Presidents Abroad: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy

Abstract

A president’s most precious commodity is time, and nowhere is this scarcity more apparent than with respect to international travel. Personal presidential involvement in diplomatic relations has proven to yield significant benefits, and yet traveling to engage in face-to-face diplomacy is often prohibitively expensive for American executives in time and attention. Given such restrictions, when and where do presidents choose to travel? We use a data set of more than 750 presidential trips spanning more than one hundred countries and a century of history to investigate the domestic and international factors influencing when, where, and for what reason presidents are likely to travel abroad. We provide a detailed examination of presidential travel over time and find that domestic political contexts influence presidential propensities to travel consistent with expectations based on allocating time and attention as limited resources.

Keywords

U.S. presidents diplomacy foreign policy presidential agenda

Foreign travel is now regarded as one of the most quintessentially presidential pursuits (Doherty 2009; Ellis 2008). President Nixon’s trip to China as well as Presidents Kennedy and Reagan’s speeches in Berlin are iconic examples of executive action on foreign policy. Traveling abroad allows presidents to make use of their superior foreign policy powers to engage in face-to-face diplomacy and negotiate international agreements. Foreign trips also have domestic implications. Given the pomp and ceremony intentionally surrounding these events, some presidential scholars suggest that presidents receive a boost in approval by traveling abroad (Darcy and Richman 1988; Marra, Ostrom, and Simon 1990) and because of this benefit, they may even seek out such opportunities (Kernell 1997). For modern presidents, foreign travel is both a cornerstone of their foreign policy agenda as well as a hallmark of the office.

Given the ubiquity of modern presidential travel, it is perhaps surprising that prevailing norms once effectively barred presidents from stepping foot beyond American borders (Ellis 2008). Many scholars have noted the extent to which the American presidency has evolved over time from a more traditional and constitutionally bounded office to one that has become more powerful over time (Burke 2000; Howell 2003). The evolution of presidential travel similarly describes a transition from a traditional to modern presidency.

While quite a bit of attention has focused on the expansion of executive office staff (Burke 2000),¹ comparatively little attention has been given to the institutional implications behind the creation and expansion of a bureaucratic apparatus related to presidential travel (Burton 2006). The ability to travel is now a presidential tool commonly used for the advancement of a foreign policy agenda.

Despite the utility of foreign travel as a tool of diplomacy (Lebovic and Saunders 2016), presidents face many practical and institutional barriers to going abroad. Most important, presidential time and attention are finite resources while foreign policy can be a significant drain on both (Kelley and Pevehouse 2015; Lindsey and Hobbs 2015). Personal presidential diplomacy is a task that by definition cannot be delegated. As such, foreign travel is limited by the executive “bottleneck” (Lindsey and Hobbs 2015), or the maximum capacity of the officeholder to be personally involved in the process. Traveling abroad, thus, necessarily takes time away from domestic affairs and when the opportunity costs of foreign travel are high, presidents may be unable to afford trips abroad. While a president’s personal participation in foreign policy development has proven to be valuable (Lindsey and Hobbs 2015), presidents must decide when, where, and how long to visit foreign countries against a backdrop of competing demands upon their time. As such, we explore how presidents allocate their time and attention abroad assuming that presidents make a cost-benefit analysis of the domestic opportunity costs associated with foreign travel. In particular, we examine the political conditions that are most likely to influence presidential foreign travel.

In this investigation, we examine the history of when, where, and how often presidents travel as well as the political factors that influence how much modern presidents travel abroad. In the following section, we first place presidential travel within the larger context of presidential politics. We then discuss the origin and evolution of presidential international travel from a historical, institutional, and foreign policy perspective. The next section outlines our investigation, from data gathering through expectations and findings. Our results suggest that presidential travel abroad is heavily influenced by domestic factors such as presidential elections and congressional relations while becoming much more frequent in recent decades. We conclude our investigation with thoughts on how our findings contribute to our understanding of the evolving presidency.

Presidential Travel

Presidential travel may be a hallmark of the modern executive, but it is a relatively recent phenomenon and not the most well-studied aspect of the U.S. presidency. The lack of scholarly attention may lie in the dual nature of foreign travel. As noted by Putnam (1988), presidents traveling abroad are playing a two-level game in that they are communicating at once to both a foreign and domestic audience. Most of the research on presidential travel to date examines this latter audience by focusing on either purely domestic trips (Cohen and Powell 2005; Doherty 2007; Ellis 2008; Kernell 1997) or the domestic implications of foreign travel (Brace and Hinckley 1993; Charnock, McCann, and Tenpas 2009; Darcy and Richman 1988; Doherty 2009; Marra, Ostrom, and Simon 1990; Simon and Ostrom 1989). While studies of presidential travel abroad as foreign policy exist (Lebovic and Saunders 2016), questions remain as to how presidential travel abroad fits into the larger scope of presidential actions as well as how presidents prioritize such travel given domestic political contexts.

