The Quantitative Peace

While the IR people are away, the Americanists will play.

Editor's note: This is a guest post by Joshua N. Zingher, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Binghamton University. The content of this post is based on Josh's paper, ‘An Analysis of the Changing Social Bases of America's Political Parties: 1952-2008’, appearing in Electoral Studies. This piece is cross-posted at the London School of Economics' USAPP Blog, which can be found here. 

 

Demographic changes mean that traditional Republican constituencies are shrinking as the Democrats’ grow.

It is difficult to discuss electoral politics in the United States without talking in terms of social groups.  Journalistic accounts of party competition often stress the important role that specific constituencies play (such as the “evangelical” or “Latino” vote) in determining the outcome of presidential elections.  A great deal of political science research has shown that these social cleavages structure party competition.  However, the political importance of these social cleavages can change, which can lead to a reshuffling of the social bases of the party coalitions.  In addition, demographic changes also have the potential to dramatically reshape the political landscape, as new groups enter the electorate and the ratio of existing groups’ changes.  I am interested in how changes in the cleavage structure and changes in the ratio of groups work in conjunction to transform electoral coalitions.  In new research, I investigated two related questions: what group memberships influence individual level voting behavior and how has the number of votes each political relevant group contributes to the party coalitions changed over time?

 

Identifying the Group Bases of Party Support 

So what groups are politically relevant?  To answer this question, I conduct a multivariate statistical analysis utilizing nearly 60 years of American National Election Survey (ANES) spanning 1952 to 2008.  I utilized group memberships as independent variables and vote choice as the dependent variable.  The battery of group memberships included variables for class, race, ethnicity, region, education, birth cohort and age. I define politically relevant group memberships as those that exert a statistically significant influence on individual level vote choice.  I ran a separate regression for each decade, which allowed me to assess whether the effect of specific group memberships have changed over time.  The substantive results of these models are displayed in Figure 1 below.

 

Figure 1 – Predicted effect of group membership on vote choice in presidential elections

 

 

The results of the analysis displayed in Figure 1 demonstrate that the following group memberships lead individuals to be consistently and statistically significantly more likely to support one party over the other: 

 

Table 1: The Core Democratic and Republican Social Groups 

Democratic Groups	Republican Groups
African Americans	Whites
Latinos	Protestants
Catholics	Weekly Church Attendees
Union Members	Southern Whites
Non-Religious	Men
College Graduates
Women Jews

 

This analysis highlights the continuity and change that characterizes the parties’ social bases.  Some groups have been stable members of a party coalition for the last 60 years.  African Americans, Catholics, union members and Jews have all been consistent members of the Democratic coalition while whites and Protestants have reliably favored the Republicans. 

Yet, other groups’ political leanings have changed considerably.  Whites in the Southern United States were once reliably Democratic voters; today they are one of the most solidly Republican constituencies.  The divide between the religiously devout and the secular has also become more politically important in recent elections.  Non-religious voters have become increasingly likely to vote for Democratic candidates while weekly church attendees have become more likely to support Republicans.  Similarly, a partisan “gender gap” emerged in the 1980s.  Men have become significantly more likely to vote for Republican candidates while women have become more likely to support Democrats.  In sum, many traditionally politically important social cleavages have endured (e.g. black/white) while other cleavages have become politically important only in recent decades (secular/religious or female/male).

           

Group Contributions and the Importance of Demographic Changes

The preceding analysis established what group memberships significantly influence vote choice, however, simply understanding what group memberships shape individual level voting behavior paints an incomplete picture of electoral change.  Winning an election is not about having core groups of loyal supporters.  Rather, parties must be able to obtain a majority of votes in order to win elections.  Thus, any process that leads to a party gaining more or less from a specific social group is potentially politically consequential.  Figures 2 and 3 show my calculations for each group’s contribution to the Democrats’ and Republicans’ party coalitions, as measured as a proportion of the party’s total votes. There have been considerable changes in the size of group contributions to the party coalitions—many of which highlight the important role that demographic shifts play in reshaping the party coalitions. 

