Amid alarm over presidential elections in the United States, a key concern has been the role of Congress in certifying presidential election results, which has been presumed to invite disaster. This article investigates the politics of congressional resolution of crises following close, competitive presidential elections. It argues that it is in legislators’ self-interest to prevent a crisis from reaching a breaking point: legislatures frequently do not survive coups or the outbreak of civil war. Offering a theoretical model supported by historical case studies from the United States, Chile, and Peru, this study shows that defeated presidential candidates find it effectively impossible to hold their parties together, even when partisan allies control legislative majorities. Legislators have strong political incentives to cooperate and to break partisan ranks to resolve a presidential election crisis decisively.
Previous research has devoted considerable attention to the outcomes of congressional activity under divided government, but far less to the question of how partisan control influences Congress’s issue priorities. In this paper, I argue that Congress pays less attention to foreign affairs under unified government than under divided government. This is because under unified government, the majority party would like to take this hard-won and fleeting opportunity to pass legislation that they think will help them in the next election, and such legislation, in most cases, concerns domestic issues. Due to the limitation of legislators’ attention span and Congress’s agenda space, consideration of foreign affairs-related bills is postponed. Under divided government, negotiations over domestic issues frequently face gridlock. Foreign policy issues, which in general are more likely to see bipartisan support, thus receive more attention and greater agenda space. I analyze all bills related to foreign policy introduced in the House from the 103 rd to 118 th Congresses (1993-2024). My findings reveal that under divided government, foreign policy bills constitute a greater proportion of the measures receiving House floor action and individual foreign policy bills are more likely to receive House floor consideration. This suggests that the partisan composition of government plays a crucial role in shaping U.S. foreign policy.
While previous research has asked how combat experience affects the willingness of military veterans to support the use of force, there has been little work that focuses on support for escalation within the context of the contemporary American all-volunteer force (AVF). Extant work relies on small sample sizes and measures of foreign policy attitudes which do not directly assess support for heightened military pressure after force is used. This note uses a dataset of more than 1,400 American veterans to distinguish between service experiences and examine opinions about military escalation in Syria. We compare those with combat experience to civilians as well as veterans whose service did not involve military conflict. Our findings advance our understanding of the ways in which direct exposure to armed violence can affect an individual’s later attitudes about the role of military force in American foreign policy.
To what extent are partisan differences about voting rules rooted in sincere disagreements about the relative importance of maximizing turnout versus preventing ineligible voters from casting ballots? We document partisan differences in preferences regarding this trade-off over time, demonstrating that these differences are particularly pronounced among the most politically interested respondents. We then report findings from two pre-registered survey experiments that shed light on whether these gaps are a product of partisan sorting or responses to elite cues. The experiments asked participants to make trade-offs between a pair of voting systems. One system would entirely prevent ineligible votes, randomly varying turnout rates among eligible voters; the other would yield universal turnout among eligible voters, but result in some randomly varied number of ineligible voters casting ballots. Some participants were also provided with cues signaling which party endorsed which system. Our results suggest that the effects of divergent partisan cues, rather than differing priorities regarding maximizing eligible turnout and minimizing ineligible turnout, are the more likely explanation for the partisan gaps we find in our observational data. Taken together, the findings suggest that strategic elites can stoke partisan disagreements about how the democratic process should work.
Why would suburban residents use their own tax dollars to fund policing in jurisdictions where they do not live? Two traditions in policing studies generate divergent answers: one treats it as a spatially bounded public good whose support tracks direct benefit, the other as an instrument of racial-spatial hierarchy whose support tracks group-position defense. Through a divide-the-dollar game embedded in a survey of six major U.S. metro areas (N = 6,200), we test the extent to which suburban residents support using their own tax dollars to fund policing in the urban core compared to residents of that core. We find that while suburban residents initially appear as or more willing to pay for metro policing than urban residents, this reverses after controlling for demographics. We test three explanations for this heterogeneity: demographic, material, and symbolic. Suburban willingness to pay for urban policing is partly explained by demographics, particularly ideology and age, but material self-interest, such as commuting to the city for work, is not a significant driver. We find symbolic concerns play a significant role: racial resentment strongly predicts support for police funding among all residents, while fear of neighborhood racial change is a significant driver specifically for white suburbanites. These symbolic variables persist in their predictiveness after controlling for demographics. The coalition funding urban policing extends across municipal boundaries, organized less by exposure to the service than by defense of a racial-spatial boundary, with implications for how state-level fiscal institutions—referenda, grants, preemption—channel those preferences into urban police budgets.