Presidents and Foreign Policy

While the powers granted to presidents explicitly within the Constitution are few in number, presidents have over time expanded their powers through reinterpretation and new precedents (Howell 2003). Presidents have been especially advantaged in the realm of foreign policy where their powers are more explicitly spelled out within the Constitution. Specifically, presidents are designated the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, given the power to negotiate treaties, and have the ability to send and receive ambassadors. Over time, presidents have also won expanded power through the development of unilateral foreign policy powers such as executive agreements that allow presidents to make treaty-like deals without the requirements of congressional approval (Schlesinger 1973).² Institutional changes such as the radical expansion of White House staff have also provided presidents with expanded capacity (Burke 2000). Scholars have noted that presidents are now structurally advantaged in foreign policy vis-à-vis Congress by their first-mover advantages, ability to collect and disperse costly information about foreign affairs, as well as by having a more direct electoral incentive to pursue foreign policy (Canes-Wrone, Howell, and Lewis 2007, 3).

Because presidents’ foreign policy powers are considerably superior to their ability to influence domestic affairs, scholars such as Wildavsky (1966) have suggested that we should consider there to be two presidencies: one foreign and the other domestic. This conception is not without its critics. For example, scholars such as Sigelman (1979, 1203) have noted that many presidents have not enjoyed a “freer hand” in foreign affairs when compared with domestic policy. However, recent research has shown that presidential advantages in foreign affairs can lead to significant policy-making advantages (Canes-Wrone, Howell, and Lewis 2007). Furthermore, presidential advantage in foreign policy extends even to the courts as Yates and Whitford (1998) demonstrate that the Supreme Court defers to presidential judgments in foreign affairs more than in domestic affairs. As such, presidents may find it far easier to influence foreign policy in comparison with domestic policy.

Perhaps because of these powers, presidents are considered to be the “primary agenda setter in American politics” with respect to foreign policy matters (Peake 2001, 69). In contrast, Mayhew (1974) and Fiorina (1989) both note that members of Congress are primarily interested in gaining reelection and, as such, foreign policy is likely to be less salient to their interests. Although Congress does sometimes attempt to constrain executive actions on foreign affairs, presidents have demonstrated that they are especially willing to defend their traditional influence. For example, when presidents use their signing statements to object to congressional intrusion, they are often doing so in defense of their foreign policy powers (Evans 2011; Ostrander and Sievert 2013). Similarly, one may expect presidents to defend their ability to travel abroad against congressional or taxpayer concerns over the high cost of presidents’ traveling and operating overseas.

Presidential ambitions in foreign policy must be weighed against domestic policy opportunity costs.³ Prior research has suggested that presidents often prioritize domestic interests over their foreign policy initiatives. For example, treaties negotiated by an executive and even supported by super-majorities in the Senate may not receive votes because of the value of scarce legislative floor time to domestic priorities (Kelley and Pevehouse 2015). While presidential travel does not interfere with legislative floor time, it can reduce a president’s domestic policy capacity by taking time away from working toward domestic policy victories.

Modern presidents now develop ambitious domestic policy agendas (Cohen 2012; Eshbaugh-Soha 2005) and are integrally involved in the direct negotiation of legislation (Beckmann 2008; Peterson 1990). Such legislative ambitions are resource intensive. While evidence for the viability of going public in support of legislation is mixed (Powell 1999), it remains the case that presidents often use public speeches (Eshbaugh-Soha and Miles 2011) and intense public campaigns in support of their domestic legislative priorities (Kernell 1997). Furthermore, prior research has shown that presidents can often influence public opinion with their rhetoric (Cavari 2017). While presidential travel abroad can drive agenda setting on foreign policy, presidents—especially in their first term—may prioritize domestic wins over foreign policy achievements. In short, time spent abroad is time that presidents cannot spend directly lobbying Congress or pushing a domestic agenda.

Yet, even with such costs, presidential travel is a valuable feature of a president’s foreign policy agenda because direct presidential involvement is nonsubstitutable. A domestic example of such a nonsubstitutable task would be the “targeting” of presidential appeals to critical members of Congress when negotiating legislation (Beckmann, Chaturvedi, and Garcia 2017). Even though the presidency has become more institutionalized and bureaucratic over time (Burke 2000), there is still an important role played by individual presidents and their personal idiosyncrasies. Lindsey and Hobbs (2015, 1089) suggest that decisions and actions requiring direct presidential involvement—such as being the sole decision-maker, manager of the bureaucracy, and his or her personal involvement in diplomacy—form a kind of “bottleneck” shaping the maximum capacity of an administration to influence foreign policy. Ultimately, they find lower levels of direct presidential involvement in foreign policy are predictive of “diplomatic outcomes that are less positive for the United States” (Lindsey and Hobbs 2015, 1090). In these circumstances, individual leaders can make a meaningful difference in international relations (Byman and Pollack 2001).

When considering presidents and foreign policy, the literature is filled with discussions of war-making authority (Howell, Jackman, and Rogowski 2013; Howell and Pevehouse 2005; Kriner 2010). However, Barilleaux and Kelley (1998, 119) point out that presidents are both “warmaker and peacemaker” and that the ability of presidents to work toward peace is perhaps just as influential and essential as the well-studied military powers. History provides a multitude of examples. President Eisenhower famously forced Britain, France, and Israel to end efforts to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956. Even President Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps more famous for his bellicose nature, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in facilitating the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Peace powers are an overlooked tool of presidential power, and the ability to travel and engage in face-to-face diplomacy may be instrumental toward establishing peace.

