Bipartisanship, Partisanship, and Ideology in Congressional-Executive Foreign Policy Relations, 1947-1988

This paper examines two perspectives on the nature of congressional-executive relations in the making of American foreign policy: the bipartisan perspective, which says that politics stops at the water's edge, and the political perspective, which sees foreign policy as subject to the same partisan and ideological disputes that characterize domestic policy-making. The results demonstrate that the bipartisan perspective applies best to the Cold War years, and that the political perspective applies throughout the postwar era. The Vietnam War, hypothesized to have been a major catalyst in the breakdown of a bipartisan approach to foreign policy, cannot be shown to have produced a major watershed in the postwar record.