do partisan types stop at the water’s edge? · do partisan types stop at the water’s edge?...
TRANSCRIPT
Do Partisan Types Stop at the Water’s Edge?
September 17, 2017
Joshua D. Kertzer,1 Stephen G. Brooks2 and Deborah Jordan Brooks.3
Abstract: Do distinctive “partisan types” exist in foreign policy? A growing number of analyses presumes that Democrats and Republicans in Washington are, in fact, seen by the public as systematically di↵ering across an array of foreign policy issues, with major implications for questions ranging from the future of liberal internationalism, to the ability of leaders to send credible signals by going against their party’s type. Yet there is a surprising absence of work that has investigated the microfoundations of partisan types — not just whether they exist in foreign a↵airs, but also how we know one when we see it. Building on a diverse body of literature on the structure and content of stereotypes in social psychology, we explore the scope conditions of partisan types using a national survey experiment, which finds that partisan types are greatly attenuated at the water’s edge; we also validate our findings by re-analyzing of a series of popularly used conflict datasets in IR. Our findings have important implications for a number of literatures, most notably those that examine “against type” models and the role of (bi)partisanship in foreign policy.
12543 words
For presentation at the University of Maryland IR Workshop. Thanks for reading!
Acknowledgments : Thanks to Perry Abdulkadir for research assistance, Ryan Brutger, Riley Carney, Jonathan Chu, Sarah Croco, Alex Debs, Micah Dillard, Susan Fiske, Joanne Gowa, Rick Herrmann, Leslie Johns, Rob Johns, Bob Keohane, Je↵ Kucik, Rick Lau, Ashley Leeds, Helen Milner, Jack Levy, Maggie Peters, Jonathan Renshon, Eliz- abeth Saunders, Rob Schub, Ken Schultz, Art Stein, Rachel Stein, Rob Trager, Mike Tomz, David Hunter Walsh, Jessica Weeks, Keren Yarhi-Milo, audiences at ISA, Peace Science, UCLA, Princeton, and Rutgers for helpful feedback, and to Jon Pevehouse for generously sharing his data.
1Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University, and Visiting Associate Research Scholar, Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, Princeton University. Email: [email protected]. Web: http:/people.fas.harvard.edu/˜jkertzer/
2Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College. Email: [email protected]. Web: http://dartmouth.edu/faculty-directory/stephen-g-brooks
3Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College. Email: [email protected]. Web: http://dartmouth.edu/faculty-directory/deborah-jordan-brooks
1
1 Introduction
Do the Democratic and Republican parties have distinctive types in foreign policy? A growing
amount of work on the domestic determinants of foreign policy and International Relations (IR)
presumes they do, arguing that Republicans are from Mars, and Democrats are from Venus: Repub-
licans are hawks, while Democrats are doves (Gries, 2014); Democrats favor working multilaterally,
while Republicans are more willing to go it alone (Rathbun, 2011); Republicans are more likely to
favor free trade, while Democrats are more likely to be protectionist (Milner and Judkins, 2004);
Democrats are “globalists” who value international institutions, while Republicans are nationalists
who prize sovereignty (Eichenberg, 2009); Republicans maintain that U.S. power depends greatly
on the possession of military might, while Democrats do not (Kupchan and Trubowitz, 2007b), and
so on.1 If foreign policy was once characterized by a bipartisan liberal internationalist consensus
— which Arthur M. Schlessinger, Jr. called “the vital center” (Schlesinger Jr., 1949) — it is now
commonly thought that the center no longer holds.2
Yet despite the frequency with which partisan types are invoked in the IR literature, there is
an absence of work that has investigated the microfoundations of partisan types in foreign policy,
explored their scope conditions, or rigorously conceptualized what a partisan type is in the first
place, and how we know one when we see it.3 We suspect the absence of systematic empirical work
on this issue should be surprising to many readers. There is a large body of scholarship on the role of
partisanship in public opinion about foreign policy, but it tends to focus on first-order beliefs (what
do Republicans and Democrats think about foreign policy?) rather than the second-order beliefs
inherent in partisan types (what do people think Republicans and Democrats think about foreign
policy?).4 Similarly, when IR scholars have studied stereotypes, they have tended to focus on the
mental images we have of international actors rather than of domestic ones.5 There is a massive 1Whereas IR scholars was once skeptical about the relevance of domestic politics given the ability of the interna-
tional system to “shape and shove” (e.g. Waltz, 1959), much of the debate has shifted from asking whether domestic politics matters to exploring how (e.g. Putnam, 1988; Simmons, 1994; Milner, 1997; Moravscik, 1997; Gowa, 1998; Fordham, 1998; Leeds, 1999; Boix, 2000; Levy and Mabe Jr., 2004; Rathbun, 2004; Davis, 2012; Chaudoin, Milner and Pang, 2015). It is in this tradition that this article is situated.
2Analysts positing that the foreign policy consensus has broken down include McCormick and Wittkopf (1992); Kupchan and Trubowitz (2007a,b); Busby and Monten (2008); Kupchan and Trubowitz (2010); Heilbrunn (2010); Bafumi and Parent (2012); Busby and Monten (2012); Hurst (2014); Mellow (2011); Krebs (2015). Dissenters include Chaudoin, Milner and Tingley (2010); Milner and Tingley (2015); Hurst and Wroe (2016).
3On the value of microfoundations in IR, see Kertzer (2017). 4See, e.g. Modigliani (1972); Holsti (1979); Hurwitz and Pe✏ey (1987); Holsti and Rosenau (1990); Wittkopf
(1990); Chittick, Billingsley and Travis (1995); Rathbun (2007); Kertzer (2013); Kertzer et al. (2014); Rathbun et al. (2016); for work in other countries, see Lai and Reiter (2005); Reifler, Scotto and Clarke (2011).
5See, e.g. work on image theory: Boulding 1959; Cottam 1977; Herrmann and Fischerkeller 1995; Herrmann 2003; Castano, Bonacossa and Gries 2016.
2
amount of research on party brands and issue ownership in American politics, but it tends to think
primarily about party reputations in terms of a reputation for competence on a particular issue,
rather than issue positions per se.6
Assessing the scope of partisan types in foreign policy has important stakes for two di↵erent
bodies of literature. First, whether because of American hegemony, embedded liberalism, or some
interaction between the two (Ruggie, 1982; Deudney and Ikenberry, 1999), debates about the stabil-
ity of the rules-based liberal international order often turn to American domestic politics, hence the
large, rapidly growing literature evaluating the extent to which a bipartisan liberal internationalist
consensus still holds among the American public (e.g. Kupchan and Trubowitz, 2007a; Busby and
Monten, 2008; Chaudoin, Milner and Tingley, 2010; Bafumi and Parent, 2012). The distinctiveness
of partisan types bears directly on this question. If public opinion in foreign policy is shaped by
elite cues — particularly the presence of elite consensus or polarization (Zaller, 1992; Berinsky, 2009;
Saunders, 2015b, though see Kertzer and Zeitzo↵, Forthcoming) — and the public sees partisan elites
as espousing fairly similar foreign policy views, this likely creates a natural limit on how far public
attitudes can veer away from the center. In contrast, if there are in fact strong partisan types in
foreign policy, this creates the potential for a vicious cycle, as a progressively larger cleavage emerges
between the foreign policy views of the supporters of the two parties. For one thing, if the public
perceives party elites as di↵ering greatly on foreign policy issues, then public attitudes are likely
to follow and become more polarized. In turn, if party elites see their base supporters as shifting
away from the center on foreign policy issues, they have incentives to follow suit, which would likely
prompt the partisan supporters in the public to shift further from the center, thereby furthering the
cycle.
Second, the potential presence of partisan types also has important consequences for a burgeon-
ing body of literature exploring the informative value of actors going against type in order to send
credible signals (Schultz, 2005; Trager and Vavreck, 2011; Fehrs, 2014; Saunders, 2015a; Mattes and
Weeks, 2016; Kreps, Saunders and Schultz, 2016; Kane and Norpoth, 2017). At their most general
level, the logic of these models is relatively straightforward: an actor (the “receiver”) is uncer- 6Indeed, issue ownership is frequently measured with questions like “which party do you think would do a better job
in handling this issue?”), which while not completely divorced from issue positions (Walgrave, Lefevere and Tresch, 2012; Therriault, 2015), is nonetheless conceptually distinct from the kind of partisan types we are interested in exploring here (Petrocik, 1996). Moreover, although the party brands literature has explored issue ownership in the context of foreign policy, it has tended to reduce foreign policy to national security — an issue on which Republicans are generally more trusted (Petrocik, 1996; Goble and Holm, 2009; Gadarian, 2010) — rather than exploring a richer array of foreign policy questions.
3
tain about the merits or outcome of a potential policy being recommended by another actor (the
“sender”), and thus relies on knowledge it has about the sender in order to evaluate the credibility of
its claims.7 Whether because we are particularly attentive to incongruent or surprising information
(Maheswaran and Chaiken, 1991), or because of the inherent value of costly signals over cheap talk
(Schelling, 1960), signals are stronger if they come from unlikely or biased sources, who thus may
give the most credible advice (Calvert, 1985; Myers, 1998; Kydd, 2003).8 Leaders whose support of
a policy goes against type are thus more persuasive (Cukierman and Tommasi, 1998; Schultz, 2005).
While some variants of these models focus on types at the leader-level — the adage that only Nixon
can go to China — many others rely on types at the party-level. Yet leaders can only gain from
going against their party’s type in foreign policy on issues where distinct partisan types exist in the
first place — something that has yet to be systematically established.
In this paper, we therefore seek to make both a theoretical and empirical contribution. First,
we conceptualize partisan types, borrowing from a diverse body of literature on the structure and
content of stereotypes in social psychology to suggest an empirical strategy political scientists can
use to study partisan types along four di↵erent dimensions: content, prevalence, intensity, and
stereotypicality. Although we hope this typology and measurement strategy will be of use for the
study of partisan stereotypes more generally, we investigate it here specifically in the domain of
foreign a↵airs, describing the experimental design of an original national survey fielded on 1007
adult Americans in August 2014 examining the range of issues in which the mass public perceives
the Republican and Democratic parties as having distinctive types. We then present our findings,
which suggest that partisan types in foreign policy are relatively weak, less prevalent, less intense, and
less distinct than in domestic politics. We then validate our findings in two ways, both by comparing
the congruence between second-order beliefs and first-order preferences in our experimental data,
and by re-analyzing a series of popularly used conflict datasets in IR. Taken together, these findings
suggest that our results are not due to the ignorance of the mass public, but rather to partisan types
simply being less distinct in foreign a↵airs than many political scientists assume. Our results are thus
consistent with the longstanding argument emphasizing the bipartisan tradition in foreign policy, 7In this sense, these models simultaneously assume both the presence and absence of uncertainty: the legislator
is both uncertain about the outcome of a policy, and certain about the bias of her advisors (e.g. Calvert, 1985); the public is uncertain about the merits of a policy, but knows (or at least has a rough estimate of) the ideal point of the cuegiver (e.g. Chapman, 2011).
8For example, if even the Pentagon says defense spending is too high, defense spending should likely be cut (Krehbiel, 1991); if even the United Nations approves of a military intervention, the intervener’s intentions are likely good (Thompson, 2009; Chapman, 2011); if even Fox News praises a Democratic policy, it is probably meritorious (Baum and Groeling, 2009).
4
while also suggesting important scope conditions for signaling models relying on the assumption of
distinct partisan types.
2 Partisan types
Types are socially shared “beliefs about the characteristics, attributes, and behaviors” of particular
actors. (Hilton and von Hippel, 1996, 240). Three points are thus worth emphasizing for our
purposes.
First, types reside at multiple levels of analysis: we can understand types as operating at the
individual-leader level based on leaders’ policy stances, and at the level of political parties more
broadly. Although both variants are significant, our focus here is on partisan types, beliefs about
the policy preferences of Republicans and Democrats. We choose to focus on partisan types for
two reasons. First, partisanship is a powerful force in American politics (Zaller, 1992; Cohen et al.,
2008). Whether because of selection e↵ects ex ante or legislative constraints ex post, the scope
and strength of partisan types determines how much latitude individual leaders have to establish
types of their own. Second, and relatedly, partisan types are typically understood as more enduring:
individual leaders come and go, but parties persist. Especially in foreign a↵airs, it often takes time
for leaders to build up independent types, as most political candidates do not have the chance to
develop clear and distinctive types on foreign policy issues before entering office, compounded by
electoral incentives for candidate ambiguity (Tomz and Van Houweling, 2009), and the tendency
of the media to “devote little attention to reporting candidates’ positions” (Conover and Feldman,
1989, 912).
