The Origins of Congressional Messaging on Foreign Affairs

• In Event: Congress and Foreign Policy

Abstract

Why does Congress sometimes hold its collective tongue on foreign affairs, and at other times actively engage it? I present a theory built upon original interviews with congressional staff of how legislators balance ideological preferences and partisan incentives as they consider publicly messaging about presidential foreign policy. Following from the observation that legislators’ party and foreign policy preferences are associated in a polarized Congress, I argue that these dual incentives predictably determine collective congressional messaging on foreign policy. Drawing upon an original corpus of thousands of manually collected and classified legislator press releases responding to major presidential foreign policies from 2007-2022, the article presents two sets of findings. First, the configuration of ideology and party ties shapes when individual legislators speak up about foreign policy, and what they say when they do. Second, the connection between a president’s party and the substance of the policy pushes Congress towards one of two idealized collective messaging environments, which I dub Vocal and Equivocal. Taken together, findings present implications for our understanding of patterns of American foreign policymaking and partisan polarization on issues beyond the water’s edge.

Author

• Andrew Michael Kenealy, Duke University