 

Figure 2 - Group contribution as a proportion of Democrats’ total votes: 1952-2008

 

 

Figure 3 - Group contribution as a Proportion of Republicans’ total votes: 1952-2008

 

The Democratic Party has been obtaining an increasing proportion of its support from groups that are growing as proportion of the electorate, such as Latinos, college graduates and the non-religious. In addition, increasing turnout among Latinos and African Americans has also led to the size of these groups’ contributions to the Democratic coalition.  The Republican Party is being forced to confront the opposite scenario—many Republican groups, whites, Protestants and weekly church attendees, are making up a continuously shrinking proportion of the electorate.  Thus far, the Republican Party has been able to offset demographic changes via high turnout among their core groups as well as through winning an increasingly large majority of the Southern white vote.

So what are the conclusions can be drawn from this analysis? Firstly, the group sources of party support are dynamic, the political relevance of certain social cleavages ebb and flow across decades, which is evidenced by the changing relationship between group membership and vote choice.  Secondly, demographic changes can be politically consequential.  The Republican Party is currently in the undesirable position of having to find new sources of electoral support in order to remain viable in future elections.  The Republican Party’s need to find new sources of electoral support has come about not as a result of the loss of electoral support among loyal groups—rather, the Republican Party must find new sources of electoral support simply because traditionally Republican constituencies are making up a shrinking proportion of the electorate.     

 

 

 

On Hegemons and Trade (Part I): Origins

I am currently in the process of entirely rewriting and redesigning one of my earliest academic papers that I want to update with the context of better data and methods in evaluating the hypotheses I initially proposed. That is, I am writing the same paper a second time.  As part of this process, I am revisiting some classic works on the topic of Hegemonic Stability Theory. Consequently, this is part one of a multi-stage blog post series.  Part 1 of the project deals with the origins of Hegemonic Stability Theory, Part 2 will dig into the advancements in the theory in the 1980s and 1990s, and Part 3 discusses the empirical record for the topic.  

*****

Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST) contains a set of different authors who propose that a state that is dominant internationally has the capacity to make particular rules, norms, and institutions that guide the course of international relations.  The theories often articulate that a unipolar system is unique and the enabling condition of unipolarity cannot, or is unlikely to, manifest in multipolar systems.  The outcomes of interest for theorists of global power preponderance theories vary with popular topics including trade, war, and the creation and maintenance of international regimes.  For the context of this series of posts, I am focusing on the trade-related theory of hegemony as it has been developed in political science and economics.

The concept of hegemony itself is a loaded term that has many different meanings for different scholars and schools of thought.  Rather than give a precise definition now, I will generally refer to it as a state that has global dominance in military, economic, and financial power. Throughout this post, I have included the CINC scores for major powers from 1816-2007.  Naturally, CINC scores are imperfect for several different reasons depending on the context in which they are used. In the case of hegemony, they may be best apt for gauging some level of military power, but are insufficient to capture the other aspects of global hegemony that are important. For the rest of this series, I will be using hegemon, unipolarity, and preponderance of power as synonyms.  Having a more refined sense of when we know we have hegemony and when we do not is a task better suited for the third part of this series. 

The idea that the hegemon under unipolarity is afforded special privileges that other states do not have is not unique to scholarship in the latter half of the 20th century (for example, Hirschman's 1945 book), nor the 20th century alone, but much of the principle tenants of the theory solidify under scholars examining the topic.  Specifically, the 1970s offered two major advancements in the theory in the work done by Kindleberger and Krasner. The former developing a thread of HST that is best described as "Leadership Theory" within HST and the latter offering a Structural Theory of HST. 

