U.S. Congress

Despite a good deal of interest in lobbyists’ tactics, virtually no research has been published examining the conditions under which interest groups lobby the bureaucracy rather than or in addition to the legislature. Using two comprehensive datasets, I show that lobbying increases in both branches when conflict is higher and when the lobbyist has professional or political connections to that venue. In addition, certain conditions cause lobbyists to specialize in one branch or a particular branch only, depending on the issue area being lobbied, the interest group type being represented, the lobbyist’s resources, and other factors.

During the 2008 presidential campaign opposing John McCain and Barack Obama, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Duncan noted that Senator Obama, who was then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs, had not called a single meeting of the Subcommittee in a year.  According to Duncan, this proved Obama had no experience and no ability to be the next commander-in-chief.  This paper studies Barack Obama’s foreign policy activism as a member of the 109th and 110th Senates (2005-2009).  Building on Carter and Scott’s work on Congress and U.S. foreign policy (2009), we rely on various data (Congressional Record, hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, etc.) to describe the various legislative and non legislative tools used by Obama to shape debates on five foreign policy issues : (1) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, (2) U.S. relations and competition with Russia and China, (3) Iran, (4) peace and security in Africa, and (5) climate change, energy and the environment.  Our paper also uses a multilevel approach to explain why Obama was dynamic on these issues.  This approach combines international, national and individual factors and shows that Obama was not active on the five issues for the same reasons.  For instance, while an international factor such as the increase of U.S. casualties in Iraq prompted Obama to be active on this war, an individual factor such as Obama’s Kenyan roots explain why he paid great attention to Africa during his tenure.

La politique étrangère des États-Unis est le produit d’une pluralité de mécanismes, d’acteurs et de facteurs. Pourtant, peu d’études mettent en lumière le rôle de la législature fédérale du pays, le Congrès, dans la formulation et la conduite de cette politique. Cet ouvrage est l’un des premiers en langue française à combler en partie ce vide. Il porte sur les activités et l’influence de l’un des personnages les plus importants du Congrès : le président de la Commission du Sénat sur les relations extérieures (CSRE). L’auteur nuance la thèse de la " présidence impériale " et l’idée que le président des États-Unis mène la politique étrangère seul et à sa guise. Il étudie en profondeur les activités de trois présidents de la CSRE, soit Arthur Vandenberg (1947-1949), J. William Fulbright (1959-1975) et Jesse Helms (1995-2001), et déboulonne le mythe voulant que le président de la CSRE et le Congrès soient devenus des acteurs secondaires dans le domaine de la politique étrangère. Cet ouvrage permet ainsi de mieux comprendre le fonctionnement du Congrès et sa relation avec la Maison-Blanche. Il relate, en outre, quelques-uns des plus grands moments de l’histoire de la politique étrangère des États-Unis à partir d’un point de vue peu étudié jusqu’ici, celui de trois sénateurs dont les actions ont certainement contribué à changer le monde.

