Presidential Support in Congress: Conflict and Consensus on Foreign and Defense Policy

Abstract

In a recent article appearing in The Journal of Politics, McCormick and Wittkopf (1990) argue that the Vietnam War did not exercise a significant impact on bipartisan presidential support in the U.S. Congress and that a bipartisan Cold War consensus on foreign policy and defense issues in the House and Senate was not as prominent as many had assumed. I develop a comprehensive model of bipartisan congressional support of presidents from 1947-1988 on foreign policy and defense roll-call votes in the House and Senate that test the impact of many factors, such as presidential influence and legislative processes not accounted for in McCormick and Wittkopf's analysis. Using probit analysis of individual roll-call votes, I show that before the Vietnam War, substantial consensus existed in both the House and Senate and after this conflict, such consensus has become much more infrequent. In addition, I find that forces originating in Congress exercise much more influence over the incidence of bipartisan support than presidential resources.