This study reexamines an empirical claim that is broadly accepted in international relations: during the Cold War U.S. foreign policy belligerence was influenced strongly by domestic factors. We develop a rational expectations theory that produces hypotheses that are at odds with that result. We test our hypotheses and report findings that are both consistent with our rational expectations theory and inconsistent with the “domestic effects” hypothesis. We thus conclude that international politics, rather than domestic politics, was the primary determinant of U.S. foreign policy behavior during the Cold War.
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Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue. Established in 1939 and published for the Southern Political Science Association, The Journal of Politics is a leading general-interest journal of political science and the oldest regional political science journal in the United States. The scholarship published in The Journal of Politics is theoretically innovative and methodologically diverse, and comprises a blend of the various intellectual approaches that make up the discipline. The Journal of Politics features balanced treatments of research from scholars around the world, in all subfields of political science including American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political theory, and political methodology.