It is for these reasons that “party brands” are typically seen as powerful heuristics in American
politics: voters lack the time and capacity to familiarize themselves with each individual candidate’s
position on every issue, and thus turn to parties instead (Rahn, 1993; Lock and Harris, 1996; Lupia
and McCubbins, 2000; Smith and French, 2009; Dancey and Sheagley, 2013; Nielsen and Larsen,
2014).9 Thus, in against type models like Trager and Vavreck (2011) and Saunders (2015a), for
example, the relevant type is really at the party-level, rather than the leader-level. Indeed, partisan
types are also thought to di↵use internationally as well: Foster (2008), for example, argues that the 9It is perhaps for a similar reason that the voluminous literature on stereotypes in social psychology inevitably
thinks of stereotypes as something that refers to groups rather than a discrete individual, since the efficacy of stereo- types in person perception hinges on the perceiver drawing inferences about an individual through social categorization.
5
United States is more likely to be targeted by foreign challengers when a Democratic White House
is facing challenges from a Republican congress, out of the assumption that foreign leaders carry
around the same partisan stereotypes in their heads as domestic audiences.
Second, types are socially shared. Although partisan types may be built upon past actions
(previous Republican reluctance to work with the United Nations, for example), for them to have
any traction, they must be socially shared by the audience; in this sense, types are social facts (Searle,
1995); they can also be thought of as reputations, in that they are beliefs about an actor that exist
in the minds of others (Mercer, 1996; O’Neill, 1999; Dafoe, Renshon and Huth, 2014; Brutger and
Kertzer, 2015). Above all else, they are stereotypes, in the sense that they are beliefs about the
characteristics of other groups (Hilton and von Hippel, 1996, 240), specifically the groups’ policy
preferences.10 Third, the strength of partisan types has important implications for both democratic
theory and the nature of public opinion. When partisan types are stronger, for example, elite cues
are easier for the public to follow (Levendusky, 2010). Moreover, because strong partisan types
cause specific policy stances to be seen as a “badge of membership within identity-defining affinity
groups”, citizens presented with them are more likely to engage in partisan motivated reasoning
(Kahan, 2016, 2), causing them to express more certainty about their opinions, and engage in the
various biases that follow from it (Lau and Redlawsk, 2001; Bolsen, Druckman and Cook, 2014).
That such partisan types exist in the foreign policy realm is widely assumed in much of the
existing literature. Yet despite the ubiquity of the assumptions that Republicans are from Mars and
Democrats are from Venus, there are reasons to question the distinctiveness of partisan types in
foreign a↵airs. First, foreign policy was for a long time assumed to be a domain in which there was
relative bipartisan agreement, both among political elites, and the public at large (Schlesinger Jr.,
1949; Gowa, 1998; Chaudoin, Milner and Tingley, 2010). Public opinion scholars like Holsti and
Rosenau (1986, 1988, 1990, 1996) and Wittkopf (1981, 1990) turned to foreign policy orientations like
“militant internationalism” and “cooperative internationalism” to explain foreign policy attitudes
precisely because conventional political variables like partisanship explained relatively little of the
variance in either elites’ or the mass public’s foreign policy views. The era of Scoop Jackson and
Nelson Rockefeller has long passed, but the mainstream foreign policy establishment in Washington
remains sufficiently congealed that one Obama administration sta↵er disparagingly referred to it as
10As with the stereotype literature more generally — which argues that stereotypes need not be accurate in order to be widely held (Allport, 1954; Judd, Park and Kintsch, 1993) — it is possible for types to be completely unmoored from actual previous policy positions, though we find relatively little evidence of this in the results we report below.
6
“the Blob”,11 and foreign policy often remains characterized by crosspartisan “baptist-bootlegger”
coalitions, in both security (e.g. liberal internationalists and neoconservatives joining forces to
support military interventions — see Posen 2014), and economics (e.g. both the critical left and
the nationalist right opposing free trade and globalization - see Rathbun 2016). As a result, even
though the two parties often adopt di↵erent stances on individual issues (e.g. Democrats were more
favorable towards the 2015 JCPOA with Iran), contemporary public opinion data often shows a fair
amount of bipartisan consensus about more general foreign policy goals. The 2012 Chicago Council
on Global A↵airs survey report on American public opinion towards foreign policy, for example,
announces that:
Democrats and Republicans are very similar in their views on foreign policy. Though they
di↵er in proportion, only rarely do they outright disagree. Moreover, there is considerable
continuity over the past decade in the degree to which Republicans and Democrats share
viewpoints. Majorities of both parties support active engagement; share concerns about
terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and protecting American jobs; and di↵er little in their
preferred approaches toward China and Iran.12
In other words, then, if partisan types accurately reflect the degree of political polarization
on various issues, it is not immediately clear how distinctive partisan types should be in foreign
a↵airs. Moreover, regardless of how objectively similar the two parties are in foreign policy issues,
partisan types ultimately have an important intersubjective component, which raises a variety of
questions given how far removed foreign a↵airs is for many members of the mass public (Rosenau,
1965; Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; Kertzer, 2013). Formal models of against type dynamics were
originally developed in legislative signaling games, where it was reasonable to treat types as common
knowledge, since the types in question are relatively well-defined, both because of the nature of the
senders (e.g. legislative committees, specialized by design), and the sophistication of the receivers
(e.g. legislators) (Krehbiel, 1991). It is unclear how well these models translate to the context of
public opinion about foreign policy, where sender preferences may be less distinct, and the receiver
much less knowledgeable (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996).13
11http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru. html?_r=0
12Chicago Council on Global A↵airs 2012, 41 13In many of these applications of the model, for example, the audience is assumed to be simultaneously ignorant
and sophisticated – ignorant enough about world politics that it is unsure whether to support a policy or not, but
7
To sum up, despite the popularity and significance of the concept, we actually know relatively
little about which (if any) foreign policy issues have distinct partisan types, or even what approach
political scientists should take if they wanted to explore the topography of partisan types. It is this
question that we explore in the next section.
3 Four di↵erent ways to operationalize partisan types
We argued above that we should think of partisan types as beliefs about the policy preferences of
Republicans and Democrats. In this sense, types are stereotypes, so for a measurement strategy
we turn for inspiration to the rich literature on stereotypes in social psychology. There are a great
many di↵erent ways to characterize a partisan type, but in this section we introduce four di↵erent
properties or dimensions of partisan types that we believe will be of particular use to political
scientists, and discuss how to measure them.
First, partisan types have content. The literature on stereotype content in psychology is vast (for
a summary, see Stagnor and Lange, 1994; Hilton and von Hippel, 1996; Fiske et al., 2002), but for
our purposes we might think simply of the content of a partisan type as the policies associated with a
particular party. Based on the discussion above, one might associate hawkishness, unilateralism, and
free trade with the Republican party, for example, and dovishness, multilateralism, and protectionism
with the Democratic party. The question of the content of a type is independent of the other
characteristics we discuss below, which focus not on what a type is, but rather, on how widely held
or intense it is.
Second, for partisan types to be meaningful, they must have prevalence ; partisan types should be
widely held. There are debates amongst psychologists about how crucial consensus is for stereotypes
(e.g. Jussim, 2012; Judd, Park and Kintsch, 1993), but in a political science context, just as social
facts are predicated upon intersubjectivity, partisan types are the most powerful when they are
widely held. If only a small segment of the population associates an issue with a particular party,
it may still be politically relevant, but is of less interest to us than if a majority of the population
makes the association.
Third, partisan types vary in their intensity, based on whether a policy proposal is strongly
sophisticated enough that it possesses a well-defined mental model about the preferences of the cuegiver: in Chapman (2011), for example, the public doesn’t know enough to know whether it should support a foreign intervention, but knows enough to have an estimate of the ideal point of the median voter on the UN Security Council. If the public is indeed relatively far removed from foreign a↵airs, however, it is unclear how plausible this assumption is.
8
N )
or only weakly associated with a particular party. We care about the intensity of partisan types
because it provides another way of speaking to their power, and thus, how much traction a political
leader can derive from going against type. For example, a leader is unlikely to procure much political
advantage from going against a policy position that is only weakly associated with the party.
Finally, we can think of intensity and prevalence as interrelated: the stronger the partisan type
is on a given issue, the more likely the partisan type is also widely held. The stereotypes with
the highest levels of overall stereotypicality are the ones for those issues where there is both a high
willingness to assign a type, and where the type assigned is relatively strong.
Table 1: Exploring di↵erent measures of partisan type
Responses
(1) Definitely
Democratic
(2) Probably
Democratic
(3) Probably
Republican
(4) Definitely Republican
(5) Both
(6) Neither
Proposal A 29% 19% 10% 4% 19% 19% Proposal B 4% 10% 19% 29% 19% 19% Proposal C 40% 30% 10% 10% 5% 5% Proposal D 10% 10% 10% 10% 30% 30% Proposal E 50% 10% 5% 0% 20% 15%
Properties : Content Prevalence Intensity Stereotypicality Proposal A 0.27 0.62 0.53 0.48 Proposal B 0.73 0.62 0.53 0.48 Proposal C 0.30 0.90 0.56 0.70 Proposal D 0.50 0.40 0.50 0.30 Proposal E 0.10 0.65 0.77 0.57 Note: Stereotype content:
P Xi where X = {1...4}. Stereotype prevalence: Pr(Xi 4). Stereotype intensity:
P abs(Xi- (4+1) 2 , where X = 1...4 . Stereotypicality: P abs(Xi-3) ,
N { } 2N where X has been recoded such that “Both” and “Neither” are the scale midpoint. All four quantities of interest presented above are scaled to range from 0-1.
We can make the above discussion more concrete using the example in Table 1. Suppose a group
of study participants (in our case, a national sample, but the logic remains the same regardless of the
sample composition) is given five di↵erent policy proposals. For each policy proposal, the respondents
are asked to imagine that leaders from a political party were taking the issue position being presented;
in other words, what party would they guess was the one taking the position? Because partisan types
are stereotypes, in order to study them it is not enough to simply focus on first-order di↵erences in
the policies endorsed by Democrats and Republicans, but to also study second-order di↵erences as
well: the beliefs that audiences have about what Democrats and Republicans believe.
The top panel in Table 1 displays hypothetical distributions of responses for each of the four
9
policy positions (ranging from “Definitely Democratic leaders” to “Definitely Republican leaders”,
as well as “Both” and “Neither” categories to allow for the possible absence of distinctive types),
while the bottom panel calculates the four di↵erent quantities of interest previewed above.
First, we can simply look at the content of each partisan type: for those participants who did
associate a policy with a particular party, on average, how Republican or Democratic a type is it?
Thus, proposal A is a relatively Democratic stereotype, and proposal B is a relatively Republican
one.
Second, we can look at the prevalence of each partisan type: what proportion of the sample
associated the policy proposal with a distinct political party? This measure is independent from a
stereotype’s content: Proposals A and B have diametrically opposed stereotype content, for example
(0.27 vs 0.73), but the same level of stereotype prevalence, as 62% of the respondents were willing to
assign a type to each. Similarly, proposal C has the highest level of stereotype prevalence, since 90%
of the sample associated it with a particular political party, and proposal D had the lowest level of
stereotype prevalence, with only 40% of the sample associating it with a particular political party.
Third, we can look at the intensity of each partisan type: of those who assigned a distinct
type for a particular policy proposal, how extreme a stereotype was it? Of the five proposals in
Table 1, proposal E has the highest level of stereotype intensity, while proposal D has the lowest,
though the intensity levels for the first four proposals are all relatively similar to one another.
Finally, we can look at the overall stereotypicality of the proposal, which is a function of both the
stereotype’s intensity and its prevalence. Since proposals A and B have identical prevalence and
intensity scores, they have identical (moderate) stereotypicality scores as well. Proposal D has the
lowest stereotypicality score, and proposal C the highest.
Each of these four measures thus captures something subtly di↵erent: content tells us what par-
ties a policy is associated with, prevalence tells us how frequently the policy is associated with parties
in general, intensity tells us the strength of the associations made, and stereotypicality provides an
aggregate measure of how crystallized the stereotype is. The measures are deliberately simple, and
there are, of course, countless other ways to characterize partisan types.14 Our claim, then, is not
that these are the only ways to operationalize partisan types, but rather, that they constitute four 14The prevalence score presented above, for example, tells us the proportion of participants willing to assign a
distinct type on a particular policy, rather than how much consensus there was about the types assigned. Similarly, the intensity measure above is akin to measures of attitude extremity (Miller and Peterson, 2004) in that it focuses on the strengths of the associations made rather than the direction of the association.
10
simple measures that are likely intuitive to many political scientists, and which we believe will be
useful in many empirical applications. To showcase one such application, we use these measures to
explore the scope conditions of against type models in IR by mapping the topography of partisan
types in foreign policy.
4 Method
To o↵er what we believe to be the first systematic study of partisan types in foreign policy, we
employ an original survey experiment, fielded on a national sample of 1007 American adults in
August 2014 by Survey Sampling International (SSI).15 The main survey instrument consisted of
two questionnaires.
At the beginning of the first questionnaire, participants were instructed:
Participants were then presented with a list of 12 policy proposals covering a mix of domestic and
foreign political issues (discussed in greater detail below, and presented in full in Appendix §1). For
each proposal, participants indicated their degree of support on a Likert response scale ranging from
1 (extremely unsupportive) to 7 (extremely supportive).