Kindleberger's (1979) foundational work, The World in Depression, is an ambitious scholarly undertaking to identify the key international and domestic causes of the great depression. Fundamentally, for Kindleberger, stability in the international system is provided by a dominant power that can maintain the rules of the system and provide the incentives necessary to encourage states to behave in a way that is conducive to liberalization and integration.  The interwar period offers a unique period of transition as there are two possible actors that could fulfill this role: Great Britain and the United States.  Great Britain has the willingness to be the leader, but lacks the capability to do so (Great Britain acts in the appropriate manner in the 1920s, but, according to Kindleberger, it becomes evident in 1931 that the British are unable to provide the necessary leadership to maintain stability). The United States has the capability, but lacks the domestic willingness to do what is necessary to prevent a race towards retrenchment in globalization.  Specifically, Kindleberger highlights five necessary behaviors for a hegemon to encourage stability (p. 289):

1. maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods;
2. providing countercyclical, or at least sable, long-term lending;
3. policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates;
4. ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies
5. acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in financial crisis.

He follows this list with the explicit statment of "These functions, I believe, must be organized and carried out by a single coutnry that assumes responsibilty for the system" (Kindleberger 1973, p. 283). After going through each of these five points, Kindleberger comments on the contemporary hegemonic decline of the 1970s and prospects for US leadership in the 1980s and 1990s. 

 

 

Krasner's branch of HST comes from his 1976 article titled "State Power and the Structure of International Trade." The structural view of HST asserts that it is not a function of willingness that determines liberalizing behavior in regards to trade, but it is a product of a state's position in the international system.  Fundamentally, and contrary to Kindleberger, capability breeds willingness.  Explicitly, a state in a privileged position in the international system ought to seek global liberalization of trade policies as such policies necessarily advantage its strategic global position.  It becomes part of the state's national interest to encourage free trade.  Beyond having a national willingness for trade liberalization, it would necessarily have the ability to encourage the system as well. Krasner argues that the hegemon has an array of positive and negative incentives, including offering access to competitive markets, providing cheap goods, encouraging other states to outcompete and ruin the business recalcitrant states, and withholding aid/grants/loans (p. 322-323). 

Thus, for Krasner, the 19th century and post-WWII bouts of liberalization were products of hegemonic dominance while the interwar period was marked by uneven multipolarity.  For Kindleberger, leadership marks the 19th and latter half of the 20th century, while the interwar period lacked a state willing and capable of providing hegemonic leadership.  The two different veins of HST create a possible conundrum for empirical scholarship as deriving testable implications may rely on definitional issues of hegemony.  Since, as social scientists, we are interested in causal determinants of behavior, it becomes hard to pinpoint the effects of HST if part of knowing whether there is a hegemon in the first place is that a state is acting hegemonic.  Finding other measures to predict hegemonic behavior becomes part of the task. In the structural sense, we should expect a dominance of power to lead to a willingness for hegemonic behavior; however, for Kindleberger and leadership theory, we may not be able to predict willingness for hegemony until we see hegemony.  

 

A few notes. First, both authors are writing in a time where the decline of the United States seemed evident to scholars and non-scholars alike.  Powerful states, especially the winners of World War II, had created powerful institutions that seemed to guide world politics to a degree that transcended mere state-base perceptions of International Relations.  Naturally, with a perceived decline of the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, trying to figure out how the state of international affairs would change, warp, or collapse was important.  Would hegemonic institutions endure? Would a leader that was incentive-compatible with the United States emerge and lead to a peaceful transition?  Would Japan/Germany become the new global financial centers?  The debates surrounding hegemonic stability theory escalated from this point and remained healthy throughout the 1980s.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, questions about US decline halted for the unipolar moment and other questions of hegemony emerged.  We will turn to the expansions of both authors' work in the second installment of this discussion.

