Have Democratic and Republican presidents used force more often than members of the other party under some circumstances during the postwar era? This article presents evidence that unemployment and inflation produce differences in the likelihood of a diversionary use of force by presidents from...

Many international relations theorists suggest that improved military capabilities will make the use or threat of military force a more attractive policy choice. Tests of this argument are complicated because policy makers’anticipation of their future needs for military capabilities could...

Recent research on the sources of individual attitudes toward trade policy comes to very different conclusions about the role of economic self-interest. The skeptical view suggests that long-standing symbolic predispositions and sociotropic perceptions shape trade policy opinions more than one's...

Three complementary explanations are tested for the phenomenon that, since 1940, the inflation rate for military goods and services has been higher on average than the inflation rates for the nonmilitary government sector or the economy as a whole. First, higher rates of public-sector inflation...

Joanne Gowa's 1998 article “Politics at the Water's Edge: Parties, Voters, and the Use of Force Abroad†is examined in light of issues raised by her empirical analysis. Newly available time-series models for event-count data permit consideration of the dynamics of the use-of-force...

Most research on congressional consideration of foreign and defense policy concludes that ideology is the most important influence on roll-call voting and that constituent economic interests are not very important. This article challenges this conclusion on two grounds. First, most previous...

Although it is widely acknowledged that economic interests influence the politics of trade policy, most research on international relations treats security issues differently. Do conflicting economic interests shape political debate over foreign policy even when security issues are highly...

Studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll-call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote. We depart from that strategy in several...