Congress, the President, and the End of the Cold War

Abstract

Many analysts believe that the end of the cold war will spark greater conflict between Congress and the president on foreign issues, thus further undermining the nation's political mythology that politics stops at the water's edge. The authors test that hypothesis using House of Representatives' support of presidents' foreign policy bids on prerogative power and defense budgeting issues during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Congresses (1983-1996). They also examine the votes of members of Congress whose careers bridged the cold war divide, asking whether the cold war's end shocked them into new forms of behavior. The authors conclude that conflict between Congress and the president has heightened in the post-cold war era, but the impact of the cold war's end is a less important explanation of executive-congressional contestation than members' role responsibilities and ideological preferences. Thus, the agenda of foreign policy issues may have changed with the end of the cold war, but the process of policy making has not.