 

 

A second note: Krasner does allow for non-hegemonic configurations to encourage liberalization. A common misconception is that hegemony is conducive to trade, but other configurations are not, In the original 1976 piece, he argues "Let us consider a system composed of a large number of small, highly developed states.  Such a  system is likely to lead to an open international trading structure. The aggregate income and economic growth of each state are increased by an open system..." (p. 321). Thus, in a multipolar world dominated by highly industrialized states, a push for liberalization may emerge.  Of course, he goes on to argue that a system composed of a small number of large, asymmetrically developed states would lead to protectionist behavior and norms.  This creates the following table of possible system configurations on page 323: 

Finally, in Krasner's original article, he concludes, after examining qualitative and quantitative evidence of trade-related behavior under different configurations of world power, that a simple measure of power is insufficient to understand hegemonic pressures on liberalization. Instead, periods of increased integration occur after shocks to the system encourage a change in behavior by the dominant state. This clarification of temporal shocks does become become important when we evaluate attempts to test Hegemonic Stability Theory.

Political Science and Scientists in the News

Just a quick link to this Atlantic article. It features several works by political scientists on why and when the public is likely to support military action. Complete with graphs and everything. 

 

*Picture taken from the aforementioned and linked Atlantic article. 

Follow-up

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday's post. Chad sent me a link to this paper that was recently posted on AJPS' early view. I've not read the entire article yet, but it seems apropos given the subject matter of yesterday's piece. 

History vs. Political Science? Temporally Constrained Studies and Generalizability.

So this is my first post back from a prolonged break. As I mentioned in a previous—albeit brief—entry, I’ve had a busy but enjoyable summer. I got married, defended my dissertation at the beginning of July, and my wife and I have since relocated to Tuscaloosa, Alabama where I’ve accepted a position as a post-doc. We’re both pretty excited about the move and we’re really enjoying ourselves. Having grown up in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, summers that extend beyond a two month window have a certain appeal. And now that we’re getting settled in down here, I’m slowly getting back into a routine for work. I’ve been sitting on some papers for a while now that I’m finally turning my attention to, and it’s my experience with one of these papers that motivated me to write this particular post.

I’ve been thinking recently about how we view the place that history holds in our discipline. Now, I suspect there is an initial reaction that many people (particularly quantitative political scientists) are likely to have to the word “history,” and I’m guessing that is probably one of derision. It’s not that political scientists necessarily dislike history or historians, but this reaction is conceivable given that these disciplines are marked by some important epistemological differences, and many quantitative political scientists are often taught from the outset to avoid relying on single cases when drawing more generalizable lessons and conclusions (with good reason). When we think of historians, it is often in the context of someone who provides an excruciating level of detail about one particular event, and then tries to explain its origins and broader implications/lessons. My issue is not in fact with this particular point—as social scientists, we want to be able to assess just how generalizable the relationships that we’re looking at really are. We are typically interested in exploring systematic relationships, trends, and patterns that hold over broader periods of time and apply to a wide range of actors than are many historical studies. So to be clear from the outset, I am not advocating that quantitative political science should attempt to emulate the professional approach or methods that many historians employ.

My issue, really, stems more from the assertion by many quantitative political scientists that a study that is time bound in some way is “history”. This does not apply to all political scientists, but it’s been my experience that reviewers will often look at the temporal range of a study and dismiss its if it is explicitly bound to a particular period of time that does not overlap with the present (allowing a few years of slack on just what constitutes the “present”, that is). Indeed, some seem to be under the impression that it’s not even political science if the gap between the time period covered by a study and the present is sufficiently large. For example, let’s say I’m interested in understanding the domestic determinants of pre-hegemonic US foreign policy behavior. In this particular instance, there are theoretical reasons to suppose that the behavior of the US could be different in this time period as compared to later periods. Let’s further suppose that I have theoretical expectations regarding the relationship between X and Y, and I write a paper on this relationship for the period between 1900 and 1945. I would not at all be surprised to receive reviews rejecting the paper at least in part because the reviewer(s) questioned the study’s broader relevance, given that it’s bound to a 46-year time period.  

