Foreign Policy Determinants: Comparing Realist and Domestic-Political Models of Foreign Policy

Mark Souva
Additional contact information
Mark Souva: Department of Political Science Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida, USA, msouva@fsu.edu

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2005, vol. 22, issue 2, 149-163

Abstract: Systemic realist arguments of foreign policy decision-making suggest that partisan disagreement stops at the water's edge. A domestic-politics model of foreign policy decision-making posits that politics does not stop at the water's edge. Extant research on foreign policy voting in the U.S. Congress is consistent with the systemic realist argument. According to this research, partisan voting is less likely to occur on national security, or high-politics issues, than on low-politics issues. I argue that this research suffers from two flaws. First, it does not measure high-politics in accordance with systemic realist thinking. Second, the goal in addressing the water's-edge question is not to learn if a specific variable, such as high-politics, is significant, but to compare competing models. To this end, it is necessary to engage in a “three-cornered fight†and conduct a nonnested model discrimination test. After creating a new measure of high-politics, I compare a systemic realist model against a domestic-politics model of foreign policy voting in the House of Representatives from 1953—2000. The model discrimination test indicates that the domestic-politics model outperforms the systemic realist model. Institutional dynamics and public opinion are more important for understanding foreign policy voting than are more traditional realist variables.

Keywords: model testing; liberalism; realism; Congress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/07388940590948574 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:compsc:v:22:y:2005:i:2:p:149-163

DOI: 10.1080/07388940590948574

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Conflict Management and Peace Science from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().