History and Change

All presidents have traveled during their administration, but not all presidents were willing or able to travel abroad. Until Teddy Roosevelt’s unprecedented trip to Panama in 1906, sitting U.S. presidents honored an unwritten norm not to cross international borders. While the Constitution does not prohibit foreign travel, it also did not endorse it. Early presidents were reluctant to travel beyond their own borders for fear of being seen as regal and violating the political norms of a more restrained presidency (Ellis 2008). Even after 1906, many presidents continued to avoid travel abroad for fear of how such actions might be perceived by the public. Rather than being a fixture of the office since the beginning, presidential foreign travel evolved slowly over time.

One institutional barrier to presidential travel in the early history of the United States was the lack of funds appropriated by Congress for presidential travel. According to Ellis (2008, 136), the very earliest of presidential trips such as President Monroe’s tour of the northern states were self-funded rather than paid for by the government. In fact, regular congressional appropriations for presidential travel were not actually provided until the early 1900s. Congress, designed as the primary branch of government and perhaps aware of presidents’ potential ability to “go public” (Kernell 1997), was likely loath to surrender any power by appropriating funds that presidents could use to rally support by traveling across the country. Eventually, the costs of presidential travel, such as the operation of Air Force One, were subsumed within the defense budget (Burton 2006; Ellis 2008). The cost of presidential travel is often a flashpoint with Donald Trump’s trips to his Florida golf courses, which is just a recent example from a one-hundred-year-old battle over travel budgets (Nussbaum 2017).

Travel is not incidental to the growth of presidential power, rather, it is itself a potent tool for advancing foreign policy priorities. Traveling abroad allows a president to act as the United State’s chief diplomat and spokesperson for the American people. While the Constitution provides presidents with many foreign policy powers, this was perhaps more than the founders intended and certainly in violation of early presidential expectations. Ellis (2008, 11) states that the end of the norm prohibiting presidential foreign travel “spelled the demise of the nineteenth century vision of a restrained, republican presidency.” In this sense, presidential travel is an option that was only added to the presidential toolbox in the twentieth century.

We must also acknowledge that changes in presidential travel are also related to the changing position of the United States on the world stage. While President Washington may have warned about foreign entanglements in his farewell address, U.S. foreign policy evolved to become imperial by the dawn of the twentieth century. The relationship between an expansionist foreign policy and presidential travel is underscored by the fact that many of the earliest presidential trips abroad—including the very first trip breaking the taboo—were to U.S. possessions such as the Panama Canal or military bases in the Caribbean. More important, two world wars and a prolonged cold war together catapulted the United States into the position of being a preeminent world power. As noted by Ellis (2008, 11), U.S. presidents “could not be the leader of the Free World without transforming the presidency’s role in the political system.” External factors were, thus, also influential in changing the nature of presidential norms.

Any study of presidential travel must also acknowledge the role that technology plays in the evolution of going abroad. Since the Constitution was written, trains replaced horse-drawn coaches and have themselves since been replaced by a sequence of ever more powerful aircraft as the primary method of presidential travel. Better transportation technology makes presidential travel quicker, safer, and ultimately more likely to occur. While technology is certainly a key consideration, Ellis (2008, 166–67) notes that a merely technological explanation cannot account for the lack of international travel prior to the twentieth century. However, once the norm prohibiting presidential travel abroad had ended, new technology may help to explain changes in presidential behavior. For example, one change may be that presidents are able to visit more countries and yet spend less total time abroad due to faster transport. Overall, new technologies lower the costs of travel and may alter presidents’ calculations about where to go and for how long to stay.

Explaining Patterns of Travel

Presidential travel does not occur in a political vacuum. One of the drivers of presidential travel is undoubtedly norms that have developed over time. Presidential scholar William G. Howell (2013, 5) notes that “the president is expected to be at the right place at the right time, no matter the distance required for travel.” Unlike domestic policy where a president may slowly build support, presidents are often forced to be reactive to world events in setting the agenda on foreign policy (Cavari 2017, 154). Just as, once, norms constrained presidents such that they could not cross international borders, presidents are now expected to travel abroad in response to events.

One of the places in which norms can be seen in action is in when and to which countries presidents choose to travel first. Table 1 shows where and when modern elected presidents take their first international trip.⁴ Because foreign travel is so visibly an element of the presidency, these first trips are important milestones. The data demonstrate the tradition of starting with an “easy” trip to one of our neighbors as a first foreign trip in that seven out of the ten examples are visits to either Mexico or Canada. Furthermore, all trips except for Eisenhower’s were taken within the first five months in office with the modal month of first foreign trip being in just the second month of office.

Table 1.

First Foreign Visits of Modern Elected Presidents.

President	Country	Month
Eisenhower	Mexico	October
Kennedy	Canada	May
Nixon	Belgium	February
Carter	United Kingdom	May
Reagan	Canada	March
G. H. W. Bush	Canada	February
B. Clinton	Canada	April
G. W. Bush	Mexico	February
Obama	Canada	February
Trump	Saudi Arabia	May

In the same way that events external to U.S. politics drive the foreign policy agenda (Wood and Peake 1998), presidential travel is also likely to be related to world affairs. Perhaps the best examples of such travel are President Wilson’s trip to negotiate the treaty ending World War I and President Roosevelt’s World War II meetings with allied leaders. While war is the most clear external demand for travel, it may also be the case that trade relationships and similar international partnerships also necessitate world travel. Many presidential trips abroad are for relatively routine meetings of international organizations such as the Group of Seven (G7) Summit in which leaders of the most advanced industrialized countries gather to discuss their concerns. As the United States has increased its international commitments and military presence around the world, the demand for international travel increases as well.