I think these sorts of reactions expose some problems and some important assumptions that we often make as political scientists. First, not every study necessarily needs to neatly map onto the present time period—or any other arbitrarily chosen time period. There is nothing inherently unscientific about the notion that certain relationships or phenomena can only be found in a particular temporal context. I’m fairly certain people have not abandoned the study of dinosaurs simply because we no longer see T-Rex roaming around the countryside. And our field is rife with examples of research, the temporal context of which is fundamentally limited in some way. Scholars of American politics provide perhaps the clearest example of an entire sub-field that cannot be held to apply to a period extending back beyond 1789. The sub-field of international relations is similarly dependent in many ways upon the existence of the modern nation-state, which we typically trace back to 1648, and some of the most widely used only go back to 1815. Do we consider our endeavors in these areas “history” because our studies are bound to these time periods?

Also on this point, there seems to be a double standard when we consider the broader implications of our research. Taking my example from earlier, reviewers will commonly ask how the study of US foreign policy between 1900 and 1945 is relevant for today, but rarely do we consider how a study of US foreign policy from 1945–2013 informs our understanding of the 1900–1945 period. It strikes me that this is (1) perpetually moving the goalpost, and (2) that it may be the wrong goalpost. This may seem like an odd point, but what it “relevant” by current standards is something that obviously changes on a day-to-day basis, and it’s a standard that says nothing about the quality of a paper as a piece of social science, or whether or not a paper helps us to understand a particular question about a given set of relationships. Really, this only represents our own innate temporal biases, but it says nothing about how scientific a piece of research is.  If the goal is truly generalizable theoretical and empirical knowledge, in a temporal sense, then this kind of consideration should apply just as much as thinking about how a study informs our understanding of the present. Conducting a study with the purpose of expanding our knowledge of systematic relationships between societal actors is not synonymous with expanding our knowledge of systematic relationships between societal actors for the purposes of informing our understanding of the present.

And it’s not as though we don’t attempt to deal with “unique” time periods and cases in our current research. However, it’s often the case that the manner in which we deal with these cases is fairly crude. For example, we might include a dummy variable in a model to control for a time period (or characteristics of a time period) that we believe to be unique in some way. Bipolarity during the Cold War, for example. Similarly, we might include a dummy variable in our model to control for states that we believe to be unique—depending on our topic, it might be a state like Israel, Egypt, the US, or maybe a group of states like the “Great Powers”. Sometimes we might also include an interaction term to account for how the effect of one variable might be conditional upon another. 

But these approaches are not always appropriate methods for dealing with the questions that we want to answer. Dummying out a particular time period is only going to tell us whether or not a given time period or group has a higher or lower intercept than the alternative time period or group. This approach is also often atheoretical. For example, we might have a belief that a time period is somehow different, but cannot fully articulate why or how. Similarly, interaction terms with a variable capturing a particular time period, for example, are implicitly suggesting that a given relationship is time-bound in some way. However, these approaches don’t allow us to examine whether or not the remaining variables in our models also have different effects in the context of a particular time period. For example, maybe we’re interested in whether or not both regime type and economic interests have a different effect on conflict propensity during the Cold War as compared to after. This, then, would suggest that maybe splitting our sample into two time periods is the more appropriate means of addressing our question. In fact, the notion that we would dummy out a particular time period because we suspect that it’s “different” in some way, but don’t exactly know how, is exactly the reason why we would want to conduct a study that is temporally bound in the first place.

This points to another issue. I think these biases are somewhat rooted in, and reinforced by, our relatively limited access to “good” data. Almost every journal article contains passages wherein the authors attempt to assert the broader relevance of their work. In the case of international relations, it is also quite common for these articles to then proceed to test their arguments using data that is only available for the post-World War II period. Sometimes, these tests will use data for a single country—often the US. Yet the arguments the authors make are often asserted as applicable to a broader set of countries than just the US, and rarely do such papers even address their own temporal limitations. We implicitly accept the generalizability of papers in which the tests of broader theoretical arguments rely on data from an incredibly narrow and often unrepresentative set of states, but push back when a study openly acknowledges its more narrow temporal confines. Why should we automatically assume that such studies inform our understanding of international relations and state behavior in the 1800s?

