All Talk, No Action? Evaluating Members of Congress’ Attention to Foreign Policy

Abstract

Scholars agree that U.S. foreign policy is an issue which offers little distributive benefits to members of Congress and over which the executive branch exerts strong policy leadership. This raises the question of why legislators continue to spend considerable time and effort on foreign affairs. I argue that specific institutional and personal factors such as outparty membership, ideological lean, and constituent representation explain why members focus on foreign policy. In particular, I expect outparty members to use the president’s ownership of foreign affairs for costless position-taking through rhetorical statements, whereas lawmakers with strong ideological preferences or those who have constituent groups with an interest in foreign affairs invest in sponsoring legislation and building coalitions of support. I utilize a novel dictionary of foreign policy-related words to operationalize member-level rhetoric in e-newsletters sent by members of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 111th to the 117th Congress, combining it with bill sponsorship data to create a unique dataset of issue attention. The results reveal a previously unknown party asymmetry, with Republicans being more attentive to foreign affairs on both rhetoric and bill sponsorship. Importantly, this effect is only partly the result of their outparty status, suggesting instead a case of “issue ownership” in foreign affairs. In addition, I show that both constituency interests as well as member background influence members’ attentiveness to foreign policy and trade. On trade as a more distributive issue, members of Congress’ exhibit pragmatic constituency-driven attentiveness. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the strategic calculations made by members of Congress in an executive-dominated policy area and builds on previous studies of asymmetric party politics and legislative representation.