アメリカ対外政策の継続と民主制度

抄録

  The United States responded to the end of the Cold War by promoting trade with regimes that adopted market-oriented reforms but investing in weapons development to maintain superiority over non-democratizing military powers. This policy was sustained in Congress in spite of majority Party changes, divided government, and economic swings. This article constructs a framework that incorporates Presidential agenda setting, partisan debates over control of the agenda, and ideological overlap between the parties to identify the lawmakers behind this policy. This framework builds on Tsebelis’ veto player theory, which includes both institutional veto points and partisan veto players, and predicts voting patterns that differ from Krehbiel's pivotal politics model (focusing exclusively on institutional veto points), Cox and McCubbins’ partisan agenda model (examining only partisan veto players), or the two presidency thesis (emphasizing Presidential agenda setting). The framework is then applied to understand Congressional foreign policy voting patterns. An analysis of Congressional bills and resolutions on China trade, defense spending, and missile defense spending shows voting patterns that are in line with the predictions from this framework, rather than existing models and suggests that stable support for the above policy comes from a bipartisan, pro-business, and President-supportive group of lawmakers.