After participants completed the questionnaire indicating their support for each proposal, they
then were presented with a second questionnaire, in which they were instructed:
15For examples of recent political science survey experiments fielded on SSI samples, see Malhotra, Margalit and Mo (2013); Berinsky, Margolis and Sances (2014); Kertzer and Brutger (2016).
Now, we would like for you to think about these issues in a di↵erent way.
If you heard that leaders from a political party were taking the issue positions de-
scribed below, which party would you guess was probably the one taking that posi-
tion?
For the first set of questions, we’re going to present you with a series of policy
proposals. Please indicate the degree of support you would feel towards the proposed
policies if politicians in the US took each position.
11
Participants were then presented the same 12 policy proposals as before, but this time, asked to
indicate which party was more likely to be the one taking the position, using the response options
“Definitely Democratic leaders”, “Probably Democratic leaders”, “Probably Republican leaders”,
“Definitely Republican leaders”, “Both Democrats and Republicans”, and “Neither Democrats nor
Republicans”. Thus, whereas the first questionnaire measures participants’ own feelings towards
these proposals, the second uses these proposals to tap into the partisan stereotypes participants hold
about each of the two major political parties. Finally, participants completed a short demographic
questionnaire.
Although the layout of the survey was relatively straightforward from the perspective of the
participants, it contained a relatively complex randomization protocol. First, to avoid potential
order e↵ects, we randomized the order in which each of the policy proposals were presented within
each questionnaire. Second, for eight of the policy issues (listed in full in Table 2 in Appendix
§1), we randomly varied the content of each proposal: for trade policy, for example, half of the
participants were presented with a protectionist policy proposal, and the other half with a free trade
policy proposal. This technique not only avoids conflating partisan types with issue ownership, but
allows us to study a wide variety of policy proposals without inducing concerns about respondent
fatigue, or the demand e↵ects that would likely arise if each respondent were evaluating multiple
policy proposals on the same issue. This randomization carried over across both questionnaires, so
participants who were given a protectionist proposal in the first questionnaire, for example, were
also given a protectionist proposal in the second.
Third, because it is possible that partisan types manifest themselves not with the goal of a policy,
but with the tactics, for four of the foreign policy proposals (listed in full in Table 3 in Appendix
§1), we held the purpose of each policy fixed, but varied the approach: namely, whether the policy
was conducted multilaterally or unilaterally. Here, we employed a nested randomization structure.
One third of participants were assigned to a pure control condition, in which, for each of these four
policies, we only presented the central purpose of the policy but did not mention how it would be
conducted. For the remaining two-thirds of participants, respondents were randomly presented with
either a unilateral or a multilateral version of each policy; each approach was randomized at the
item-level, such that some participants were in the multilateral condition for some policies, and the
unilateral condition for the others.16
16In this manner, we avoid potential contamination e↵ects that would result if the pure control was also assigned
12
Because random assignment allowed for di↵erent participants to evaluate di↵erent versions of
each policy, we obtain results for 28 di↵erent policy statements overall. Although the list is not
exhaustive, it nonetheless reflects a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues, from economic
issues to social ones, from general foreign policy predilections, to specific foreign policy interventions.
This breadth not only bolsters the generalizability of our results, but also enables us to test whether
participants espouse systematically di↵erent partisan types in domestic issues than in foreign policy
ones.
5 Results: what do partisan types look like in foreign policy?
We present our initial results in three stages. First, we look at stereotype prevalence, showing
that relatively low proportions of Americans assign distinct partisan types to foreign policy issues
compared to domestic ones. Second, we look at stereotype content, showing that of the participants
who do assign types to foreign policy issues, the types tend to be less stark, although some foreign
issues display starker types than others. Third, we show that for the 28 political issues we examine
here, the intensity and prevalence of the partisan types are highly intercorrelated, and reconfirming
the relative weakness of types in IR.
5.1 Stereotype prevalence
Figure 1 depicts the stereotype prevalence measure of each of our 28 policy proposals, with 95%
bootstrapped confidence intervals derived from B = 1500 bootstraps. The results show that domestic
issues generally display relatively high levels of stereotype prevalence: regardless of whether the
policy statements are in favor or opposed, over three quarters of our participants assign a partisan
type to abortion, taxes and gun control, for example. In contrast, apart from military spending,
the stereotype prevalence levels for many of the foreign policy issues are relatively low: half of our
participants don’t assign a partisan type to a proposal for arms control, and barely more than that
for interventionist or isolationist policies and trade policies. The multilateral/unilateral treatments
also appear to have relatively little e↵ect when measured by stereotype prevalence.
at the item level. To increase the dosage of the multilateralism treatment, it includes both quantitative (“cooperating with other countries”) and qualitative (“seeking backing from the United Nations”) measures of multilateralism. See Ruggie (1992).
Domestic
Foreign
Foreign (Approach)
Figure 1: Stereotype prevalence: the proportion of participants who assigned a partisan type on each issue
Pro-abortion Anti-abortion Pro-tax hike Anti-tax hike
Pro-environment Anti-environment
Pro-gun control Anti-gun control
0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00
Pro-arms control Anti-arms control
Interventionist Isolationist Free trade
Protectionist Increase military spending Decrease military spending
0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00
Troops humanitarian Troops humanitarian (unilateral)
Troops humanitarian (multilateral) Troops oil
Troops oil (unilateral) Troops oil (multilateral)
Enviro sanction Enviro sanction (unilateral)
Enviro sanction (multilateral) Stop piracy
Stop piracy (unilateral) Stop piracy (multilateral)
0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 Stereotype prevalence
The proportion of respondents who assigned a type to each of the 28 di↵erent issues, with 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals.
13
Foreign (Approach)
Figure 2: Stereotype content: average partisan types for each issue
Pro-abortion Anti-abortion Pro-tax hike Anti-tax hike
Pro-environment Anti-environment
Pro-gun control Anti-gun control
0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00
Pro-arms control Anti-arms control
Interventionist Isolationist Free trade
Protectionist Increase military spending
Decrease military spending
0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00
Troops humanitarian Troops humanitarian (unilateral)
Troops humanitarian (multilateral) Troops oil
Troops oil (unilateral) Troops oil (multilateral)
Enviro sanction Enviro sanction (unilateral)
Enviro sanction (multilateral) Stop piracy
Stop piracy (unilateral) Stop piracy (multilateral)
0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 Definitely
Democratic Stereotype content Definitely
Republican The average stereotypes participants suggested for each of the 28 di↵erent issues, with 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals. The light grey lines conect pairs (or
triads) of treatments for a given issue: the longer the line, the more distinct the stereotypes, and the greater the e↵ect of switching from one policy stance (e.g. interventionism) to another (e.g. isolationism).
14
Domestic
Foreign
15
5.2 Stereotype content
To more deeply probe the topography of partisan types, Figure 2 plots the stereotype content
measures for each of the 28 policy proposals, revealing what the average partisan types were for each
issue amongst those participants who did assign a party to the issue. As before, the lines around
the point estimates depict 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals; the figure also includes light grey
lines connecting each pair of treatments (or, triad of treatments, for the foreign policy approach
conditions) on a given issue. Thus, the longer the grey line, the more distinct the stereotypes, and
the greater the e↵ect of switching from one policy treatment (e.g. interventionism) to another (e.g.
isolationism). The results show that the magnitude of the di↵erences in stereotype content between
policy pairs varies dramatically across issues. Domestic issues display a large and intuitive symmetry
between opposing policy proposals: for example, a pro-choice policy has a relatively Democratic
type, while an anti-abortion policy has a relatively Republican one. Foreign policy approaches
— whether an intervention is conducted multilaterally or unilaterally — display extremely small
treatment e↵ects; there is some indication that unilateral missions are more strongly associated with
the Republican party, but not consistently so, and the e↵ect sizes are modest; the principal policy
objective (Jentleson, 1992) matters more for stereotype content than the approach itself. Of the
foreign policy issues in the middle panel, partisan types on military spending are relatively distinct,
an e↵ect similar in magnitude to many of the domestic issues in the top panel. Otherwise, the
magnitude of the di↵erences tends to dissipate: although partisan types significantly di↵er for arms
control, the size of the treatment e↵ect is roughly 2.5 times smaller than for the domestic issues,
and partisan types for interventionism and free trade are barely discernible. On the whole, then,
although partisan types don’t entirely stop at the water’s edge, the content of partisan types is
notably less distinct on many foreign issues. 5.3 Stereotype intensity
We argued above that stereotype prevalence and stereotype intensity are interrelated: the more
willing people are to assign a policy to a political party, the stronger the association people should
see between the policy and the party. We test this hypothesis by estimating a simple bivariate
linear regression model, in which the stereotype intensity of each of the 28 issues is regressed on
the stereotype prevalence scores for each issue. Importantly, not only is the stereotype prevalence
16
Figure 3: Stereotype prevalence and intensity are highly related
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Stereotype prevalence The proportion of respondents who assigned a type to each of the policy proposals, versus how strong the stereotypes were; to improve the legibility, the unilateral and multilateral versions of the foreign policy interventions are omitted from the plot. The dashed line is from a simple bivariate linear regression model, showing that 82% of the variance in stereotype intensity can be explained by variance in stereotype prevalence. Domestic issues are in black, foreign
issues in red. Stereotype intensity is scaled such that a value of 0 indicates the weakest possible stereotype (in which Republican and Democratic attributions cancel one another out), and a value of 1 indicates the strongest possible stereotype (in which all respondents would have indicated that a policy was definitely Republican (Democratic)).
Anti tax hike AntiP-arbootratixonhike
PrPor-og-ucnhociocnetrol Anti-gun control
Enviro Sanction UAnntilia-Etenrvailronment
Decrease milSpend IncreaPsreo-mEinlSviproennmd ent
Enviro Sanction Troops Oil
Pro-armAsnctio-anrTmrsoocposntOroill Unilateral IsolaEtniovniriostSanction Multilateral
trol Troops Civ Multilateral
Stop SPtiroapcy TroopsnseCiv
evsrOaPlilroMteuclttiiloanteisrat l Stop PirInatceyrventionist
PiMraTucrloytiolTUaptroirolCaaptli Unilateral
Free Trade
Ster
eoty
pe in
tens
ity
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
17
measure highly significant (p < 0.000), but the model fit is impressively high, with an R2 statistic
of 0.820, suggesting that 82% of the variation in stereotype intensity can be explained by variation
in stereotype prevalence. We demonstrate the same point visually by plotting stereotype prevalence
and intensity scores in Figure 3, along with a dashed line representing the linear fit derived from
the regression model estimated above. The plot illustrates two points: first, the strong covariation
between stereotype prevalence and stereotype intensity. Second, foreign policy issues (coded in red)
are generally further down the regression line than domestic political issues (in black); in general,
then, the foreign policy issues we include here show weaker partisan types than the domestic issues.
6 Why are partisan types weak in foreign a↵airs?
The above analysis suggested that although partisan types are detectable in foreign a↵airs, the e↵ects
tended to be quite modest, apart from that of defense spending. In general, foreign policy issues
displayed relatively low levels of stereotype prevalence, and the types that the public perceived tended
to be relatively weak and indistinct. The findings should thus reassure those scholars concerned about
the potential collapse of bipartisanship in foreign policy, while also raising some important questions
about the viability of against type models in foreign policy in which the receiver is the mass public.
If partisan types are social facts, the question of their objective accuracy is at most a secondary
one, since socially shared beliefs can have real consequences regardless of their veracity (Searle,
1995). Nonetheless, the question of accuracy suggests two diametrically opposed interpretations of
the findings presented above. The first is that the generally weak findings for partisan types in
foreign policy simply show how ignorant or inattentive the public is about world a↵airs: although
political scientists may know that Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus, the
public itself may be too disconnected to recognize these clear partisan gaps (e.g. Guisinger, 2009;
Kertzer, 2013). A very di↵erent interpretation is that the weakness of partisan types in foreign
policy is not an indictment of the public, but rather, a relatively accurate reflection of reality, and
that political scientists have perhaps overstated the existence of these gaps in the first place.
We adjudicate between these two possibilities using two sets of tests. First, we investigate the
individual- and issue-level correlates of stereotypicality in our data using a set of mixed e↵ect models,
assessing the accuracy of respondents’ second-order beliefs by analyzing the relationship between
issue-level polarization and stereotypicality, and examining whether the stereotypicality gap between
18
domestic and foreign issues shrinks among more politically sophisticated respondents. Second, we
turn to a variety of popular datasets in IR to look at the foreign policy records of Democratic
and Republican administrations with respect to hawkishness and interventionism over the past half
century; if we expect Republicans to be seen as more hawkish and interventionist than Democrats,
this evidence should unambiguously manifest itself in actual foreign policy behavior.
