Opportunities and Obstacles: Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurship in the House and Senate, 1946-2000.

Many recent studies of Congress and foreign policy have concluded that the institution frequently has greater influence on foreign policy than conventional wisdom has allowed. Such analyses typically conclude that the size, structure, powers and procedures of the Senate provides the chamber and its individual members with greater incentives and opportunities to affect foreign policy. Our analysis compares congressional behavior and influence in each chamber of Congress, focusing on the nature, role, and behavior of congressional foreign policy entrepreneurs, individual members of Congress who initiate action on their own foreign policy agenda without awaiting action from the administration. Earlier analyses have indicated that that most of these entrepreneurs are found in the Senate. Nonetheless, many congressional foreign policy entrepreneurs can be found in the House of Representatives. This paper compares the House and Senate entrepreneurs across the periods of the Cold War Consensus (1946-1967), the Cold War Dissensus (1968-1989), and the Post-Cold War (1990-1998) eras. It examines foreign policy entrepreneurs across a number of factors, including partisanship, legislative access points, and legislative tactics, exposing key shifts in such patterns over time. We test hypotheses about the characteristics and behavior of entrepreneurs in each house of Congress using a data set of 2,621 instances of entrepreneurial behavior across the post-World War II period. Our analysis sheds light on the patterns of activity and influence as well as the similarities and differences in entrepreneurship from each house over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]