The domestic politics of defense in the U.S. Congress
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The US defense budget is one of the few pieces of legislation that regularly passes the US Congress, but current scholarship in American politics and US foreign policy struggle to explain precisely why this happens. Existing theories of Congressional behavior that explain other issue areas— like the influence of a member's districts or his or her personal history— have a history of null results when applied to defense votes. My dissertation addresses the question of why the US defense budget is so popular in Congress, and how this varies across members and time. I decompose support for the defense budget into a member's engagement, or work on this issue, and their voting record, and show that existing theories explain well members' engagement— members with military industry in their district tend to work on defense issues more than other members— but does not explain a members' vote pattern. This is largely because of the large number of unengaged congressmembers who vote in favor of defense bills despite not having these characteristics. I suggest that this occurs because members of Congress are concerned about the domestic political consequences of being labeled soft on defense, and engage in strategic voting in support of defense, particularly in times of national threat. I use survey experiments and 80 years of Congressional behavior to support this claim. My final paper compares two instances in which soft on defense criticism were used to change the politics of missile defense and demonstrates how a perception of threat in Congress is a precondition for this effect.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Matchett, Leah Katherine |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Sagan, Scott Douglas |
| Thesis advisor | Sagan, Scott Douglas |
| Thesis advisor | Grimmer, Justin |
| Thesis advisor | Schultz, Kenneth A |
| Degree committee member | Grimmer, Justin |
| Degree committee member | Schultz, Kenneth A |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Leah Matchett. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/st060vr1951 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Leah Katherine Matchett
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...