6.1 Modeling overall stereotypicality
As a first cut at investigating the accuracy of partisan types, we analyze our experimental data
in a di↵erent way. Given the strong intercorrelation between the extremity of the partisan type
held, and willingness to assign a distinct partisan type in the first place, we integrate the two to
produce a composite measure of stereotypicality at the respondent-level.17 This approach enables us
to calculate a stereotypicality score for each of the 28 issue areas for each of the 1007 participants,
looking across all of the responses simultaneously and examining the extent to which respondent-
level characteristics (e.g. political sophistication, and a participant’s own attitudes regarding the
issue proposal) and issue-level characteristics (e.g. whether the issue is a foreign issue or not, and
the the degree of partisan polarization in the issue) shape assessments of stereotypicality. Given the
clustered structure of the data, we estimate a series of mixed linear models with random e↵ects on
each participant and each issue area, presented in Table 2.
The first model in Table 2 estimates a simple one-way ANOVA, simply partitioning the variance
in the responses to determine how much of the variation in stereotypicality can be attributed to
characteristics of respondents, rather than characteristics of the policy proposals themselves. Con-
sistent with other work emphasizing the considerable heterogeneity of the public (e.g. Kertzer,
2013), an analysis of the intraclass correlations finds that there is 4.16 times more variation in the
data between respondents than between issues, thereby reinforcing the importance of incorporating
respondent-level predictors to explain this variation theoretically.
Thus, the second model in Table 2 adds a series of individual-level covariates: respondents’ age,
gender, income, race, education, partisanship and interest in politics (all of which are described
in greater detail in Table 1 in Appendix §1). The results show that, on average, more educated
respondents (who are presumably more politically sophisticated) tend to report stronger stereotypes 17Unlike the issue-level measure of stereotypicality, where we calculate the average level of stereotypicality for a
given issue, we calculate our respondent-level measure of stereotypicality by abs(Xi - 3); as before, we recode the “both“ and “neither” responses to form a neutral scale midpoint.
19
Table 2: Mixed linear models: respondent-level and issue-level correlates of stereotypicality
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Age -0.001⇤⇤⇤ -0.002⇤⇤⇤ -0.001⇤⇤⇤ -0.001⇤⇤⇤
(0.001) (0.0005) (0.001) (0.001) Male 0.049⇤⇤⇤ 0.041⇤⇤⇤ 0.049⇤⇤⇤ 0.049⇤⇤⇤
(0.015) (0.015) (0.015) (0.015) Income 0.0001 -0.0002 0.0001 0.0001 (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) White 0.025 0.022 0.025 0.025 (0.018) (0.017) (0.018) (0.018) Education 0.020⇤⇤⇤ 0.020⇤⇤⇤ 0.020⇤⇤⇤ 0.020⇤⇤⇤
(0.005) (0.005) (0.005) (0.005) Partisanship 0.004 0.004 0.004 0.004 (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) Political interest 0.095⇤⇤⇤ 0.082⇤⇤⇤ 0.095⇤⇤⇤ 0.095⇤⇤⇤
(0.009) (0.008) (0.009) (0.009) Strength of preferences 0.148⇤⇤⇤ (0.009) Foreign policy issue -0.212⇤⇤⇤ (0.025) Polarization 0.807⇤⇤⇤
(0.150) Constant 0.136⇤⇤⇤ 0.106⇤⇤⇤ 0.287⇤⇤⇤ 0.035 (0.042) (0.040) (0.042) (0.044) N 12,074 12,038 12,037 12,038 12,038 AIC 8,419.018 8,285.000 8,037.908 8,257.042 8,268.846 BIC 8,448.613 8,366.354 8,126.657 8,345.791 8,357.595 ⇤p < .1; ⇤⇤p < .05; ⇤⇤⇤p < .01. All models include random e↵ects for both respondents and issues.
2
than less educated ones; the same pattern is also detected with measures of self-reported interest
in politics. Younger respondents tend to report slightly weaker stereotypes than older ones, and
male respondents tend to provide slightly stronger stereotypes than female ones. The third model
in Table 2 finds the same pattern of results, this time also including a measure of the strength of
participants’ own preferences on the particular policy proposal. The results show that the stronger
participants themselves feel about a proposal, the stronger a partisan type they attribute to it.18
The fourth model in Table 2 adds our first issue-level predictor: a dichotomous variable for
whether the issue is a foreign policy issue or not. Corroborating our earlier findings, foreign policy
issues feature approximately 20% lower levels of stereotypicality than domestic issues. Finally, the
fifth model adds a measure of how polarized the issues themselves were on party lines amongst
our respondents. Including a polarization measure as an issue-level predictor in the mixed model
provides a means of investigating how accurate these partisan types are, telling us the extent to
which variation in stereotypicality maps onto actual variation in partisan polarization amongst our
respondents. Importantly, the e↵ect of the polarization measure is both substantively large and
statistically significant: moving from the least to the most polarized issue amongst our respondents
is associated with a 28.5% increase in stereotypicality. In other words, Americans see less distinct
partisan types in foreign policy issues because their peers display less distinct partisan types in
foreign policy issues. In this sense, the stereotypes they employ are largely accurate!
A series of supplementary analyses in Appendix §2.1 o↵er further support for this interpretation.
First, we replicate the fourth model in Table 2, but this time including an interaction term between
the foreign policy issue variable and participants’ level of education. We also estimate another version
of this same model, but this time interacting the foreign policy issue variable with participants’
level of interest in politics. In both models, the interaction term is statistically significant, and
negative : more politically sophisticated participants assign relatively weaker types to foreign policy
issues than domestic political ones, rather than stronger ones. The more educated or politically
engaged participants are, the more they know that foreign policy issues display relatively weaker
types, perhaps because they have a better sense of the partisan landscape. Similarly, when we
replicate the fifth model from Table 2, but this time interacting the polarization variable with
political interest or education, the interactions are positive and significant, reconfirming that more 18In Appendix §2.2, we conduct supplementary tests to suggest that this association is not attributable to order-
induced priming e↵ects.
21
politically sophisticated respondents more accurately gauge how Republicans and Democrats think. 6.2 Examining the foreign policy record
The previous analyses operationalize the accuracy of partisan types based on the congruence between
these second-order beliefs and the actual partisan distribution of first-order preferences in the public.
Another way to assess stereotype accuracy, however, is to look at the historical record. Such an
approach is taken by Chaudoin, Milner and Tingley (2010), who analyze roll-call data to show that
bipartisanship persists in American foreign policy despite the end of the Cold War, consistent with
the results we present above. To supplement their analysis, we turn to a variety of frequently-used
conflict datasets in IR. This analysis is valuable for two reasons. First, one of the more striking
findings presented above concerned the relatively weak partisan types detected on issues relating
to interventionism and the use of force: the findings for interventionism and a set of hypothetical
military interventions were relatively weak, and although stronger di↵erences were detected on arms
control, the partisan gap was nonetheless smaller than the stark hawk-dove division implied by
some political scientists. Providing an objective baseline from which to evaluate the accuracy of
the relatively weak hawkish types is thus of particular theoretical interest. Second, if one way that
people internalize partisan types in foreign a↵airs is by observing actual partisan behavior in foreign
policy, questions regarding the use of force are highly salient, and the average citizen is more likely
to monitor or otherwise be aware of actual conflict behavior than congressional voting patterns. We
thus turn to a variety of datasets that IR scholars frequently use to study questions regarding the
use of force, letting us test how distinct the two parties’ foreign policy behavior has been on this
dimension.
Figure 4 (a) uses version 4.1 of the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) data (Palmer et al.,
2015) to study the number of fatal MIDs (Oneal, Russett and Berbaum, 2003) initiated by each
Presidential administration from 1945-2010. By this measure, Democrats and Republicans do not
appear to systematically di↵er from one another: of the 18 fatal MIDs originated by the United
States since 1945, 9 were initiated by Democrats, and 9 by Republicans. Similarly, panel (b) turns
to version 11 of the International Crisis Behavior (ICB2) data (Brecher et al., 2016), looking at
the number of violent crises engaged in by each Presidential administration from 1945-2013. Of
the 36 crises the US was involved in in this time period in which violence played a role in the
White House’s conflict management strategy, 18 had a Democratic President at the helm, and 18 a
play
of
Dis of force
Use force
War
Num
ber o
f MC
Ts is
sued
N
umbe
r of f
atal
MID
s in
itiat
ed
MID
pro
pens
ity (%
) N
umbe
r of v
iole
nt c
rises
Num
ber o
f vio
lent
cris
es
Figure 4: Are Republicans from Mars and Democrats from Venus?
(a) Fatal Militarised Interstate Disputes (MIDs), 1945-2010 (b) International Crisis Behavior (ICB), 1945-2013
5 10.0 6
4
7.5 10
4 3
5.0
2 5
2
2.5 1
0 0.0 0 0
President Party President Party
(c) Militarized Compellent Threats (MCTs), 1945-2001 (d) MID initiation relative to opportunities to use force, 1945-2000
15 1.00
6
1.5
0.75
10
4 1.0
0.50
5
2 0.5
0.25
0 0 0.0 0.00
President Party President Party
Panel (a) uses MID data (Palmer et al., 2015) to plot the number of fatal MIDs originated by the United States during each Presidential administration from 1945-2010; by this indicator, Democrats do not appear to be significantly less hawkish than Republicans; of the 18 fatal MIDs the US initiated during this period, half
came from Democratic administrations, and half from Republican ones. Panel (b) uses the ICB2 data (Brecher et al., 2016) instead, plotting the number of international crises faced by each administration where violence was employed; of the 36 violent crises in the data, half involved Democratic administrations, and half
Republican ones. Panel (c) uses the MCT data (Sechser, 2011) to study militarized compellent threats instead, showing that Democratic administrations (Clinton especially) have actually been more likely to issue MCTs than Republican administrations. Finally, panel (d) combines the MID data with the Howell and Pevehouse
(2007) “opportunities to use force” data as a denominator, showing that Democrats may actually be more trigger happy than Republicans.
22
Num
ber o
f MC
Ts is
sued
N
umbe
r of f
atal
MID
s in
itiat
ed
Aver
age
MID
pro
pens
ity (%
)
23
Republican. Since both datasets have their critics (e.g. Downes and Sechser (2012)), panel (c) uses
the Militarized Compellent Threats (MCT) data (Sechser, 2011); by that measure, Democrats appear
to be systematically more hawkish than Republicans, thanks in no small part to the interventionism
of the Clinton administration (“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking
about if we can’t use it?”, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously asked), with
Democrats responsible for 71% of the MCTs in the data. As we show in Appendix §2.4, across all
three datasets, permutation tests fail to reject the null hypothesis that Republicans are no more
hawkish than Democrats in the data (p< 0.577 for the MID data, p< 0.568 for ICB, p< 0.977 for
the MCT data).
However, the above analyses fail to account for “the dogs that didn’t bark”: perhaps partisan
types come not just from decisions to use force, but also by decisions to stay out of crises. Thus, panel
(d) adds a denominator to the analysis, calculating the number of militarized interstate disputes
initiated as a function of the number of opportunities each President had to use force, calculated
using Howell and Pevehouse’s (2007) data. Whereas the results in panel (a) focus strictly on fatal
MIDs, the results in panel (d) explore a wider range of MIDs and focus on levels of hostility rather
than fatalities, depicting MIDs where the US displayed force, used force, or full war. Importantly,
Democratic presidents do not appear to be particularly dovish compared to Republicans: the only
wars in the data in this period were initiated by Democratic administrations, and although the
probability that a White House responded to an opportunity to use force by actually initiating a
MID is relatively low, on average Democratic administrations were actually more likely (0.98%) to
initiate hostile MIDs than Republicans were (0.78%). In general, then, at least through the prism of
these commonly used data sources in IR, it is not clear that the public is wrong in failing to perceive
Democrats as systematically more dovish than Republicans.19
7 Discussion
Our findings raise a number of potential questions. First, it is possible that the results are simply an
artifact of the contemporary political environment, such that partisan types were more distinct in
the past in foreign policy issues than they are today. Yet given the historical data presented above, 19Although space constraints prohibit exploring other issue areas here at the same depth, it is worth noting that the
foreign policy behavior of the two parties are also similar along other dimensions as well: for example, of the eleven Preferential Trade Agreements entered into between 2001-2016, for example, eight passed along bi- or cross-partisan lines. See Kucik and Moraguez (2016).
24
and the volume of literature decrying the collapse of the bipartisan consensus of yore, such an
interpretation is unlikely — the hyper-partisan senectitude of the Obama administration is surely
an easy test for the presence of partisan types rather than a hard one. Importantly, our study
was fielded in the summer of 2014. If anything, the ascendance of Donald Trump — whereupon
Republicans in Washington are now seemingly dovish on Russia, anti-interventionist, and opposed
to free trade — should only render partisan types murkier going forward.