Given the empirical and theoretical shortcomings of Aaron Wildavsky’s (1966) “Two Presidencies Thesis” that presidential-congressional policy making relations are best seen as presidentially-centered regarding the construction of foreign policies and congressionally-oriented regarding similar activity in the realm of domestic affairs. I propose an alternative based around in “issue areas” rather than a “policy domain” perspective. I propose that presidential-congressional foreign policy making relations are best viewed as a “securitizing president” versus a “domesticating Congress” at least within the heart of Wildavsky’s (1966) notions about a presidentialist favored environment in international affairs relative to the Congress. Furthermore, we can examine the presidential-congressional policy making divide across the multiple issue areas of foreign policy including: security, domestic security, diplomacy, trade, foreign aid and immigration in both independent and mixed aggregations. Once done certain patterns exist which roughly approximate the thesis that an institutionally empowered president in security will dominate those issue areas that are closest to the security realm and that a similarly empowered domestically oriented Congress will have its greatest impact in those issue areas that are furthest away from the security dynamic and hence closer to the domestic realm—what Bayless Manning (1977) called “intermestic policies.”
    In this project, I employ content, time series and longitudinal based regression analyses on the population of presidential position votes in foreign policy re-coded along an issue areas spatial dimension in order to capture each votes’ proximity to the security issue area. My longitudinal time line for analysis is the Post War Era (1945-present) but due to data limitations I start with the first year of the Eisenhower presidency (1953) and conclude with the end of George W. Bush’s first term in office (2004). 
      Tentative findings suggest that there are two primary forces operating which emplace both constraints and opportunities on the presidential-congressional issue areas policy relationship within international affairs. The first is the unit level institutional and partisan based relationship which governs the conduct between the presidential as well as the congressional actors themselves on specific votes at any given period in the Post War Era. The second level is structural and historical in its orientation which allows for the broad spectrum of the issue area relationships to be typologized into three and possibly four distinct “orders” of relations including a security oriented War Power Order (1953-1972) and a Resurgent Insurgency Order with the rise of “intermestic politics,” (1973-1989). Then, a newly re-empowered but still partisan/ideologically constrained Imperial Presidency Politicized Order (1990-2000) arises along with the possibilities of a tenuous somewhat constitutionally balanced Extra-Systemic Dilemma Order (2001-present) where the structural factors are loosened to the point that the unit level relationships now dominate the flow of presidential-congressional relations in international affairs.

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THE MULTIPLE PRESIDENCIES THESIS

By

Matthew M. Caverly

May 2008

Chair: Richard S. Conley
CoChair: Lawrence C. Dodd
Major: Political Science

This project examines executive-legislative relations in foreign affairs during the Post-War Era. Accordingly, this research posits and answers the question: What is the inter-institutional policy making relationship between the president and Congress regarding foreign affairs?
The Multiple Presidencies Thesis—In the office of a single foreign policy president there exist multiple presidencies, wherein differential sets of executive-legislative relations co-exist at the unit level but are subject to periods of both stasis as well as dynamism due to structural level influences. Presidential power in foreign policy is security determined and hence dependent, while the “heart” of congressional power is a function of its ability to draw the foreign into the domestic which is most possible among issue areas that are more naturally intermestic in orientation. Thus, conflict/cooperation between the president and the Congress is best sceen along a dimensionality characterized by a securitizing president v. a domesticating Congress across the six issue areas of foreign policy and the vagaries of “political time.” 
I utilized a three stage methodological inquiry which was comprised initially of a content analysis of presidential position roll call votes relating to foreign policy from annual editions of CQ Almanacs. I coded these votes by issue area along a dimension which captured high politics arenas which are more prone to presidential securitization (security, domestic security and diplomacy) and low politics arenas that are by nature more intermestic and hence more prone to congressional domestication (trade, foreign aid and immigration). Then, I conducted longitudinal analysis in order to garner the “broad historical and economic patterns” from 1953-2004 relating to aggregate annual presidential success on roll call votes with the Congress across the six issue areas. Lastly, I engaged in cross-sectional analyses using simple OLS multivariate regressions in order to determine the impacts of  unit level political determinants on  presidential foreign and issue area success rates relative to the Congress. 

This article tests multiple hypotheses for the structure of congressional voting on recent immigration reform legislation. In particular, it examines the influence of partisanship, constituencies, and member characteristics. While some accounts have emphasized the cross-cutting nature of immigration policy debates, more recent research finds a growing partisan divide. These votes also provide the opportunity to (1) explore whether a contemporary version of the threat hypothesis – an association between Latino populations and immigration voting – is at work in Congress, and (2) extend the immigration voting literature to the Senate. We find that partisanship is the only consistent factor across votes and chambers. By contrast, district demographics and the personal attributes of members of Congress were not consistently associated with votes. We also found several chamber differences; Latino population was associated with more House than Senate votes, economic competition dynamics may have influenced senators but not representatives, representatives but not senators may have voted with re-election concerns in mind, and the substantive effect of partisanship is larger in the House than in the Senate. Lastly, African-American population was not associated with immigration voting, which stands in some contrast to accounts that emphasize competition between African Americans and Latinos.