supporting their president in military interventions but blocking the military interventions of a Republican, and conversely, Republicans supporting Republican interventions and blocking democratic interventions, have encouraged observers to conclude that Democrats and Republicans in Congress approach foreign policy from purely hypocritical and crass partisan perspective.
Matt Grossman: So you try to differentiate between the partisan motives and the ideological motivations, and we know that those usually are hard to differentiate because they go together, so how do you distinguish those two?
William Bendix: Right. So we take a number of steps, but recognize that it’s very difficult to disentangle partisan and ideological effects, but our main strategy is the following. We collect all of the foreign policy riders from 1971 to 2016, and then we identify the NOMINATE score, in effect, the ideological placement of each lawmaker who sponsors a rider, and then we identify if the lawmaker at the time of sponsorship is in the president’s party or in the opposing party. This allows us then to see if lawmakers are proposing riders on ideological grounds or for partisan reasons. So we can conduct regression analyses and effectively see whether our variable for ideology or variable for partisan affiliation has a stronger relationship with sponsorship behavior. So are the members sponsoring limitation riders based on their ideological preferences, or are they sponsoring riders based on partisan calculation?
Matt Grossman: So your analysis of sponsorship shows that there’s not much of an effect for opposing party members of the president’s party, but there is an ideological difference. So how should we interpret that, and how big are these differences?
William Bendix: Right. So the thing to keep in mind is that there’s a really big difference between sponsoring a rider and voting for or against a write. It takes real effort to put together legislative language, so to draft an amendment, or to draft a limitation rider, means that you need to understand what the proposed legislation includes, you need to also understand what federal programs or federal agencies are likely to be affected, both by the proposed legislation and by your rider. So there’s a lot of groundwork involved before you can just draft an amendment and put it forward. What that means ultimately is that only those who have real interest in foreign policy, who have real expertise in foreign policy, are actually going to do that kind of heavy lifting, that kind of work. And if they’re going to put in the time to develop legislative language, they’re going to write something that actually reflects their preferences, or reflects the interests and the deep needs of their constituents. They’re not going to draft legislation based on some sort of short-term partisan calculation.
Whereas most members who are voting for or against amendments or limitation riders aren’t necessarily deeply involved in foreign policy matters. Most members are not campaigning on foreign policy matters, and most members don’t necessarily anticipate that their election interests will rest on foreign policy issues, so therefore, most members are going to rely on partisan cues whether to support or oppose a given amendment. So is it something that the president supports or opposes, is it something that the leader of their party supports or opposes, that kind of thing. And so, it’s obvious that, at certain points in the legislative process, you’re going to have much more deeply committed ideologues participating, and then in other parts of the process, you’re going to have the full chamber participating, and then you’re going to have a range of voices and a range of expertise and competencies and background shaping those decisions. And that’s why the floor, we see evidence of both partisanship and ideology at work, whereas in the pre-floor stages, we see primarily ideology at work.
What’s interesting is that when we try to disentangle ideology and partisan effects in roll call votes, and that’s admittedly very difficult to do, but when we try to disentangle that, what we see is that partisanship seems to have a more consistent impact across our different regression analyses. But that ideology nonetheless appears to be surprisingly significant in most of our analyses, and the effect size for ideology tends to be considerably larger than the effect size for partisanship or partisan affiliation.
Matt Grossman: So tell us about some examples of these policy riders. What are they, what do they usually contain, and what ones might we be familiar with?
William Bendix: Right. So there aren’t necessarily typical types of riders that I can point to, but oftentimes, there’ll be key foreign policy battles that erupt because of certain presidential actions or certain kinds of ongoing military operations, and members of Congress, especially those who are on the various foreign policy or national security committees, are likely going to respond to those foreign policy-
William Bendix: …. going to respond to those foreign policy developments. So during the Iraq war, for example, we saw increased activity in foreign policy riders, where members were trying to shape the direction of the war through this amending process. And so we saw, for example, riders that tried to reduce US troop commitments to Iraq, we saw riders that tried to affect the treatment of detainees in Iraq, and we saw riders that tried to shift, basically, defense funds from Iraq to the World Bank. So you can see that these riders are not just necessarily trying to reduce defense spending or foreign aid, but are also trying to implement substantive policies.
Matt Grossman: So the other interview for this episode is about bipartisanship in congressional voting on foreign policy, finding that it is quite common. Not necessarily consensus, but splits within parties that create bipartisan voting, and still more bipartisan than domestic policy. So how would you fit those findings in with your own?
William Bendix: Our findings nicely support the work of Jordan Tama’s. What’s interesting about Tama’s work is that he identifies different types of bipartisanship, so whether there’s two-party support for presidential action in foreign policy or cross-party support for a particular foreign policy issue. And I think our work supports the various types of bipartisanship that he identifies. Essentially, if you’ve got a fairly large group of members with consistent foreign policy positions and consistent foreign policy goals, it’s going to be relatively easy to see those members, or it’s going to be relatively common to see those members working together either to support a president and foreign policy program or to work against a president.
In other words, I don’t think it’s particularly surprising to see this level of bipartisanship in whatever form it arises, because you do have members who have demonstrated across time that they are consistently committed to certain foreign policy positions and will happily or readily work across party lines to see those goals succeed. I should add that one reason, and I’m sure that this is something that Tama identifies, but one reason why you can see this bipartisanship in foreign policy is simply because it’s not an electoral priority most of the time.
Matt Grossman: So in some of your other work, you find that military hawks tend to lead and win congressional defense bill fights regardless of who’s president, regardless of some partisan differences on that dimension. So what does that suggest about partisan and ideological influence?