An additional critique might be that although the results are mixed news for partisan types in
IR, individual leaders can cultivate types of their own, such that they can choose to go against their
own type rather than that of their party as a whole. Yet as noted above, this suggests important
scope conditions for against type models: in order to gain traction from going against type, one
must have successfully built up a type in the first place. This would suggest that going against
type would predominantly be the preserve of individuals with long political careers, who had the
opportunity to develop distinctive types on salient foreign policy issues before entering office. Indeed,
the reason why the American politics literature turned to “party brand” heuristics was precisely out
of a concern that members of the mass public lack the time and capacity to memorize individual
candidates’ positions across every political issue. If leaders need to rely on personal types in order to
leverage against type e↵ects, for most political leaders this should make going against type harder,
rather than easier.
Third, it is possible that partisan di↵erences in foreign policy issues may be minimal amongst
the masses, but are more pronounced amongst elites. Yet if elite cue-taking is as powerful as
many scholars claim (Zaller, 1992; Berinsky, 2009; Baum and Potter, 2015), it begs the question of
why distinct partisan types amongst elites don’t spill over into the masses. Moreover the significant
negative interaction terms between foreign policy issues and political interest and education suggests
that the citizens who should be the most likely to receive elite cues are also the least likely to see
distinct foreign policy types.
Finally, the historical record also raises a broader theoretical puzzle. Most models of against
type behavior are one-shot games, where a receiver is uncertain about the quality of a policy, a sender
provides a signal, the receiver updates based on the contents of the signal and its beliefs about the
sender, and formulates support, whereupon the game ends. However, if leaders have an incentive to
go against type in order to bolster support, and publics update their beliefs about the leader’s type
over time, the long-run dynamics are worth exploring. Suppose a simple model featuring a politician
25
s +sx
20
4
20 4
-
trying to acquire the support of the median voter, who has beliefs (b) about the politician’s type
that are common knowledge; for our purpose, we can understand the relevant type as dovishness,
although the logic of the model is invariant to the type’s content. In each iteration, the politician
carries out a policy (xt = 0, 1), designed to maximize the voter’s support (yt). If yt = f (xt|b), the
politician should go against type by choosing the policy that maximizes the distance from b. If the
process repeats, however, b should change over time, as the voter updates based on x. In a simple
Bayesian updating model (e.g. Achen, 1992; Bartels, 2002), bt = bt-1 + k(xt-1 - bt-1), where k
is a weight telling the voter how much to update based on the new information. Traditionally in
Bayesian learning models, k = sb , such that the weight attached to the di↵erence between xt 1 b
and bt-1 is a function of the fraction of the voter’s total uncertainty that is around the prior, but
for purposes of simplicity, in Figure 5, we present simulations where k is a constant varying from 1
to 1 , to show how the results change.
Figure 5: The boy who cried wolf: the diminishing returns of going against type over time
5 10 15 20
Time (t) The plot depicts changes in type over 20 rounds, where b1 = 0.75 and k ranges from 1
to 1 . In this simple model,
against type e↵ects are self-negating, as a strategic politician exploiting against type e↵ects for immediate gain ends up eroding partisan types’ stereotypicality in the process.
Although the setup is is deliberately simple, and there are myriad ways it could be complicated
further in future work,20 the intuition depicted by the simulations in Figure 5 (where the politician
begins with a relatively strong type (b = 0.75)) is worth emphasizing. If Democrats begin with a
more dovish reputation, which gives them an incentive to go against type by carrying out hawkish 20For example, other modeling variants could allow the politician to only imperfectly observe her type, or incorporate
political costs for inconsistency.
K=1/20
K=1/4
Type
(b)
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
26
policies in order to bolster public support, and citizens update their assessments of type based on
actual behavior, the advantages of going against type should narrow over time. Akin to the parable
of “the boy who cried wolf”, for against type e↵ects to be powerful, they must be used sparingly.
“Sister Souljah moments” can only be momentary; Nixon can go to China, but presumably can’t
tour the entire Eastern Bloc. Given the frequency with which Democratic presidents have gone to
war, escalated the use of force, or otherwise pivoted to the foreign policy center for electoral reasons,
why should we expect members of the public to think of Democrats as systematically more dovish
or less interventionist than Republicans?
8 Conclusion
As interest in the domestic politics of foreign policy grows (e.g. Simmons, 1994; Milner, 1997;
Leeds, 1999), political scientists are increasingly interested in the role that partisan types — and the
ability to go against them — play in international a↵airs (e.g. Palmer, London and Regan, 2004;
Rathbun, 2004; Foster, 2008; Koch, 2009; Williams, 2014). Nevertheless, there has been surprisingly
little empirical work that systematically examines partisan types in foreign policy. In this paper,
we proposed a typology of four di↵erent properties of partisan types, and then turned to a survey
experiment to explore the range of issues in which distinct partisan types exist. We find that partisan
types, though present in foreign a↵airs, are relatively weak: partisan stereotypes are less prevalent,
less distinct, less intense, and less stereotypical than in domestic political issues. Moreover, using
both experimental and observational data, we also suggest that this relative weakness of partisan
types in foreign policy is due not to the public’s ignorance, but because the degree of partisan
polarization in foreign policy issues is much less stark than many political scientists assume.21 In
this sense, the findings speak nicely with the psychological literature on stereotype accuracy — one
recent strand of which asserts that stereotypes serve as good heuristics precisely because they work
(Jussim, Crawford and Rubinstein, 2015).
Our results also have obvious implications for the large literature that examines whether a
bipartisan liberal internationalist consensus exists regarding US foreign policy. The vast majority of
studies in this literature maintain that this foreign policy consensus is breaking down or has already
done so (e.g. Kupchan and Trubowitz, 2007a,b; Busby and Monten, 2008; Snyder, Shapiro and 21On low levels of issue polarization, and the distinctions between issue position polarization and social polarization,
see Mason (2015).
27
Bloch-Elkon, 2009; Heilbrunn, 2010; Mellow, 2011; Bafumi and Parent, 2012; Busby and Monten,
2012; Hurst, 2014; Krebs, 2015). Our study o↵ers support for the alternative position in this debate
by Chaudoin, Milner and Tingley (2010) that the center indeed holds in foreign policy, in that
foreign policy polarization in the mass public is perhaps less extreme than some critics allege. The
key takeaway for future research can be stated succinctly: although we examined a very wide range
of foreign policy issues in this study, it would obviously be valuable to analyze additional issues.22
Our findings also have important implications for against type models that are rapidly prolif-
erating in the field. Our results suggest that political elites seeking to bolster support from the
mass public by going against their partisan type are perhaps more limited in the range of issues in
which they can do so than many IR scholars realize. Given that against type models were imported
into IR from domains where types were extremely well defined (e.g. legislative politics, where a
bureaucracy’s position on its own issue area is abundantly clear), our findings suggest caution in
whether the assumptions that motivate these models so well in other domains are present in foreign
policy. Recent experimental work has found support for against type models in IR (e.g. Saunders,
2015a; Mattes and Weeks, 2016), but has tended to use hypothetical vignettes that explicitly define
the sender’s type on participants’ behalf, thereby bracketing the role of prior beliefs in the process.
Although these experiments are helpful in amending classic against type models by reminding us
that political actors have incentives to frame senders’ types, in competitive political environments
other actors also have incentives to counterframe in order to minimize the sender’s credibility (think,
for example, of Republicans who dissent from traditional party positions being accused of being “RI-
NOs”), which both experimental and formal work could benefit from taking into account (Chong
and Druckman, 2013).
Most generally, then, the findings encourage further dialogue between formal modelers and stu-
dents of political behavior and political psychology. Many of our theories of domestic politics in IR
rely on assumptions about voters’ preferences and beliefs. One of the advantages of experimental
methods is the extent to which they provide an opportunity to test many of these microfounda-
tional assumptions directly (e.g. Tomz, 2007; Trager and Vavreck, 2011; Kertzer and Brutger, 2016;
Kertzer, 2017). Doing so enriches our understanding of the interactions between domestic politics 22It is also worth conducting similar studies in other countries. On the one hand, one consequence of America’s
hegemonic role in in the international system is that the left-wing party in the American party system is generally more hawkish and interventionist than left-wing parties in many other countries, such that partisan types in foreign a↵airs could likely be more distinct elsewhere. On the other hand, countries with less material capabilities also have less ability to carry out interventionist foreign policies, providing less of an opportunity for di↵erentiation on these dimensions.
28
and international a↵airs.
References Achen, Christopher H. 1992. “Social Psychology, Demographic Variables, and Linear Regression:
Breaking the Iron Triangle in Voting Research.” Political Behavior 14(3):195–211. Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The nature of prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley. Bafumi, Joseph and Joseph M. Parent. 2012. “International polarity and America’s polarization.”
International Politics 49:11–35. Bartels, Larry M. 2002. “Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions.” Political
Behavior 24(2):117–150. Baum, Matthew A. and Philip B.K. Potter. 2015. War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public
Influences Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Baum, Matthew A. and Tim Groeling. 2009. “Shot by the Messenger: Partisan Cues and Public
Opinion Regarding National Security and War.” Political Behavior 31(2):157–186. Berinsky, Adam J. 2009. In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World
War II to Iraq. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berinsky, Adam J., Michele F. Margolis and Michael W. Sances. 2014. “Separating the Shirkers
from the Workers?” American Journal of Political Science 58(3):739–753. Boix, Carles. 2000. “Partisan Government, International Economy and Macroeconomic Policies.”
World Politics 53(1):38–73. Bolsen, Toby, James N. Druckman and Fay Lomax Cook. 2014. “The Influence of Partisan Motivated
Reasoning on Public Opinion.” Political Behavior 36(2):235–262. Boulding, Kenneth E. 1959. “National images and international systems.” Journal of Conflict Res-
olution 3(2):120–131. Brecher, Michael, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, Kyle Beardsley, Patrick James and David Quinn. 2016.
“International Crisis Behavior Data Codebook, Version 11.” https://sites.duke.edu/icbdata/ data-collections/.
Brutger, Ryan and Joshua D. Kertzer. 2015. “Exploring the Microfoundations of Reputation Costs.” Working paper.
Busby, Joshua and Jonathan Monten. 2008. “Without Heirs? Assessing the Decline of Establishment Internationalism in U.S. Foreign Policy.” Perspectives on Politics 6:451–472.
Busby, Joshua and Jonathan Monten. 2012. “Republican Elites and Foreign Policy Attitudes.” Political Science Quarterly 127(1):105–142.
Calvert, Randall L. 1985. “The Value of Biased Information: A Rational Choice Model of Political Advice.” Journal of Politics 47(2):530–555.
Castano, Emanuele, Alain Bonacossa and Peter Gries. 2016. “National Images as Integrated Schemas: Subliminal Primes of Image Attributes Shape Foreign Policy Preferences.” Political Psychology 37(3):351–366.
Chapman, Terrence L. 2011. Securing Approval: Domestic Politics and Multilateral Authorization for War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Chaudoin, Stephen, Helen V. Milner and Dustin H. Tingley. 2010. “The Center Still Holds: Liberal Internationalism Survives.” International Security 35(1):75–94.
Chaudoin, Stephen, Helen V Milner and Xun Pang. 2015. “International systems and domestic poli- tics: Linking complex interactions with empirical models in international relations.” International Organization 69(02):275–309.
Chicago Council on Global A↵airs. 2012. “Foreign Policy in the New Milennium: Results of the 2012 Chicago Council Survey of American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy.” http://www. thechicagocouncil.org/sites/default/files/2012_CCS_Report.pdf.
Chittick, William O., Keith R. Billingsley and Rick Travis. 1995. “A Three-Dimensional Model of
29
American Foreign Policy Beliefs.” International Studies Quarterly 39(3):313–331. Chong, Dennis and James N. Druckman. 2013. “Counterframing E↵ects.” Journal of Politics
75(1):1–16. Cohen, Marty, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller. 2008. The Party Decides: Presidential
Nominations Before and After Reform. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Conover, Pamela Johnston and Stanley Feldman. 1989. “Candidate Perception in an Ambigu-
ous World: Campaigns, Cues, and Inference Processes.” American Journal of Political Science 33(4):912–940.
Cottam, Richard. 1977. Foreign policy motivation: A general theory and a case study. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Cukierman, Alex and Mariano Tommasi. 1998. “When Does It Take a Nixon to Go to China?” American Economic Review 88(1):180–197.
Dafoe, Allan, Jonathan Renshon and Paul Huth. 2014. “Reputation and Status as Motives for War.” Annual Review of Political Science 17(371-393).
Dancey, Logan and Geo↵rey Sheagley. 2013. “Heuristics Behaving Badly: Party Cues and Voter Knowledge.” American Journal of Political Science 57(2):312–325.
Davis, Christina L. 2012. Why Adjudicate? Enforcing Trade Rules in the WTO. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Delli Carpini, Michael X. and Scott Keeter. 1996. What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Deudney, Daniel H. and G. John Ikenberry. 1999. “The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order.” Review of International Studies 25(2):179–196.
Downes, Alexander and Todd Sechser. 2012. “The Illusion of Democratic Credibility.” International Organization 66(3):457–489.
Eichenberg, Richard. 2009. “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy in the Obama Era.” Politique Americaine 14.