This is understandable. Particularly in the field of international relations, the availability of data is exponentially greater in the post-World War II period than before. Commonly used indicators like GDP and trade either don’t exist, are often missing, or are highly inaccurate for earlier time periods. Accordingly, many of our studies focus on this 50–60 year time period—not because it somehow matters more, or because we are interested only in this particular time period, but because this is the period for which we have access to relatively abundant data sources. But even in the post-World War II time period some of the data we use can still be of questionable reliability. Accordingly, when we see an article that focuses on a much earlier time period it sticks out like a sore thumb, and reviewers will often proceed to subject that paper to a different standard than other papers—a standard that really has nothing to do with the execution of the paper or the soundness of its argument.

This knee-jerk reaction against studies that are temporally bound in some way can also have deleterious consequences for our ability to understand the world. Finding that a particular relationship between two variables holds only for a given time period can reveal new and interesting questions. For example, we have evidence that Republicans and Democrats have switched their positions on military spending over the course of the Cold War. If we were looking for a relationship between Republicans and higher military spending over the entirety of this time period, we might erroneously conclude that there is no relationship. Alternatively, the finding that this relationship is temporally bound in some way raises new questions: Why did they switch? What caused the switch? Etc.

If our goal is to continuously develop and refine our understanding of how the world works then we must think carefully about the standards we set. If that standard is that we must only examine relationships that hold for centuries at a time, then we are imposing some very serious limitations on ourselves as researchers. These kinds of “big” systematic relationships are clearly important, but the march of scientific progress is not marked exclusively in these terms. 

Chuck Hagel and Bipartisanship in Foreign Policy

The news surrounding Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan as Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA (respectively) has primarily been focused on the "controversial" Hagel's previous statements and positions. Republican commentators have been complaining about Hagel's nomination, claiming that his nomination sends a powerful signal that the Obama administration is putting more "daylight" between the US and Israel, among other things. Steve Clemmons at The Atlantic has also reviewed several arguments for and against Hagel's nomination. The turf on that subject has already been covered pretty thoroughly, so I'll leave the issue be for now. What has received less attention, however, is that Hagel's nomination represents a continuation of a fairly long history of Democrats appointing Republicans to positions within the foreign policy bureaucracy. 

In 1940 FDR appointed Henry Stimson and Frank Knox—both Republicans—to be his Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy (again, respectively). Stimson's appointment in particular is generally regarded as marking the onset of the bipartisan consensus that characterized the early Cold War period. Having previously served as Secretary of State under President Hoover and Secretary of War under Taft, Stimson was already a widely recognized figure in the foreign policymaking community (such as it was back then). Along with Stimson came John McCloy and Robert Lovett, both of whom were also Republicans and both of whom served as Stimson's assistants in the War Department.

By bringing these Republicans into his administration, Roosevelt was attempting to build support among opposition Republicans for increasing US activism in World War II. Primarily this encompassed moderate internationalist Republicans from the Northeast. Even prior to his nomination, Stimson and his mentor, Elihu Root, himself previously a Secretary of War and Secretary of State, had petitioned Congressional leadership to introduce some form of draft bill to prepare the US for involvement in the growing conflicts in Europe and East Asia. Stimson and Root had both been devout internationalists in the years leading up to the Second World War, and their appointment marked what many historians have labeled as the beginning of the "Eastern Establishment" in foreign policymaking. The Establishment narrative, broadly speaking, tends to emphasize bipartisanship in the foreign policy bureaucracy specifically, but it also encompasses themes of elite influence, economic interests, and political polarization in foreign policymaking.

This general narrative has been present for several decades in the US foreign policy literature, but it's largely been isolated to the qualitative political science and historical literatures. Quantitative political science research has delved into the more narrow issue of bipartisanship, but these studies have tended to focus on Congress. Accordingly, the central focus of this large body of work has gone unexamined in a systematic sense, and part of my dissertation research has attempted to address this gap. This is really all a long-winded way of saying that the Hagel nomination provides me with a timely opportunity to briefly share some of my work on the subject. Though I don't want to give away the farm here, this seems like a fine time to chime in. 