We believe that the most important theoretical consideration when predicting presidential travel is that presidents have limited time and attention. Presidents pay an opportunity cost to travel in that by traveling, they are giving up time that could be used toward a different goal. Going abroad to promote foreign policy may preclude pushing a domestic policy agenda (Kelley and Pevehouse 2015) or perhaps not traveling to a politically relevant U.S. state. As noted above, Lindsey and Hobbs (2015) discuss how political circumstance may form an “executive bottleneck” in which presidents are forced to trade off between efforts on international diplomacy and attention to domestic affairs. In particular, they find that presidents are able to give less effort to international issues during presidential campaign seasons. A simple extension of the bottleneck logic would suggest that presidents would also travel less during campaigns. However, this theoretical implication is in direct contrast to the previous findings of Brace and Hinckley (1993, 389) that presidents are more likely to travel within presidential election years.

In contrast to periods of time in which presidents are especially constrained, presidents may sometimes find foreign policy a more advantageous choice. For example, lame duck presidents may have limited influence on the domestic agenda (Light 1999) as well as more incentive to focus on foreign travel for legacy building purposes (Charnock, McCann, and Tenpas 2012). Both features make a focus on foreign policy more appealing. Regardless of electoral timing, when presidents find themselves less able to form deals with Congress, they may focus more on foreign policy matters in which the capacity for independent and unilateral action can provide for an opportunity to create policy wins. Following the logic of Kelley and Pevehouse (2015), when the opportunity cost to foreign policy action is low, presidents may be expected to travel more often as there is less to give up by doing so.

It may also be the case that presidents travel abroad as “diversionary foreign policy” (Smith 1996) to refocus attention away from difficult domestic affairs. Based on historical anecdotes, presidents may have used travel as a diversion from domestic affairs. For example, President Nixon famously traveled to Egypt during the unfolding Watergate scandal that eventually forced his resignation. In a more recent example, President Clinton traveled significantly more in his scandal-plagued second term during which he faced impeachment. As noted by Rottinghaus (2015), presidential scandals do have institutional effects on how the executive branch operates. However, Brace and Hinckley (1993, 390) suggest that presidents may be far less likely to travel in times of turmoil such as scandals, economic hardship, and political tension.

Investigating Presidential Travel Abroad

To investigate the travel patterns of American presidents, we use information collected and provided by the Department of State Office of the Historian.⁵ These data contain accounts of all presidential trips—including travel as president-elect and international vacations—including information regarding time, place, duration, and the purpose of the visit. While these data have been used by international relations scholars (Lebovic and Saunders 2016), they have not yet been used to directly examine domestic influences on or the early history of presidential travel. These data have the advantage of not being tied to finding references within the Public Papers of the President in which discovering a trip is in part dependent on whether the president issued formal remarks.⁶ Overall, these data provide a consistent, uniform, and reliable platform for evaluating presidential travel from 1906 to 2016.

While travel abroad would seem to be an easy concept to measure, there are a few different options. Specifically, both the number of country visits and the total number of days spent abroad are relevant for a discussion of presidential travel. Each measure also captures slightly different facets of the travel concept. With increasingly efficient means of travel, presidents often make several country visits within a single international trip lasting just a few days. However, a visit of an afternoon may be incomparable to the visit spanning multiple days. Including all travel, presidential visits to individual countries averaged about 2.7 days with a minimum of one day counted for a single visit and a maximum of ninety-seven days set by President Wilson when negotiating the end of World War I. While it is easy to focus on country visits, it is equally important to observe how much time presidents spend at each visit.

Figure 1 shows aggregate travel data on presidential country visits and total days abroad from the first trip in 1906 to President Obama’s last trip of 2015. These data do not include vacations or travel as president-elect, which were both somewhat more common in the earlier twentieth century. In terms of counting days abroad, multiple country visits within the same day were combined together when calculating the total days abroad. This provides a more accurate representation of “days away” as distinct from country visits. For both visits and days, the dots represent the value for each year while the line is a locally weighted scatter-plot smoother (LOWESS) curve demonstrating the trend across time.

Figure 1.

Number of days and visits abroad.

Several observations stand out in Figure 1. First, both the number of visits and the days abroad are generally increasing over time. The increase is especially true once the jet age begins in 1953 with the creation of a dedicated presidential transport: Air Force One. Second, the early norm prohibiting international travel by sitting presidents is still clearly active even after the first presidential trip abroad in 1906. There are many years in the earlier portion of the figure in which no trips were made, though the last year without foreign travel was 1976. Third, several interesting outliers are observed. Despite the prevalence of modern international travel, President Wilson’s multi-month participation in the talks ending World War I and President Roosevelt’s travel during World War II still stand out. Fourth and finally, there is substantial year-to-year variation in foreign travel observed within these data.