Fehrs, Matthew. 2014. “Leopards Can Change Their Spots: When Leaders Take Out of Character Actions.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 25(4):669–687.
Fiske, Susan T., Amy J. C. Cuddy, Peter Glick and Jun Xu. 2002. “A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype Content: Competence and Warmth Respectively Follow From Perceived Status and Competition.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82(6):878–902.
Fordham, Benjamin. 1998. “Partisanship, Macroeconomic Policy, and U.S. Uses of Force, 1949- 1994.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42(4):418–439.
Foster, Dennis M. 2008. ““Comfort to Our Adversaries”? Partisan Ideology, Domestic Vulnerability, and Strategic Targeting.” Foreign Policy Analysis 4(4):419–436.
Gadarian, Shana Kushner. 2010. “Foreign Policy at the Ballot Box: How Citizens Use Foreign Policy to Judge and Choose Candidates.” Journal of Politics 72(4):1046–1062.
Goble, Hannah and Peter M. Holm. 2009. “Breaking Bonds? The Iraq War and the Loss of Republican Dominance in National Security.” Political Research Quarterly 62(2):215–229.
Gowa, Joanne. 1998. “Politics at the Water’s Edge: Parties, Voters, and the Use of Force Abroad.” International Organization 52(2):307–324.
Gries, Peter Hays. 2014. The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives over Foreign A↵airs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Guisinger, Alexandra. 2009. “Determining Trade Policy: Do Voters Hold Politicians Accountable?” International Organization 63(3):533–557.
Heilbrunn, Jacob. 2010. “End of the Establishment: Where Have All the Serious Republicans Gone?” Foreign Policy. URL: http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/07/16/end-of-the-establishment/
Herrmann, Richard K. 2003. Image Theory and Strategic Interaction in International Relations. In Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy and Robert Jervis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
30
Herrmann, Richard K. and Michael P. Fischerkeller. 1995. “Beyond the Enemy Image and Spiral Model: Cognitive-Strategic Research After the Cold War.” International Organization 49(3):415– 50.
Hilton, James L. and William von Hippel. 1996. “Stereotypes.” Annual Review of Psychology 47:237– 71.
Holsti, Ole R. 1979. “The Three-Headed Eagle: The United States and System Change.” Interna- tional Studies Quarterly 23(3):339–359.
Holsti, Ole R and James N Rosenau. 1986. “Consensus Lost. Consensus Regained?: Foreign Policy Beliefs of American Leaders, 1976-1980.” International Studies Quarterly pp. 375–409.
Holsti, Ole R. and James N. Rosenau. 1988. “The domestic and foreign policy beliefs of American leaders.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 32(2):248–294.
Holsti, Ole R. and James N. Rosenau. 1990. “The structure of foreign policy attitudes among American leaders.” The Journal of Politics 52(01):94–125.
Holsti, Ole R and James N Rosenau. 1996. “Liberals, populists, libertarians, and conservatives: The link between domestic and international a↵airs.” International Political Science Review 17(1):29– 54.
Howell, William G. and Jon C. Pevehouse. 2007. While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hurst, Steven. 2014. Parties, Polarization, and US Foreign Policy. In Obama and the World: New Directions in US Foreign Policy, ed. Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller and Mark Ledwidge. Routledge pp. 95–106.
Hurst, Steven and Andrew Wroe. 2016. “Partisan polarization and US foreign policy: Is the centre dead or holding?” International Politics 53(5):666–682.
Hurwitz, Jon and Mark Pe✏ey. 1987. “How are foreign policy attitudes structured? A hierarchical model.” The American Political Science Review pp. 1099–1120.
Jentleson, Bruce W. 1992. “The Pretty Prudent Public: Post Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force.” International Studies Quarterly 36(1):49–74.
Judd, Charles, Bernadette Park and Walter Kintsch. 1993. “Definition and Assessment of Accuracy in Social Stereotypes.” Psychological Review 100(1):109–128.
Jussim, Lee. 2012. Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self- Fulfilling Prophesy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Jussim, Lee, Jarret Crawford and Rachel Rubinstein. 2015. “Stereotype (In)Accuracy in Perceptions of Groups and Individuals.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24(6):490–497.
Kahan, Dan M. 2016. The Politically Motivated Reasoning Paradigm, Part 1: What Politically Motivated Reasoning Is and How to Measure It. In Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Wiley Online Library.
Kane, John V. and Helmut Norpoth. 2017. “No Love for Doves? Foreign Policy and Candidate Appeal.” Social Science Quarterly Forthcoming.
Kertzer, Joshua D. 2013. “Making Sense of Isolationism: Foreign Policy Mood as a Multilevel Phenomenon.” Journal of Politics 75(1):225–240.
Kertzer, Joshua D. 2017. “Microfoundations in international relations.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 34(1):81–97.
Kertzer, Joshua D., Kathleen E. Powers, Brian C. Rathbun and Ravi Iyer. 2014. “Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes.” The Journal of Politics pp. 1–16.
Kertzer, Joshua D. and Ryan Brutger. 2016. “Decomposing Audience Costs: Bringing the Audience Back into Audience Cost Theory.” American Journal of Political Science 60(1):234–249.
Kertzer, Joshua D. and Thomas Zeitzo↵. Forthcoming. “A Bottom-Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy.” American Journal of Political Science .
Koch, Michael T. 2009. “Governments, Partisanship, and Foreign Policy: The Case of Dispute Duration.” Journal of Peace Research 46(6):799–817.
Krebs, Ronald R. 2015. “How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall: Military Conflict, Politics, and
31
the Cold War Consensus.” International Organization 69(4):809–845. Krehbiel, Keith. 1991. Information and Legislative Organization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press. Kreps, Sarah, Elizabeth N. Saunders and Kenneth Schultz. 2016. “The Ratification Premium:
Hawks, Doves, and Arms Control.” Working paper. Kucik, Je↵rey and Ashley Moraguez. 2016. “Liberals, Labor, and the Democratic Party’s Volatile
Relationship with Free Trade.” The Forum 14(2):121–142. Kupchan, Charles A. and Peter L. Trubowitz. 2007a. “Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Inter-
nationalism in the United States.” International Security 32(2):7–44. Kupchan, Charles A. and Peter L. Trubowitz. 2007b. “Grand Strategy for a Divided America.”
Foreign A↵airs 86(July/August). Kupchan, Charles A. and Peter L. Trubowitz. 2010. “The Illusion of Liberal Internationalism’s
Revival.” International Security 35(1):95–109. Kydd, Andrew. 2003. “Which Side Are You On? Bias, Credibility, and Mediation.” American
Journal of Political Science 47(4):597–611. Lai, Brian and Dan Reiter. 2005. “Rally ’Round the Union Jack? Public Opinion and the Use of
Force in the United Kingdom, 1948–2001.” International Studies Quarterly 49(2):255–272. Lau, Richard R. and David P. Redlawsk. 2001. “Advantages and Disadvantages of Cognitive Heuris-
tics in Political Decision Making.” American Journal of Political Science 45(4):951–971. Leeds, Brett Ashley. 1999. “Domestic political institutions, credible commitments, and international
cooperation.” American Journal of Political Science 43(4):979–1002. Levendusky, Matthew S. 2010. “Clearer Cues, More Consistent Voters: A Benefit of Elite Polariza-
tion.” Political Behavior 32(1):111–131. Levy, Jack S. and William F. Mabe Jr. 2004. “Politically Motivated Opposition to War.” Interna-
tional Studies Review 6(1):65–83. Lock, Andrew and Phil Harris. 1996. “Political marketing - vive la di↵erence!” European Journal
of Marketing 30(10-11):14–24. Lupia, Arthur and Mathew D. McCubbins. 2000. The Institutional Foundations of Political Compe-
tence: How Citizens Learn What They Need to Know. In Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality, ed. Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins and Samuel L. Popkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press pp. 47–66.
Maheswaran, Durairaj and Shelly Chaiken. 1991. “Promoting systematic processing in low- motivation settings: E↵ect of incongruent information on processing and judgment.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61(1):13–25.
Malhotra, Neil, Yotam Margalit and Cecilia Mo. 2013. “Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration: Distinguishing between Prevalence and Conditional Impact.” American Journal of Political Science 57(2):391–410.
Mason, Lilliana. 2015. ““I Disrespectfully Agree“: The Di↵erential E↵ects of Partisan Sorting on Behavioral and Issue Polarization.” American Journal of Political Science 59(1):128–145.
Mattes, Michaela and Jessica L. P. Weeks. 2016. “Hawks, Doves and Peace: An Experimental Approach.” Working paper.
McCormick, James M. and Eugene R. Wittkopf. 1992. “At the Water’s Edge: The E↵ects of Party, Ideology, and Issues on Congressional Foreign Policy Voting, 1947-1988.” American Politics Quar- terly 20(1):26–53.
Mellow, Nicole. 2011. “Foreign policy, bipartisanship and the paradox of post-September 11 Amer- ica.” International Politics 48(2):164–187.
Mercer, Jonathan. 1996. Reputation and International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Miller, Joanne M. and David A. M. Peterson. 2004. “Theoretical and Empirical Implications of Attitude Strength.” Journal of Politics 66(3):847–867.
Milner, Helen. 1997. Interests, Institutions and Information: Domestic Politics and International
32
Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Milner, Helen V. and Benjamin Judkins. 2004. “Partisanship, Trade Policy, and Globalization: Is
There a Left–Right Divide on Trade Policy?” International Studies Quarterly 48(1):95–119. Milner, Helen V. and Dustin Tingley. 2015. Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of
American Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Modigliani, Andre. 1972. “Hawks and doves, isolationism and political distrust: An analysis of public
opinion on military policy.” The American Political Science Review 66(3):960–978. Moravscik, Andrew. 1997. “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics.”
International Organization 51(4):513–53. Myers, Marissa. 1998. “When biased advice is a good thing: Information and foreign policy decision
making.” Internaitonal Interactions 24(4):379–403. Nielsen, Sigge Winther and Martin Vinaes Larsen. 2014. “Party brands and voting.” Electoral Studies
33:153–165. Oneal, John R., Bruce Russett and Michael L. Berbaum. 2003. “Causes of Peace: Democracy,
Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885–1992.” International Studies Quarterly 47(3):371–393.
O’Neill, Barry. 1999. Honor, Symbols and War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Palmer, Glenn, Tamar R. London and Patrick M. Regan. 2004. “What’s Stopping You?: The
Sources of Political Constraints on International Conflict Behavior in Parliamentary Democracies.” International Interactions 30(1):1–24.
Palmer, Glenn, Vito D’Orazio, Michael Kenwick and Matthew Lane. 2015. “The MID4 Data Set: Procedures, Coding Rules, and Description.” Conflict Management and Peace Science Forthcom- ing.
Petrocik, John. 1996. “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.” American Journal of Political Science 43(3):864–87.
Posen, Barry R. 2014. Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Putnam, Robert D. 1988. “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: the Logic of Two-Level Games.” International Organization 42(3):427–60.
Rahn, Wendy M. 1993. “The Role of Partisan Stereotypes in Information Processing about Political Candidates.” American Journal of Political Science 37(2):472–496.
Rathbun, Brian C. 2004. Partisan Interventions: European Party Politics and Peace Enforcement in the Balkans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Rathbun, Brian C. 2007. “Hierarchy and Community at Home and Abroad Evidence of a Com- mon Structure of Domestic and Foreign Policy Beliefs in American Elites.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51(3):379–407.
Rathbun, Brian C. 2011. “The ‘Magnificent Fraud’: Trust, International Cooperation, and the Hidden Domestic Politics of American Multilateralism after World War II.” International Studies Quarterly 55(1):1–21.
Rathbun, Brian C. 2016. “Wedges and widgets: liberalism, libertarianism, and the trade attitudes of the American mass public and elites.” Foreign Policy Analysis 12(1):85–108.
Rathbun, Brian C., Joshua D. Kertzer, Jason Reifler, Paul Goren and Thomas J. Scotto. 2016. “Taking Foreign Policy Personally: Personal Values and Foreign Policy Attitudes.” International Studies Quarterly 60(1):124–137.
Reifler, Jason, Thomas J. Scotto and Harold D. Clarke. 2011. “Foreign Policy Beliefs in Contempo- rary Britain: Structure and Relevance.” International Studies Quarterly 55(1):245–266.
Rosenau, James N. 1965. Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: An Operational Formulation. New York: Random House.
Ruggie, John Gerard. 1982. “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberal- ism in the Postwar Economic Order.” International Organization 36(2):195–231.
