Coalition building and overcoming legislative gridlock in foreign policy, 1947-98.

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Coalition building and overcoming legislative gridlock in foreign policy, 1947-98.

The failure of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in October 1999 highlights the degree of partisan conflict that existed between President Clinton and the Republican majority in Congress. Observers argued that politicians should set aside partisanship and pass a treaty that most analysts agree is beneficial to America's strategic position (Broder 1999; Judt 1999). However, as many political scientists have noted, bipartisan cooperation in Washington has declined in recent decades (Binder 1999, Bond and Fleisher 2000; Cooper and Young 1997), even in the foreign policy arena (Fleisher et al. 2000; McCormick and Wittkopf 1990, 1992; McCormick, Wittkopf, and Danna 1997). Examples of the inability to enact significant foreign policy change exist throughout the postwar era. President Truman lobbied Congress for universal military training during the Eightieth, Eighty-first, and Eighty-second Congresses but was rebuffed. President Eisenhower successfully blocked attempts to change the president's treaty and international agreement--making powers. Is the defeat of the test ban treaty an anomaly, or is it representative of a broader trend of gridlock stemming from increased partisan politics in foreign policy?

The study of legislative gridlock, or the inability of government to pass significant legislation, has gained new life since the publication of Mayhew's groundbreaking book Divided We Govern (1991). Mayhew challenged the conventional wisdom that split party control of Congress and the presidency leads to legislative gridlock. In his book, Mayhew catalogued the significant legislation passed from 1947 to 1990 and found no difference in the rate of passage between times of split-party control and unified government. Several authors have challenged Mayhew's findings (Binder 1999; Coleman 1999; Edwards, Barrett, and Peake 1997; Kelly 1993) as well as the theoretical approach of focusing attention on the dynamics of party control rather than preference positions (Brady and Volden 1998; Krehbiel 1998). While some of these authors have demonstrated that divided government leads to gridlock, other factors are clearly important, including the degree of partisanship on Capitol Hill, ideological diversity among partisans, and ideological differences between the chambers of Congress (Binder 1999; Coleman 1999). In this article, I measure foreign policy gridlock by counting the number of significant foreign policy bills (1) that failed to pass in a given Congress. I explore determinants of the variation in foreign policy gridlock across time. Foreign policy is a significant, important subset of American policy with different assumptions about political behavior, and it deserves attention. It is often presumed ...

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