Table 2 shows the number of country visits and total days spent abroad for each presidential term from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama.⁷ These data show again that while presidents first began to travel after 1906, they were generally reluctant to do so. Most early twentieth-century presidents were reluctant to travel abroad, but President Wilson’s record 148 days abroad was not surpassed until President Clinton’s second term nearly eighty years later. With the notable exception of world wars, however, presidents prior to Eisenhower tended to travel less with Presidents Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, and Truman, all having at least one four-year term containing no international travel. Furthermore, the modal region traveled to in these early days tended to be North America as opposed to Europe in the later years. Transportation technology is a likely culprit for more limited travel in these early days but lingering isolationist sentiment in foreign policy may also account for these patterns.

Table 2.

Travel by Presidential Term: 1906–2016.

President	Visits	Days	Modal region
T. Roosevelt II	1	4	North America
Taft	1	1	North America
Wilson I	0	0	—
Wilson II	9	148	Europe
Harding	1	1	North America
Coolidge I	0	0	—
Coolidge II	1	3	North America
Hoover	0	0	—
F. Roosevelt I	10	14	North America
F. Roosevelt II	9	13	North America
F. Roosevelt III	21	71	Africa
F. Roosevelt IV	4	15	Europe
Truman I	7	43	Europe
Truman II	0	0	—
Eisenhower I	5	20	North America
Eisenhower II	31	89	Europe
Kennedy	16	38	Europe
Johnson I	1	1	North America
Johnson II	26	44	South/Central Asia
Nixon I	31	51	Europe
Nixon II	11	26	Europe
Ford	19	41	Europe
Carter	31	72	Europe
Reagan I	25	52	Europe
Reagan II	24	66	Europe
G. H. W. Bush	61	101	Europe
B. Clinton I	51	82	Europe
B. Clinton II	82	158	Europe
G. W. Bush I	58	96	Europe
G. W. Bush II	82	131	Europe
Obama I	51	88	Europe
Obama II	67	118	Europe

The data in Table 2 also show several interesting trends within modern presidencies. First, those presidents with full second terms tend to travel more in their second term as compared with their first. This pattern suggests that there is a link between foreign travel and the presidential election cycle. Second, the pattern of generally increasing travel is observed even when aggregating to the level of presidential term. This increase, however, is not monotonic and in the last few administrations, we may be seeing evidence that a natural plateau has been reached in terms of visits and days abroad. Third, the modal region visited has been Europe since the Nixon administration, suggesting that while presidents often make trips to other continents, the focus of American foreign policy remains locked on Europe.

The data shown in Figure 2 demonstrate the pattern of time spent abroad by modern presidents over the course of an entire two-term administration. These data are limited to those presidents serving a full two terms from the Eisenhower to Obama administrations so that the patterns are fully comparable. Several interesting trends stand out. First, presidents appear to travel most within their last few years of office. This comports well with conventional intuitions related to lame duck presidents seeking a foreign policy legacy (Charnock, McCann, and Tenpas 2012). Second, there does appear to be less travel around the time that presidents would be constrained by their reelection campaign. Overall, each of these patterns suggests that presidential foreign travel is heavily influenced by domestic politics.

Figure 2.

Two-term presidents’ travel trends: 1953–2016.

There are also a few patterns that stand out when looking at the timing of presidential travel within the year. In particular, the most common months of travel start dates are June (at 15%), November (at 13%), and July/December (at about 11% each). In contrast, the least common month of travel is September (at 2.5%). These particular months suggest that presidential travel may be timed in part by relation to the congressional calendar as the height of activity falls toward the traditional end of sessions (November, December) and just before the August recess (June, July). Such timing is likely to be strategic. The actions of past presidents certainly suggest that even small advantages in timing are taken. For example, Kernell (1997, 125) notes that President Nixon’s famous China trip was arranged such that the arrival and return were timed to coincide with prime viewership for U.S. television.

Table 3 shows the breakdown of foreign travel by the purpose of the visit. By far, the most prevalent purpose of the visit was a bilateral meeting between the president and a head of state/government or other governing body. These trips constitute more than 60 percent of total visits. The second most prevalent purpose is some manner of multilateral meeting between the president and many other heads of state. Examples include attending the Group of Eight (G8) economic summit or a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit meeting. Far more rarely, presidents also engage in a small amount of purely ceremonial travel to mark an occasion or to attend a nongovernmental event such as participating in the funeral of a past governmental official or prominent figure. In the last category, at just more than 3 percent of cases, presidents will sometimes travel purely for the purpose of visiting U.S. military possessions or personnel. There are also many instances in which presidents will travel abroad for vacation, or more likely visit a country for purely incidental purposes such as refueling a plane or boat. Such cases represent just more than 5 percent of total visits.⁸

Table 3.

Purpose of Travel: 1906–2016.