Ruggie, John Gerard. 1992. “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution.” International Orga-
33
nization 46(3):561–98. Saunders, Elizabeth N. 2015a. “Pulling and Hauling Revisited: Leaders, Advisers, and the Political
Origins of Elite Support for War.” Working paper. Saunders, Elizabeth N. 2015b. “War and the Inner Circle: Democratic Elites and the Politics of
Using Force.” Security Studies 24(3):466–501. Schelling, Thomas C. 1960. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. 1949. The Vital Center. Boston, MA: Houghton Mi✏in. Schultz, Kenneth A. 2005. “The Politics of Risking Peace: Do Hawks or Doves Deliver the Olive
Branch?” International Organization 59(1):1–38. Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. Sechser, Todd. 2011. “Militarized Compellent Threats, 1918-2001.” Conflict Management and Peace
Science 28(4):377–401. Simmons, Beth A. 1994. Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the
Interwar Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, Gareth and Alan French. 2009. “The political brand: A consumer perspective.” Marketing
Theory 9(2):209–226. Snyder, Jack, Robert Y. Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon. 2009. “Free Hand Abroad, Divide and Rule
at Home.” World Politics 61(1):155–87. Stagnor, Charles and James E. Lange. 1994. Mental Representations of Social Groups: Advances
in Understanding Stereotypes and Stereotyping. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 26. Academic Press pp. 357–416.
Therriault, Andrew. 2015. “Whose Issue Is It Anyway? A New Look at the Meaning and Measure- ment of Issue Ownership.” British Journal of Political Science 45(4):929–938.
Thompson, Alexander. 2009. Channels of Power: The UN Security Council and US Statecraft in Iraq. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Tomz, Michael. 2007. “Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Ap- proach.” International Organization 61(4):821–40.
Tomz, Michael and Robert P. Van Houweling. 2009. “The Electoral Implications of Candidate Ambiguity.” American Political Science Review 103(1):83–98.
Trager, Robert F. and Lynn Vavreck. 2011. “The Political Costs of Crisis Bargaining: Presidential Rhetoric and the Role of Party.” American Journal of Political Science 55(3):526–545.
Walgrave, Stefaan, Jonas Lefevere and Anke Tresch. 2012. “The Associative Dimension of Issue Ownership: Conceptualization, Measurement, and E↵ect.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76(4):771– 782.
Waltz, Kenneth N. 1959. Man, The State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.
Williams, Laron K. 2014. “Hawks, doves, and opportunistic opposition parties.” Journal of Peace Research 51(1):111–125.
Wittkopf, Eugene R. 1981. “The Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes: An Alternate View.” Social Science Quarterly 62(1):108–23.
Wittkopf, Eugene R. 1990. Faces of internationalism: Public opinion and American foreign policy. Duke University Press.
Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Public Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1
Do Partisan Types Stop at the Water’s Edge? Supplementary Appendix
March 17, 2017
Contents
1 Study instrumentation 2 Table 1: Individual di↵erence variable descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Table 2: Policy proposals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Table 3: Policy proposals II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.1 Sampling methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2 Supplementary analysis 5 2.1 Political sophistication and stereotype accuracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 1: More politically sophisticated respondents see foreign policy issues as rela- tively less stereotypical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5
5 Table 4: More politically sophisticated participants are more aware of polarization
and see foreign policy issues are relatively less stereotypical .................................. 6 2.2 Order e↵ects .................................................................................................................................. 7
Figure 2: Little evidence of priming-induced order e↵ects ................................................. 8 2.3 Cohort e↵ects ............................................................................................................................... 9
Table 5: Generalized additive models find little evidence of cohort e↵ects ...................... 11 Figure 3: Little evidence of cohort e↵ects in perceived stereotypicality ........................... 12
2.4 Permutation tests with observational data ............................................................................. 13 Figure 4: Permutation tests fail to find evidence that Republicans are more hawkish
than Democrats ............................................................................................................... 13
2
1 Study instrumentation
Table 1: Individual di↵erence variable descriptions
Respondent-level
Age A continuous measure of respondents’ age in years Male A dichotomous measure of participants’ self-identified gender, coded 1
for males, and 0 for females Income An ordinal variable measuring participants’ income White A dichotomous measure of participants’ race, coded 1 for whites, and 0
for non-whites Education An ordinal measure of participants’ education Partisanship The standard 7 point partisan identification scale, scaled with 1 being
strong Democrats, and 7 being strong Republicans. Political interest An ordinal measure how closely participants reported following the news
about American politics and elections. Strength of preferences A measure of attitude extremity for the particular policy, calculated by
subtracting the scale midpoint from each response, taking the absolute value, and dividing by the theoretical maximum of the scale to produce a standardized measure ranging from 0-1, with 0 indicating neutrality on an issue, and 1 indicating very strong preferences.
Issue-level ]
Foreign policy issue A dichotomous variable indicating whether the issue is foreign or domes- tic, using the same coding scheme presented visually in Figure 3 in the main text.
Polarization A measure of the degree of polarization for the particular issue in our sample, calculated by taking the average level of support for a policy amongst self-described Democrats, and subtracting it from the average level of support for the policy amongst self-described Republicans, taking the absolute value, and rescaling based on the theoretical maximum. Thus, a polarization score of 0 indicates Republicans and Democrats approve of a policy to an identical extent, while a polarization score of 1 indicates all Republicans oppose a policy and all Democrats support it (or vice versa).
3
Table 2: Policy proposals
1 Protectionist
Free trade
Increasing limits on imports of foreign-made products, and re- fraining from signing more free trade agreements like NAFTA. Decreasing limits on imports of foreign-made products, and sign- ing more free trade agreements like NAFTA.
2 Pro-environment Decreasing o↵shore drilling for oil and gas in U.S. coastal areas and increasing restrictions on drilling on public lands in order to protect the environment. Anti-environment Increasing o↵shore drilling for oil and gas in U.S. coastal areas and decreasing restrictions on drilling on public lands in order to increase energy production.
3 Interventionist Encouraging the US to play an active role in solving problems around the world. Isolationist Discouraging the US from playing an active role in solving prob- lems around the world.
4 Anti-arms control Opposing an arms control treaty that would reduce both US and Russian nuclear arsenals. Pro-arms control Supporting an arms control treaty that would reduce both US and Russian nuclear arsenals.
5 Increase military spending Increasing military spending to allow the US to better solve in- ternational problems. Decrease military spending Decreasing military spending to allow the US to better solve in- ternational problems.
6 Pro-gun control Passing a law making the sale of firearms more strict than they are today. Anti-gun control Passing a law lowering restrictions on the sale of firearms.
7 Pro-tax hike Passing a new law that would raise taxes on households earning $1 million a year or more. Anti-tax hike Passing a new law that would lower taxes on households earning $1 million a year or more.
8 Pro-abortion Allowing abortions to be generally available to those who want it. Anti-abortion Placing stricter limits on abortions than there are now.
Note: Participants randomly assigned to receive one version of each of the eight policies (e.g. for trade, either a protectionist policy, or a free trade policy). The order of the policy statements is randomized, along with those from Table 3.
Table 3: Policy proposals II
9 Stop piracy Control Sending American ships to stop overseas piracy in an area critical to the American shipping in- dustry.
Unilateral Sending American ships to stop overseas piracy in an area critical to the American shipping in- dustry. The US would seek to stop piracy by deploying US military forces on their own without seeking military assistance from other countries or approval from the United Nations.
Multilateral Sending American ships to stop overseas piracy in an area critical to the American shipping indus- try. The US would seek to stop piracy by deploying US military forces alongside military personnel from many other countries by working through the United Nations.
10 Enviro sanction Control Placing major sanctions on a country that is violating environmental regulations. Unilateral Placing major sanctions on a country that is violating environmental regulations. The US would
implement the sanctions by acting alone without seeking approval from the United Nations. Multilateral Placing major sanctions on a country that is violating environmental regulations. The US would
implement the sanctions by cooperating with other countries and seeking backing from the United Nations.
11 Troops oil Control Sending American troops to defend a country with oil reserves that has been attacked by its larger neighbor.
Unilateral Sending American troops to defend a country with oil reserves that has been attacked by its larger neighbor. The US would do so by deploying US ground troops on their own without seeking military assistance from other countries or backing from the United Nations.
Multilateral Sending American troops to defend a country with oil reserves that has been attacked by its larger neighbor. The US would do so by deploying US ground troops alongside the troops provided by many other countries by working through the United Nations.
12 Troops humanitarian Control Sending American troops to defend a country against attacks by its larger neighbor in order to protect civilians who are being brutally attacked. The attacks include mass rapes and slaughters, particularly of members of ethnic minority groups.
Unilateral Sending American troops to defend a country against attacks by its larger neighbor in order to protect civilians who are being brutally attacked. The attacks include mass rapes and slaughters, particularly of members of ethnic minority groups. The US would do so by deploying US ground troops on their own without seeking military assistance from other countries or backing from the United Nations.
Multilateral Sending American troops to defend a country against attacks by its larger neighbor in order to protect civilians who are being brutally attacked. The attacks include mass rapes and slaughters, particularly of members of ethnic minority groups. The US would do so by deploying US ground troops alongside the troops provided by many other countries by working through the United Nations.
Note: participants either assigned to control condition for all four of these policy statements, or a policy approach condition, in which the approach taken (unilateral or multilateral) randomly varies for each item. The order of the statements are randomized, along with those from Table 2.
4
5
1.1 Sampling methodology
SSI panels employ an opt-in recruitment method, after which panel participants are randomly se-
lected for survey invitations, using population targets rather than quotas to produce a nationally
diverse sample of registered voters. Because of the recruitment technique, the sample is nationally
diverse, although not a national probability sample; for other examples of recent political science
articles using SSI samples, see Barker, Hurwitz and Nelson (2008); Healy, Malhotra and Mo (2010);
Popp and Rudolph (2011); Kam (2012); Malhotra and Margalit (2010); Malhotra, Margalit and Mo
(2013); Berinsky, Margolis and Sances (2014); Kertzer and Brutger (2016).
2 Supplementary analysis 2.1 Political sophistication and stereotype accuracy
Figure 1: More politically sophisticated respondents see foreign policy issues as relatively less stereo- typical (with 95% confidence intervals)
1 2 3 4
Political interest
Con
ditio
nal e
ffect
of f
orei
gn p
olic
y is
sue
-0.3
0
-0.2
5
-0.2
0
-0.1
5
-0.1
0
-0.0
5 0.
00
6
Table 4: More politically sophisticated participants are more aware of polarization and see foreign policy issues as relatively less stereotypical
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Age -0.001⇤⇤⇤ -0.001⇤⇤⇤ -0.001⇤⇤⇤ -0.001⇤⇤⇤
(0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001) Male 0.049⇤⇤⇤ 0.049⇤⇤⇤ 0.049⇤⇤⇤ 0.049⇤⇤⇤
(0.015) (0.015) (0.015) (0.015) Income 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001 (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) White 0.025 0.025 0.025 0.025 (0.018) (0.018) (0.018) (0.018) Education 0.028⇤⇤⇤ 0.020⇤⇤⇤ 0.020⇤⇤⇤ 0.013⇤⇤
(0.006) (0.005) (0.005) (0.006) Partisanship 0.004 0.004 0.004 0.004 (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) Political interest 0.095⇤⇤⇤ 0.112⇤⇤⇤ 0.071⇤⇤⇤ 0.095⇤⇤⇤
(0.009) (0.010) (0.010) (0.009) Foreign policy issue -0.164⇤⇤⇤ -0.136⇤⇤⇤ (0.030) (0.032) Foreign policy issue ⇥ education -0.012⇤⇤⇤ (0.004) Foriegn policy issue ⇥ political interest -0.027⇤⇤⇤ (0.007) Polarization 0.299⇤ 0.627⇤⇤⇤
(0.175) (0.168) Polarization ⇥ political interest 0.177⇤⇤⇤ (0.031) Polarization ⇥ education 0.046⇤⇤
(0.019) Constant 0.255⇤⇤⇤ 0.237⇤⇤⇤ 0.103⇤⇤ 0.059 (0.044) (0.044) (0.045) (0.045) N 12,038 12,038 12,038 12,038 AIC 8,259.815 8,252.380 8,244.324 8,271.119 BIC 8,355.961 8,348.526 8,340.470 8,367.265 ⇤p < .1; ⇤⇤p < .05; ⇤⇤⇤p < .01. Linear mixed-e↵ect model with random e↵ects on both respondents and issues.
7
2.2 Order e↵ects
Although the experimental protocol randomized both which policy proposals were presented to each
participant (e.g. half the participants received an interventionist policy proposal, and the other
half an isolationist), and the order in which they were presented, the 12-item questionnaire measur-
ing policy attitudes was always administered before the 12-item questionnaire measuring partisan
stereotypes. Although this ordering cannot account for our main finding — the relative weakness of
partisan types in foreign issues compared to domestic ones — one possibility is that asking people
to think about their own attitudes before asking them to invoke partisan stereotypes primes respon-
dents to anchor their second-order beliefs on their first-order ones, potentially accounting for part
of the relationship between the strength of respondents’ own preferences and the respondent-level
stereotypicality reported in Table 2 in the main text.
