Partisanship and US Foreign Policy: Beyond the Water's Edge.

Conventional wisdom in American politics suggests that partisanship stops at the water's edge. As such, partisan divides within the country have typically not extended to the realm of foreign affairs. The political platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties created often deep divisions on domestic policies, but these partisan policies normally did not transfer onto international issues. However, in the past few decades, this trend has deteriorated somewhat. In an increasingly polarized era, partisanship in the United States has crept into the debate on foreign policy. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that in fact, the US partisan politics does not stop at the water's edge today when it comes to foreign policy; rather, partisanship in foreign policy has risen since the end of World War II, and especially in the past 15 years. This project attempts to answer the following questions: first and most importantly, has partisanship in both houses of the Congress increased in foreign policy over the past sixty years? Second, if so, what has caused this rise in partisanship with regard to foreign policy issues in the United States? Third, is this a cyclical pattern or is it more related to trends over time? Methodologically, our findings will be mainly based on the careful study of key votes on foreign policy issues in Congress for every complete Congress in the post-World War II period. These key votes are selected by Congressional Quarterly annually as the most important votes in Congress for a given year. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]