Despite the recognition that the foreign policy bureaucracy—indeed, the bureaucracy more broadly—plays a fairly prominent role in the policymaking process, we don't really have much in the way of systematic quantitative research on the subject. I've tried to get at some of these issues in my dissertation by collecting some new data on appointees to foreign policymaking positions within the foreign policy bureaucracy. I primarily focus on the State Department and the Defense Department, but I also focus on some other agencies like the CIA. In total, I've collected data on some 1,000+ individuals serving in these posts from 1948 through the present. One of the primary characteristics that I coded for each individual was what, if any, party affiliation that individual had. As a way to get at trends in bipartisanship within the foreign policy bureaucracy, the graph below shows the percentage of appointments included in the data set that are bipartisan in nature.* 

Some interesting points: Perhaps not surprisingly, the Truman administration represents an all-time high in the data. This is partially a function of the fact that Truman inherited many of FDR's appointments, but it's also partially due to the fact that the foreign policy bureaucracy was undergoing some pretty radical changes during this time period. In particular, the size of these agencies grew dramatically during the World War II period. Coding rules are also partially responsible, as I focused on individuals occupying positions at the assistant secretary level and up (where appropriate). By the early to mid-1950s, however, the rate of growth slows a bit and, while still increasing in size, it does so more slowly than in the first few years of the Cold War. The crash at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration might reflect some of the antics of Joseph McCarthy and Secretary Dulles, both of whom were more than a little keen to go after anyone remotely suspected of being communists. It could also be a function of the Republicans having been out of power for about two decades. Also of note, the late 1970s do see a slight slump in the level of bipartisanship, which is potentially in line with arguments concerning the impact of Vietnam on bipartisanship more generally. The Clinton administration sees a fairly sharp spike near the end, and the Bush administration also sees a dip in its later years, while the incoming Obama administration sees a slight increase.

More broadly, the work that I've done so far suggests a few general trends. First, I find some evidence that, all else equal, Democrats tend to be more likely than Republicans to make bipartisan appointments to the foreign policy bureaucracy—Even controlling for the Truman administration. Other models suggest this difference is more acute in the early Cold War period (again, also while controlling for Truman). Additionally, I also find some evidence to support the conventional wisdom concerning the use of bipartisan appointments as a means of building moderate coalitions and as a response to domestic political conditions. In particular Congressional support matters, but is perhaps a little more nuanced than the historical accounts often suggest, as the availability of moderates in Congress also seems to condition this relationship. It also appears as though Presidents make these appointments with an eye towards governing more broadly, as the composition of the Senate alone appears to have little impact.

So what? Well, with respect to current news my work would suggest that Obama's retention of Bob Gates and his appointment of Chuck Hagel are actually very much in line with broader trends in Democratic foreign policy appointments since World War II. Robert Lovett—formerly Stimson's assistant at the War Department—went on to serve as Truman's Secretary of Defense. Kennedy subsequently offered Lovett his choice of State, Defense, and Treasury. Though Lovett turned him down, Kennedy did end up appointing Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy—both Republicans—to important posts. While there are certainly other lesser-known bipartisan appointees, these folks are some of the more prominent. Furthermore, these trends emerged well before the Republicans had fully taken on the identity of the party of national security. Still, even in the early Cold War period the Republicans did attack Democrats for being soft on Communism, so this vulnerability was present in some incarnation. Accordingly, Democratic administrations perhaps had more to gain from trying to draw in Republicans than vice versa, as such appointments could confer some measure of credibility. 