Type	Number	Percent
Bilateral Meeting	472	62.27
Multilateral Meeting	198	26.12
Incidental/Vacation	40	5.28
Ceremonial	25	3.30
U.S. Bases/Troops	23	3.03

Where do presidents choose to travel? Table 4 shows the regions that presidents have tended to visit most often between 1906 and 2016. As one might expect, presidents have concentrated their travel in European countries and in North America. The large number of visits in Europe is, in part, due to the fact that presidents can easily visit many European countries in a single trip lasting just a few days. North America features prominently as neighbors are the easiest to visit, especially when travel technology was more limited. Furthermore, this distribution may be related to the prominence of European and North American countries within the NATO alliance, the fact that North American neighbors form a significant percentage of U.S. foreign trade, and the prevalence of democracies within these regions. In contrast, American presidents have made very few visits within Africa or Oceania.

Table 4.

Presidential Travel by Region: 1906–2016.

Region	Number of visits	Percent
Europe	331	43.67
North America	139	18.34
Middle East	70	9.23
South/Central Asia	64	8.44
Asia	53	6.99
South America	51	6.73
Africa	40	5.28
Oceania	10	1.32
Total	758

One way to examine where presidents visit is to look at the ten countries that have been most often visited since 1906. Table 5 shows these countries in order along with the total number of trips and what percentage of all visits have been to the given country. Overall, the list confirms much of the same intuition provided by the examination of regions in Table 4. Europe and North American countries dominate the list. However, this list also provides several additional insights. First, while presidents have visited about one hundred countries since 1906, about 43 percent of visits are to just these ten countries. As such, presidential travel tends to be concentrated. Second, the list contains a high proportion of countries that are strong U.S. allies. Third, the presence of Vatican City on the top ten list suggests that presidents may use such travel symbolically to appeal to domestic audiences rather than visits being purely about foreign policy.

Table 5.

Top 10 Presidential Destinations: 1906–2016.

Country	Number of trips	Percent of total
United Kingdom	61	8.04
France	46	6.07
Germany	43	5.67
Canada	39	5.15
Mexico	34	4.49
Italy	29	3.83
Japan	22	2.90
Vatican City	20	2.64
Republic of Korea	18	2.37
Egypt	16	2.11

Expectations and Operationalizations

As with any complex political phenomenon, there are likely to be many factors that influence presidential travel abroad in terms of timing, countries visited, duration, and the total number of visits. To focus on the opportunity costs associated with travel, we analyze the total number of days presidents spend abroad each year. Days abroad is a better reflection of costs than the more traditionally researched country visits as presidents often visit several countries within the same day or trip. While there are other units of time that we could aggregate to (Congress or presidential term), we chose to use “year” because it is the most natural unit for most of our key predictors.

One classic prediction for presidential travel is that it peaks during the last years in office as presidential influence over legislation wanes and a focus on legacy building takes center stage (Charnock, McCann, and Tenpas 2012), which may increase the benefits of foreign travel. Prior studies suggest that presidents tend to lose their influence over domestic legislation as time in their administration passes (Light 1999), and other studies note that Congress itself passes fewer landmark laws during the last two years of a presidential term (Mayhew 1991). As such, presidents may have more time in which to travel during their final years in office. However, prior studies have also noted that presidents may be “less motivated to take foreign trips” once reelected (Brace and Hinckley 1993, 394). We, therefore, test these contrasting predictions by observing whether lame duck status, or being within the last two years of a second term, increases presidential travel abroad.

Hypothesis 1 (H1): Presidents will travel more days during their last two years of a second term.

Because there are only so many tasks that a president can personally attend to within each day, presidential time is one of the most precious commodities within an administration. Accordingly, Lindsey and Hobbs (2015) have noted that presidential elections exacerbate an “executive bottleneck” in which tasks that the president cannot delegate can be neglected. When the flow of tasks through the bottleneck is greatest, such as during a presidential election, Lindsey and Hobbs (2015) suggest that circumstances will lead to less time being spent on international affairs. On the basis of this theoretical framework, we should also expect that presidents who are preoccupied with an election may also be unable to travel as much or as often because the campaign raises the costs of travel. Although it stands in sharp contrast with prior findings in Brace and Hinckley (1993, 389), we believe that presidents will travel fewer days during presidential election years.⁹

Hypothesis 2 (H2): Presidents will travel fewer days during presidential election years.

Presidents may also be influenced to travel by their relationship with Congress. As noted by Kelley and Pevehouse (2015), when presidents enjoy a fruitful relationship with Congress, they may prefer working on domestic legislation as opposed to working on their foreign policy agenda. As such, we would expect that the presence of divided government, which hampers a president’s ability to negotiate domestic agendas, would increase the likelihood of presidential travel. It may also be the case that, beyond chamber control, the size of a congressional majority will influence the decision to travel. For example, as noted by Beckmann, Chaturvedi, and Garcia (2017), presidents may often be called upon to target their personal lobbying efforts (another example of a nonsubstitutable presidential tool) to pivotal members of Congress. When legislative majorities in Congress are large, presidents may be less likely to succeed or to need such strategies as compared with times when there are slim majorities in Congress. This, in turn, may lower the costs of foreign travel. As such, we may expect presidents to travel more as majority sizes in Congress grow larger.¹⁰

Hypothesis 3 (H3): Presidents will travel more days during divided government.

Hypothesis 4 (H4): Presidents will travel more days when legislative majority sizes in Congress are large.