To test for this potential priming e↵ect, we exploit the fact that although the sequence of the
two questionnaires was fixed, the order of the questions within each questionnaire was not. For
illustrative purposes, suppose two respondents completed the survey, with di↵erent order random-
izations. Respondent A ended the first questionnaire with a question about gun control, and began
the second questionnaire by answering a question about that same topic. Respondent B was ad-
ministered the gun control question at the beginning of the first questionnaire, and at the end of
the second questionnaire. If we are concerned about priming e↵ects on this issue, we should be
more concerned about them for Respondent A (who answered the gun control stereotype question
immediately after the gun control policy preference question, such that Order6.i,j = 1) than for
Respondent B (who answered 22 di↵erent questions in between the two gun control questions, such
that Order6.i,j = 23).
Figure 2 thus presents the results from a series of regression models. Panels (a) and (b) use
a respondent-level measure of stereotype prevalence as the dependent variable, whereas panels (c)
and (d) use the respondent-level measure of stereotypicality employed in the analysis in Table 2
in the main text. In panel (a), each dot depicts the point estimate (accompanied by 95% confi-
dence intervals) for the marginal e↵ect of the largest possible di↵erence in order randomizations
(i.e., Order6.i,j = 23) on stereotype prevalence, controlling for a set of respondent covariates (parti-
8
Effe
ct o
n st
ereo
typi
calit
y Ef
fect
on
prev
alen
ce
-1.0
-0
.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
-1.0
-0
.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
Figure 2: Little evidence of priming-induced order e↵ects
(a) Marginal e↵ects of Order!::i,j (b) Conditional e↵ects of Order!::i,j
(c) Main e↵ects of Order!::i,j (d) Conditional e↵ects of Order!::i,j
For panels (a) and (c), each dot represents a point estimate of the marginal e↵ect of Order!::i,j = 23, the largest possible di↵erence in order randomizations for a given issue (accompanied by 95% confidence intervals), in a
regression model controlling for a set of respondent-level covariates, estimating separate models for each of the 28 issues. For panels (b) and (d), the dots instead depict conditional e↵ects, for the interaction between the maximum order randomization di↵erence for a given issue and the strength of respondents’ own preferences on the issue. The
results suggest little evidence of priming-induced order e↵ects.
Effe
ct o
n st
ereo
typi
calit
y Ef
fect
on
prev
alen
ce
-1.0
-0
.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
-1.0
-0
.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
9
sanship, education, gender, race, age, political interest, income, and participants’ own preference on
the issue), estimated separately for each of the 28 issues. In panel (c), each dot depicts the quantity
as before, but this time on stereotypicality. In panels (b) and (d), each dot depicts the conditional
e↵ect between the strength of participants’ policy preferences and Order6.i,j = 23, accompanied as
before by 95% confidence intervals, and controlling for the same respondent demographic covariates
listed above. Importantly, we find very little evidence of order e↵ects: only 3 of the 28 marginal
e↵ects presented in panel (a), 2 of the 28 marginal e↵ects presented in panel (c), 3 of the 28 condi-
tional e↵ects presented in panel (b), and 2 of the 28 conditional e↵ects presented in panel (d) are
significant at the 95% level.
2.3 Cohort e↵ects
The mixed linear models in Table 2 in the main text operationalizes age with a linear functional form,
finding evidence that older participants perceive slightly weaker stereotypes in general. Combined
with the results of the observational data showing how di↵erent administrations used force at di↵erent
rates, this raises the prospect of cohort-based heterogeneity in partisan types, in which individuals
from di↵erent generations, who witnessed di↵erent formative events in American foreign policy may
rely on systematically di↵erent mental models (Khong, 1992; Schuman and Rieger, 1992; Levy, 1994;
Sylvan and Voss, 1998) perceive the stereotypicality of foreign policy issues in systematically di↵erent
ways.
To test this possibility, we estimate a series of generalized additive models (GAMs) (Keele,
2008) in Table 5, regressing a variety of stereotypicality measures (described in detail below) on
participants’ age (modeled with a cubic spline), gender, income, race, education, partisanship, and
self-reported level of interest in politics. In the first model of Table 5 (also plotted visually in Figure
3(a)), the dependent variable is each participant’s average stereotypicality score for the six pol-
icy statements implicating hawkishness or interventionism (interventionism, isolationism, increasing
defense spending, decreasing defense spending, pro-arms control, and anti-arms control). In this
manner, we can model the e↵ects of age on perceived stereotypicality of the hawkish or intervention-
ist policies studied with observational data later in the paper in a nonlinear fashion. In model 2 of
10
Table 5 (plotted in Figure 3(b)) we also include the free trade and protectionist statements, thereby
averaging across all 8 of the foreign policy proposals shown in the middle panel of Figures 1 or 2
in the main text. Model 3 of Table 5 (see also Figure 3(c)) focuses instead on the 12 foreign policy
approaches shown in the bottom panel of Figures 1 or 2 in the main text, while model 4 of Table
5 (also depicted in Figure 3(d)) average across all 20 foreign policy proposals included in the study.
Finally, model 5 of Table 5 (plotted in Figure 3(e)) calculates each respondent’s average di↵erence in
stereotypicality between the foreign policy issues and domestic policy issues in the data, enabling us
to test how the distinctiveness of partisan types in foreign a↵airs compared to their domestic coun-
terparts varies across time. Importantly, across all of these di↵erent dependent variables, across all
five panels of Figure 3, we find very little evidence of cohort e↵ects: in general, the figures reconfirm
the results from Table 2 in the main text that older respondents perceive slightly weaker stereotypes
than younger ones, but the slope of the e↵ect is modest.1
1The results in Table 5 also hold if we estimate bivariate models that study the e↵ects of age on stereotypicality without any additional demographic controls.
11
Table 5: Generalized additive models find little evidence of cohort e↵ects
Hawkishness/
interventionism Foreign policy
Foreign approaches
All foreign issues
Foreign - domestic
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Male 0.046⇤⇤ 0.050⇤⇤⇤ 0.043⇤⇤ 0.046⇤⇤⇤ -0.007 (0.019) (0.017) (0.018) (0.016) (0.016) Income -0.003 -0.005 -0.002 -0.003 -0.011⇤⇤⇤
(0.004) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) White 0.035 0.031 0.011 0.021 -0.017 (0.023) (0.021) (0.021) (0.019) (0.019) Education 0.025⇤⇤⇤ 0.023⇤⇤⇤ 0.016⇤⇤ 0.020⇤⇤⇤ -0.003 (0.007) (0.006) (0.006) (0.006) (0.006) Party ID 0.013⇤⇤⇤ 0.012⇤⇤⇤ 0.003 0.007⇤⇤ 0.011⇤⇤⇤
(0.004) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004) Pol. Interest 0.099⇤⇤⇤ 0.098⇤⇤⇤ 0.080⇤⇤⇤ 0.089⇤⇤⇤ -0.016⇤
(0.011) (0.010) (0.010) (0.009) (0.009) Constant -0.024 -0.011 0.078⇤ 0.033 -0.128⇤⇤⇤
(0.043) (0.040) (0.040) (0.036) (0.036) s(Age) 4.586⇤ 4.869 5.111⇤⇤⇤ 5.47⇤⇤⇤ 2.261⇤⇤⇤
(1.944) (1.688) (4.563) (3.331) (4.333) N 1,003 1,003 1,003 1,003 1,003 Adjusted R2 0.126 0.141 0.104 0.143 0.037 UBRE 0.079 0.067 0.069 0.055 0.056
Note: ⇤p < .1; ⇤⇤p < .05; ⇤⇤⇤p < .01. Main entries for spline results are estimated degrees
of freedom; entries in parentheses are F statistics. To substantively interpret the e↵ect of age, see Figure 3.
Average stereotypicality: hawkish/interventionist policies
-0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6
Average stereotypicality: all foreign policy issues and approaches
-0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6
Average stereotypicality: foreign policies
-0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6
Average difference in stereotypicality: foreign policy - domestic policy
-0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6
Average stereotypicality: foreign policy approaches
-0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6
Figure 3: Little evidence of cohort e↵ects in perceived stereotypicality
(a) Haw
kishness (b) Foreign policies
(c) Foreign policy approaches
20 40
60 80
20 40
60 80
20 40
60 80
Age Age
Age
(d) All foreign policy issues
(e) Foreign - domestic
20 40
60 80
20 40
60 80
Age Age
X.
13
2.4 Permutation tests with observational data
Figure 4: Permutation tests fail to find evidence that Republicans are more hawkish than Democrats
(a) Fatal MIDs (b) International Crisis Behavior (ICB) (c) Militarized Compellent Threats
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Proportion of fatal MIDs initiated by Republicans
Proportion of violent crises initiated by Republicans
Proportion of MCTs initiated by Republicans
Each panel presents the results from permutation tests, where we randomly resample from each dataset with
replacement B = 1000 times, recording the proportion of simulated datasets in which Republican administrations appear more or less hawkish than their Democratic counterparts. Each plot thus depicts the bootstrapped
distribution of the proportion of simulated datasets in which Republicans appear more hawkish than Democrats; each p-value refers to the null hypothesis that Republicans are no more hawkish in the data than Democrats are,
represented here with blue shading.
Figure 4 in the main text uses a number of commonly-used conflict datasets in IR to provide a
baseline from which to contextualize the relatively weak partisan types on hawkishness and inter-
ventionism detected in our survey experiment. Thus, panel (a) of Figure 4 uses MID data (Palmer
et al., 2015) to plot the number of fatal MIDs originated by the United States during each Presiden-
tial administration from 1945-2010; panel (b) uses the ICB2 data (Brecher et al., 2016) to plot the
number of international crises faced by each administration where violence was employed; Panel (c)
uses the MCT data (Sechser, 2011) to plot the number of militarized compellent threats issued by
each administration. Across each analysis, Republican administrations do not appear to be system-
atically more hawkish than Democratic ones; the same also holds in panel (d) when we combine the
MID data with the Howell and Pevehouse (2007) ”opportunities to use force” data as a denominator.
To provide a better sense of whether the pattern of results we show here might be due to chance,
we employ permutation tests, where we randomly resample from each dataset with replacement
B = 1000 times, recording the proportion of simulated datasets in which Republican administra-
p<0.979 p<0.568
p<0.577
14
tions appear more or less hawkish than Democratic administrations. Thus, Figure 4(a) shows that
we fail to reject the null hypothesis that Republicans are no more hawkish than Democrats using
MID data (p < 0.577); panel (b) shows that we similarly fail to reject the null with violent crises
in the ICB data; panel (c) shows that when measured by the rate at which they issue compellent
threats, Republicans actually appear significantly less hawkish than Democrats.
References Barker, David C., Jon Hurwitz and Traci L. Nelson. 2008. “Of Crusades and Culture Wars: ”Mes-
sianic” Militarism and Political Conflict in the United States.” Journal of Politics 70(2):307–322.
Berinsky, Adam J., Michele F. Margolis and Michael W. Sances. 2014. “Separating the Shirkers from the Workers?” American Journal of Political Science 58(3):739–753.
Brecher, Michael, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, Kyle Beardsley, Patrick James and David Quinn. 2016. “International Crisis Behavior Data Codebook, Version 11.” https://sites.duke.edu/icbdata/ data-collections/.
Healy, Andrew J., Neil Malhotra and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo. 2010. “Irrelevant events a↵ect voters’ evaluations of government performance.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107(29):12804–12809.
Howell, William G. and Jon C. Pevehouse. 2007. While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kam, Cindy D. 2012. “Risk Attitudes and Political Participation.” American Journal of Political Science 56(4):817–836.
Keele, Luke. 2008. Semiparametric Regression for the Social Sciences. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Kertzer, Joshua D. and Ryan Brutger. 2016. “Decomposing Audience Costs: Bringing the Audience Back into Audience Cost Theory.” American Journal of Political Science 60(1):234–249.
Khong, Yuen Foong. 1992. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decision of 1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Levy, Jack S. 1994. “Learning and foreign policy: sweeping a conceptual minefield.” International Organization 48(2):279–312.
Malhotra, Neil and Yotam Margalit. 2010. “Short-Term Communication E↵ects or Longstand- ing Dispositions? The Public’s Response to the Financial Crisis of 2008.” Journal of Politics 72(3):852–867.
Malhotra, Neil, Yotam Margalit and Cecilia Mo. 2013. “Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration: Distinguishing between Prevalence and Conditional Impact.” American Journal of Political Science 57(2):391–410.
Palmer, Glenn, Vito D’Orazio, Michael Kenwick and Matthew Lane. 2015. “The MID4 Data Set: Procedures, Coding Rules, and Description.” Conflict Management and Peace Science Forthcom- ing.
15
Popp, Elizabeth and Thomas J. Rudolph. 2011. “A Tale of Two Ideologies: Explaining Public Support for Economic Interventions.” Journal of Politics 73(3):808–820.
Schuman, Howard and Cheryl Rieger. 1992. “Historical Analogies, Generational E↵ects, and Atti- tudes Toward War.” American Sociological Review 57(3):315–326.
Sechser, Todd. 2011. “Militarized Compellent Threats, 1918-2001.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 28(4):377–401.
Sylvan, Donald A and James F Voss. 1998. Problem representation in foreign policy decision-making. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.