This research evaluates two different perspectives on congressional-executive relations across four major foreign policy issue areas using congressional voting from 1947 to 1988. Both a bipartisan perspective and a partisan/ideological perspective are evaluated across high politics issues-national security and foreign relations votes—and low politics issues-foreign aid and trade votes. In addition, we examine the impact of the Vietnam War on voting in each issue area. In general, we find that although high politics issues elicit more bipartisanship than low politics, party and ideology seem to account better for congressional voting across all four issue areas. The effect of the Vietnam War is to lessen bipartisanship and to exacerbate partisan and ideological divisions, especially on national security votes and somewhat less so on foreign aid votes.
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