As noted above, we also want to account for the state of world affairs. External events such as conflicts and the need to consult with allies should also influence presidential travel abroad (Lebovic and Saunders 2016). The quintessential case of external demands for presidential travel is war. Many of the outlier years noted in the descriptive summaries above strongly suggest that presidents face additional travel burdens in times of war. Based on the literature and data presented above, we would expect that presidents travel more during wartime compared with peaceful years.¹¹

Hypothesis 5 (H5): Presidents will travel more days during times of war.

To examine the presidential demand for travel abroad based on the president’s attention to foreign affairs, we examine the proportion of each president’s State of the Union Address devoted to foreign policy within a given year.¹² While a snapshot in time, these speeches tend to come at the start of a year and have been used by prior studies as an expression of a president’s policy agenda (Cohen 1995; Light 1999). A president with an active foreign policy agenda may see larger benefits to foreign travel. We expect that presidents with a higher proportion of foreign policy discussion within their speeches will be more likely to spend time abroad to press this agenda.

Hypothesis 6 (H6): Presidents will travel more days abroad as the presidential attention to foreign policy increases.

We would also like to examine the possibility that presidents travel as a diversion from domestic policy failures as this could raise the benefits of travel abroad. One consistent measure of presidential interest in refocusing attention is the economy. Because of its importance to presidential performance ratings, scholars such as Brace and Hinckley (1993) have examined the role of economic factors in presidential foreign travel. Following this logic, we test the influence of economic factors on travel using the yearly average levels of unemployment within the United States from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.¹³

Hypothesis 7 (H7): Presidents will travel more days abroad as unemployment increases.

Last, we wish to account for the influence of the passage of time on travel tendencies. As noted in Figure 1 above, travel has been generally increasing since the 1950s. This shift is intuitive. Over time, transportation technology has improved, norms of travel have shifted, and international conferences have multiplied. To account for the passage of time, we include a variable for presidency within the model. This inclusion will demonstrate how the propensity to travel changes over successive administrations.

Empirical Model

The measure of interest for our investigation into presidential travel is the count in days that presidents spend abroad for each year within the jet age. Because of these data, we use a Negative Binomial count model to estimate the influence of potential factors on presidential travel.¹⁴ The model examines the 1953 to 2016 time frame because of a mixture of data availability and substantive concerns. We begin with 1953 because Eisenhower’s was the first full presidency to have access to a dedicated jet-age means of international travel: Air Force One.

Table 6 shows the results of the model examining days spent abroad. The results are mixed with respect to generally held beliefs about the nature of presidential travel while largely supportive of a theoretical framework focused on presidential opportunity costs. One of the more striking findings according to prior research and theoretical expectations is that lame duck status appears to have no influence over the number of days presidents spend abroad. As such, H1 is not supported. While the trend in Figure 2 would suggest that presidents do travel more in their last two years, this expectation does not hold when controlling for other political factors. It is worth noting that these findings also contrast with the expectation from Brace and Hinckley (1993) that presidents will travel less in their second term. These findings may be explained by the fact that lame duck years are compared against the baseline of nonelection years and that, when controlling for the electoral cycle, presidents are not significantly more likely to travel abroad in their final years.

Table 6.

Negative Binomial Model of Presidential Travel Days: 1953–2016.

Variable	Estimate (SE)	p $> \| z \|$
Election Year	−0.376 (0.184)*	.041
Lame Duck	0.002 (0.215)	.992
Majority Size	0.090 (0.025)*	.000
Divided Government	0.373 (0.197)**	.058
Wartime	0.098 (0.254)	.699
State of the Union	1.182 (0.658)**	.072
Unemployment	−0.090 (0.068)	.183
Kennedy	−0.293 (0.374)	.434
Johnson	−0.740 (0.449)**	.099
Nixon	0.653 (0.406)	.108
Ford	0.082 (0.446)	.854
Carter	0.392 (0.343)	.254
Reagan	0.669 (0.324)*	.039
G. H. W. Bush	0.863 (0.324)*	.008
Clinton	1.470 (0.295)*	.000
G. W. Bush	1.421 (0.288)*	.000
Obama	1.462 (0.343)*	.000
Constant	−2.954 (1.394)
α	.159 (.045)
Observations	64
Wald χ²	47.38
Prob > χ²	.000

and ** indicate significance at the p < .05 and p < .1 levels, respectively.

With respect to H2, we find strong support for the expectation that presidential reelections are predictive of reduced travel. Holding other variables at their mean values, the model suggests that presidents in a reelection year travel abroad approximately six fewer days—about a 30 percent reduction—when compared with a normal year. This finding builds on the previous theoretical contribution of Lindsey and Hobbs (2015) to suggest that when the “executive bottleneck” is constricted by an election, then presidential travel, just as other facets of foreign policy attention, wanes. The results are intuitive from the standpoint of opportunity costs. Not only is time more limited, but presidents within an election year may choose to prioritize domestic policy. Furthermore, domestic presidential travel within election years is often paired with campaign priorities (Doherty 2007; Ellis 2008) in a way that foreign trips cannot quite compete with. These findings support the theory that presidential travel is a limited resource subject to trade-offs forced by the scarcity of presidential time and attention.