Moving forward it will be interesting to see how these trends continue to develop. Despite the much publicized opposition to Hagel's appointment it is entirely possible that this is just media hype and Republican chest-thumping. David Karol at the Monkey Cage recently wrote about the House Republicans' position-taking when voting on the recent Fiscal Cliff deal. So it's easy to imagine that the Republican outcry over Hagel's nomination is really going to wither when it comes time for the Senate to vote. Though these situations are not completely comparable, giving Obama a hard time seems to be a means of gaining currency in the Republican Party these days. Beyond the current confirmation battle, much of this will depend on how the current debate over the GOP's foreign policy positions pans out (see Drezner's latest Foreign Affairs piece, for example). If the Democrats manage to become the party of national security moving forward, perhaps we might see a reversal of these trends. Given the current Republican field, however, I wouldn't hold my breath.**

 * Given that none of this work/data is published (yet?) please don't cite this post or data. I'm still very much hoping to update and improve this material as I go. I guess this is kind of the norm, right?

** In the off chance that anyone comments, please be aware that I have had trouble leaving comments in the recent past. On the rare occasion that we do get feedback, I feel rude not replying, so apologies in advance if this should happen.

Bureaucratic Politics, Interservice Rivalries, and The Galactic Empire

The fact that this post follows so closely on the heels of my recent post regarding the sparseness of posts over the next couple of months should in no way be taken as negating my previous point. That said, Steve Saideman at the Duck has linked to this fairly lengthy piece on the role of inter-service rivalries in bringing about the downfall of the Galactic Empire. I will say that I have not had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but given that I 1) am a Star Wars enthusiast, and 2) have done work on inter-service rivalries, I find this to be potentially interesting. 

That is all.

Human Rights and NGOs

I've been working recently on quite a few projects that deal with human rights and NGOs, and today's BBC podcast has quite a bit of material that is relevant to these topics. 

First, there's a story regarding a new law that is being debated in Russia that would require NGOs receiving funding from external sources to label themselves as "foreign agents" in all of their state documentation and internet materials. The law would also increase the amount of bookkeeping required by the Russian government to allow NGOs to operate within Russia. Failure to abide by the new law's requirements would result in fines and a possible two-year jail sentence. This measure comes on the heals of more of Putin's shenanigans (see here and here). The BBC segment has some interesting interviews with Russian MPs, who justify the legislation on the grounds that NGOs are acting at the behest of Western and US interests in an effort to undermine Russian democracy. 

The second segment of interest concerns the disappearance and execution of people during the 1970s by the military government in Argentina. I've just spent a bit of time reading Keck and Sikkink's 1998 book, Activists Beyond Borders. It just so happens that the authors have a nice and concise account of the role played by NGOs in exposing the activities of the military government during this time period—one that I found myself drawing upon only yesterday. The BBC segment expands a bit upon the details concerning disappearances involving young pregnant women, and the details are both interesting and appalling. Essentially, women were kidnapped, but the authorities often waiting until the women gave birth before executing them. The babies were subsequently handled in a variety of ways, but apparently many children were dropped off at hospitals, while many others were adopted by military families. 

Military Capabilities

Phil Arena has a very cool post up wherein he explores a potential alternative to the ubiquitous CINC score for measuring military capabilities. This strikes me as something that is long overdue.  And there are a couple of things that I like about the measure just from taking a quick glance at it. First, given that China just launched its first aircraft carrier, which is actually a refurbished Soviet carrier if I recall correctly, I think the notion that China has already surpassed the US in terms of military capabilities is a big pill to swallow. Second, just glancing at his figures for European powers during the late 19th century, Phil's measure looks more noisy, which in truth is kind of what I'd actually expect to see. The CINC measure makes there appear to be a lot more stability than I would expect to come along with a period where many of these European powers are vying for access to colonial possessions, foreign markets, etc. Furthermore, there were definite differences in terms of how each of these countries allocated their military resources. England certainly had the dominant navy during the late 1800s, but countries like France, Germany, and Russia had advantages in terms of their ability to field ground forces that the British just didn't possess.  

As Phil mentions, the measure may need some further development, but I still think this is really neat. 

On the Utility of IR Research

At the Duck of Minerva, Josh Busby has a post on the gap between political science research/IR and the policymaking community. I don't have a whole lot to say about the specific content of Busby's post, aside from the fact that I think this is an interesting an important debate to have. (Also, please note that the links in the quotations were provided in Busby's original post).