We are delighted to welcome this guest post from Philip Potter of the University of Michigan.
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With the election just days away, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. What policies are we likely to actually see after the confetti falls and a concession speech is made? Over the last several years I’ve been working on a series of projects exploring the relationship between elections and foreign policy, and they point to a couple patterns worth keeping an eye on.
The first is relevant regardless of whether Obama or Romney wins. The margin by which a candidate wins has a systematic effect on the president’s agenda (article here).
While I’d argue it’s impossible to discern a “mandate” for a specific course of action from an aggregate vote (although the winning campaign will almost certainly try to tell us that they can do precisely that), margins do influence presidential power at the all-important outset of a term. Presidents who win by a lot generally use this power to pursue their domestic agendas because the rewards are higher. Those who win by a little are forced into the less constrained (but also less rewarding realm) of foreign policy.
Within foreign policy there are further distinctions between those who win by a lot and those who win by a little. Specifically, presidents emboldened by the power that comes from a significant margin of victory are more prone to deploy major military force. In contrast, weak presidents have a tendency toward more minor interventions and diplomacy.
Regardless of what one thinks about the likely outcome of Tuesday’s presidential vote, no one is predicting a blowout. This means that we should anticipate a relatively weak president at the outset of the term, and correspondingly constrained policymaking. If government is divided, as is expected, the effect will be magnified. In this environment, ambitious domestic achievements will be hard to come by, as will substantial uses of force in places like Iran and Syria. Of course, the impending sequestration showdown may provide some important leverage for the next president that wouldn’t otherwise be there, and we’ll likely see some important changes, one way or the other, on the domestic side as a result. However, as political scientists, we tend to be more fascinated by the underlying regularities than the exceptions to the rule.
The second of these systematic forces that I think is worth keeping an eye on is the unfortunate reality that new administrations tend to make foreign policy mistakes (article here). If Romney wins the election, we’ll have a president with essentially no foreign policy experience, a new and untested management structure for a new administration, and upheaval throughout the foreign policy bureaucracy as appointees are replaced. Historically, this process has been associated with an uptick in foreign policy crises for the United States.
Presidents accrue foreign policy expertise relatively slowly, which shows up in the finding that second term presidents are substantially less crisis-prone than those in their first term. The nitty-gritty empirics are in the paper, but the short story is that this experience translates into about 1.2 fewer crises over the course of a hypothetical second term. Not huge, but still meaningful given that these are relatively rare, significant, and destabilizing events.
Inevitably, unforeseeable events will intervene and shape the course of the next term for whoever occupies the Oval Office. G. W. Bush, for example, initially behaved like exactly the sort of weakened president one would anticipate after the historically tight 2000 election. Then 9/11 then radically altered the trajectory of his presidency. That said, it’s worth understanding the systematic forces that are at play so that we can better anticipate what the next four years are likely to look like from a foreign policy perspective.