William Bendix: Yeah. In other work that we’ve done, we see that hawks have a much more consistent level of legislative success in foreign policy than doves do. And so what that means is that, ultimately, hawks in the Republican Party and hawks or relative hawks in the Democratic Party are seeing their amendments, seeing their foreign policy bills succeed on the floor at a much greater rate than doves in their respective parties. What that means ultimately is that there seems to be a hawkish bias in Congress. That there seems to be a pro-defense spending, pro-Military bias in Congress. If you were to look at the IR literature, I think scholars would say that there is a relatively sizable faction in Washington that is committed to US hegemony. That would be the the IR spin on this.
Matt Grossman: And does that extend beyond Military support? There’s talk of the role of the Blob in foreign policy in Washington, and elite consensus. Is part of what we’re seeing in making foreign policy different that there’s just this elite set of actors that share a conception of American interests?
William Bendix: I think that that’s probably right. And I think it goes beyond just foreign policy. I think if we were to look at national security policy, you would see a very similar set of patterns or trends. Somewhat recently we saw the passage of the FISA Amendments Act, a reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act. And there was fairly sizable opposition to that legislation. The opposition came from both parties, some in the Republican Party, some in the Democratic Party concerned about the potential privacy impact that the reauthorization posed, and that the surveillance posed.
Nonetheless, you saw that there was an overwhelming majority of members of Congress supporting that legislation, in a sense investing or reinvesting in the so-called national security apparatus, providing the for expansive surveillance and for aggressive intelligence programs. So whether we’re looking at foreign policy or whether we’re looking at national security, we see this consensus, this pro-Military or hawkish or muscular consensus.
Matt Grossman: We also just had a series of votes on Military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. On the one hand, there was a lot more resistance, maybe than usual, among house Republicans. On the other hand, everybody voted to go along with all of this. In the end there was a fairly substantial division in the House Republicans on Ukraine, a little and more than usual division among House Democrats on Israel. So how should we interpret that in light of the historic patterns?
William Bendix: Yeah. I think the work that my co-author and I have done on the hawkish bias in Congress nicely explains the developments we saw with funding for Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, et cetera. You see that this reinvestment in a much more muscular foreign policy, continued support for a muscular foreign policy and an expansive footprint, US footprint, around the world. So it just, to me, reflected the kind of hawkish success that has been consistently observed, at least in our work, since the at least late-1960s.
Matt Grossman: And you don’t see any changes in terms of the rise in the non-interventionist side of the Republican Party or the rising constituency on questioning funding for Israel, which has traditionally not been contentious?
William Bendix: Right. For the moment I don’t see a major change. If you look at, for instance, the funding bill that came out of… the Senate’s bill, which wrapped up the four different bills that the House passed. If you look at what the Senate passed and you look at who voted for or against that package, the ideological range of support in the Senate was really quite stunning.
On the left you saw Elizabeth Warren supporting the package, and on the right you saw James Lankford supporting the package. If you look at their respective nominate scores, and I don’t have them offhand, but they’re about a point apart, a full point apart from each other on the nominate scale. As far as I know, Warren is the most liberal member of the US Senate, and Lankford is not the most conservative member of the US Senate but he is well right of Mitch McConnell.
And so you can see that there is this breadth, this ideological breadth in the Senate supporting this aid package. And so as long as you see this wide range of support, I would expect to see the hawkish bias readily observed in Congress. Now, that said, there’s clearly something going on in the Republican Party, and it has been for at least the last 15 years, an increased factionalism that makes the politics within especially the House much more unpredictable. And so as this factionalism continues, and if it intensifies further, that will make votes on foreign policy, votes on national security much more unpredictable.
Matt Grossman: So you’ve painted mostly a picture of continuity here, that people for the most part stick to their principles, but there do seem to be at least some grounds for potential change, particularly in the Republican Party, with a potential second Trump administration. What would be the signs that things really are changing? That either Republicans and Democrats are making different partisan calculations or that there really has been a shift in the foreign policy of the Republican Party?
William Bendix: I think the most immediate indicators would be if there are major leadership changes in Congress. In other words, if committee chairs are going to members who hold unorthodox foreign policy or national security positions. So for instance, Jim Jordan. If Jim Jordan, who has vocally opposed to funding Ukraine, vocally opposed to FISA, essentially appears to be libertarian in his national security views and isolationist in his foreign policy views. If he were to shift from the Judiciary Committee to the Intelligence Committee and head that, that would be a very clear sign that the Republican Party in the House is moving in a very different direction and that the hawkish consensus is falling apart.
Aside from those kinds of leadership changes, I can’t think of anything in particular that people should be paying attention to. Obviously whether Joe Biden is reelected or whether Donald Trump regains the White House will have a dramatic impact on US foreign policy and its direction, and then there will be congressional responses to it. But within Congress, I would be looking to see who’s in charge. And if Mike Turner remains the senior-most member of the Republican Party on the Intelligence Committee for example, that would be a clear signal that Republicans, regardless of the factionalism, are remaining committed to your standard hawkish approach to both national security and foreign policy.
Matt Grossman: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website:
How Debt Finance Leads to War and Defense Spending. Putin’s War and Populist Authoritarianism. Compromise Still Works in Congress and With Voters. How Media Coverage of Congress Limits Policymaking. And Did Chinese Trade Competition Increase Nativism and Elect Trump?
Thanks to Jordan Tama and William Bendix for joining me. Please check out Bipartisanship in US Foreign Policy and Beyond Party: Ideological Convictions and Foreign Policy Conflicts in the US Congress. And then listen in next time.