The model results offer support for the expectation that the makeup of Congress will influence presidential travel. First, we find that divided government is predicted to increase the number of days presidents spend abroad.¹⁵ The substantive prediction of the model is that divided government will yield approximately six more days of travel when compared with unified government while other values are kept at their means. As such, the model supports the expectation of H3. Furthermore, the model provides support for H4 in that as majority size increases, presidents are predicted to spend more days abroad. Holding all other values at their means, the model indicates that moving upward within the inner-quartile range of majority size yields approximately ten more days of predicted travel. These findings are consistent with an expectation that close majorities may require more presidential direct involvement (and hence an unsubstitutable trade-off with foreign travel) than large majorities.

Our expectation that wartime will influence presidential travel, H5, is unsupported. While perhaps counterintuitive, this finding is in line with the logic of Brace and Hinckley (1993) that presidents will wish to travel less during crises perhaps to manage the response. These findings may also suggest that the image of a president traveling to consult with allies in a time of war could be a feature of a pre-modern presidency or the two world wars. Similarly, the model provides no evidence in support of H7 that presidential travel abroad is related to unemployment. While individual scandals may still yield diversionary travel (or the opposite of crisis management at home) on a case-by-case basis, we find for broader sensitivity to economic factors as suggested by Brace and Hinckley (1993).

We find weak support for the expectation (H6) that presidents will travel abroad more days when the significance of foreign policy forms a greater portion of their State of the Union Address. This finding, however, is significant only at the .1 level. These findings do suggest some support for the intuitive expectation that presidential attention to foreign policy is related to foreign travel. The weak results may be a result of foreign travel being tied to events that occur after the State of the Union Address is delivered.

Our general expectation that the propensity to travel will be higher for more recent presidents is supported by the model. Compared against the baseline of Eisenhower, presidents since the Reagan administration have been consistently and significantly more likely to spend time abroad. The results suggest that a turning point in presidential travel occurred during the 1980s, which is consistent with the frequencies of travel shown in Table 2. These findings are interesting as they indicate that while Nixon was famous for using travel as a tool of diplomacy, he was not significantly more likely to travel than Eisenhower. There is also some evidence to suggest that Johnson traveled less than Eisenhower, which may be an artifact of how he inherited the presidency.

Conclusion

In his book on presidential travel, Richard Ellis (2008, 4) demonstrates that presidents are not “a prisoner of the White House.” Presidential travel—both foreign and domestic—has become an integral part of the modern executive branch. In addition to being common, presidential travel is consequential. Traveling is a tool presidents use for negotiating foreign policy as well as for appealing to their domestic audience (Kernell 1997). By examining presidential travel abroad from its earliest instance through the last full administration, we show how the practice has evolved to become an institutionalized part of the modern presidency. When presidents travel abroad, they reinforce their own expertise and role as the primary agenda setter in foreign affairs. Indeed, President Trump’s 2018 summits with the North Korean and Russian leaders reinforce how independent presidents are to engage in personal diplomacy. While scholars have suggested that the modern presidency may be more myth than reality (Nichols 1994), the study of presidential foreign travel provides a further distinction between presidential eras that highlights how the executive branch has expanded over time.

Our empirical investigation of foreign travel yields several contributions to the study of U.S. presidents. First, we use a new and more complete data set of presidential travel that allows us to provide an empirical description of travel trends going back to 1906. These data represent a significant advancement over anecdotes and the prior studies of speeches made abroad. Second, our empirical model demonstrates that foreign travel is responsive to domestic political contexts consistent with expectations stemming from a theory of limited presidential attention and domestic policy opportunity costs. These findings directly extend the reasoning of Lindsey and Hobbs (2015) on the reelection bottleneck from foreign policy generally to foreign travel specifically while also extending a discussion of how presidents make foreign and domestic policy trade-offs given political constraints (Kelley and Pevehouse 2015). Third, our empirical findings—such as a dip in travel during reelection years and the lack of a lame duck effect—update and contrast with previous studies of presidential travel.

Together, these findings generally support a theory of presidential travel based on the constraints imposed by finite presidential time and attention. As presidents travel abroad to press a foreign policy agenda, they may sacrifice time and effort that could be used to advance a domestic agenda or to campaign in key states. How presidents make choices among these alternatives likely accounts for the substantial year-to-year variation in foreign travel. Ultimately, our findings help to develop a basic theory of presidential travel abroad, which will allow the literature on presidential travel to advance and connect with the broader literature on the operation of the executive branch.

Our findings also provide several new directions for future research regarding presidential travel abroad. For example, future studies should make use of duration when examining travel. As noted above, a visit of an afternoon versus several days (both common within these data) should be quite different in the anticipated substantive effect. Such studies could model the related decisions of when, where, and how long presidents travel. Furthermore, while this study is restricted to yearly data, researchers should consider examining presidential travel within smaller units of time as well as examining the timing of trips within the broader political contexts. This would allow scholars to examine the influence of executive scandals and congressional contexts such as being in session or working through major legislation. Insights may also be gained by examining the factors related to different kinds of travel as the mechanisms that yield meetings with heads of state may differ from those that govern summit meetings and visits to military bases abroad. Last, travel likely has an effect on presidents. Heightened presidential popularity or advancing a foreign policy agenda may be both effects and motivating goals of travel abroad.

Footnotes

Author’s Note

We would like to thank Nate Smith for his research assistance as well as our three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Our data can be found online at .

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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