Foreign Policy in American Presidential Elections : A Study of Five Presidential Elections Between 1992 and 2008

Abstract

Studies of the role of foreign policy in American presidential elections go back to the 1950s. For a long time the prevailing view was that American voters were both uninterested in and unable to let foreign policy questions influence their vote in presidential elections because of the perceived complexity and remoteness of the policy area. This view radically changed during the 1970s and 1980s when several studies showed that not only does foreign policy influence vote choice, it can also be one of the strongest predictors. No comprehensive cross-election studies have been conducted on this field since the end of the Cold War. This study aims to fill this hole by using surveys from American National Election Studies (ANES) to study the five presidential elections between 1992 and 2008. This is done by employing a model of vote choice in presidential elections and using sequential linear regression to analyse the data. The most important findings are that the importance of foreign policy for vote choice varies to a great degree throughout the period, and that even in elections where foreign policy has the strongest influence of vote choice, it is still inferior to domestic policy concerns.