Research

This article analyzes how democratic leaders cultivate an elite consensus in favor of participating in international institutions. We theorize two tactics to prevent elite dissent. Delegating early policy development to technocratic and nonpartisan experts can set a depoliticized tone. Later integration of opposition elites into the process can create powerful advocates that expand support to a consensus. We assess contrasting fates of the United Nations (UN) and International Trade Organization (ITO). Haunted by Woodrow Wilson’s failure to win approval for the League of Nations, leaders outsourced early planning for a UN to the Council on Foreign Relations. Later, Franklin D. Roosevelt and top aides tapped moderate Republicans for the US delegation to San Francisco, creating powerful Republican advocates. In contrast, leaders developed the ITO in-house and excluded legislative elites in final negotiations, provoking elite dissent. These tactics shed new light on leaders, elites, and the domestic politics of international order and hegemony.

How do wartime experiences shape citizens’ support for their country’s role in the world? This paper develops and tests a place-based theory of local war legacies, arguing that the coerciveness and geographic distribution of wartime mobilization shape postwar political support for national strategic aims. Using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) with historical surveys from the late 1930s through the early Cold War, I generate novel county-level estimates of support for U.S. entry into World War II and subsequent backing for postwar internationalism, the central issues in historical debates over the war’s legacy. I show that communities most exposed to coercive mobilization, such as high rates of draftee deaths, were significantly less supportive of postwar internationalism. The findings demonstrate that coercion matters: rather than uniformly generating unity, wars that impose concentrated and involuntary costs can alienate communities from the state’s strategic goals. This research contributes to theories of democratic responsiveness, the interplay of international and domestic politics, and the domestic foundations of grand strategy by linking local experiences of coercion to national debates over America’s global orientation.

The rise of China has focused scholarly attention on the sources and consequences of international competition. How does international competition influence domestic politics, and how do these effects inform a state’s foreign policy? We argue for the merits of renewing research at the nexus of international relations and American political development–what we term IR-APD–to study the interaction of domestic and international politics. We synthesize three analytical frameworks offered by an IR-APD perspective. An inside-out approach explains foreign policy as a function of domestic variables studied in American politics. An outside-in approach treats external forces as a cause of domestic political change. Finally, an interactive approach emphasizes the interplay between forces internal and external to the state. We illustrate these approaches by examining the domestic politics of U.S.-China competition. This study revitalizes an IR-APD research program that treats the U.S. as an international order maker, taker, and breaker.

What role do extra-governmental elites like think tanks play in democratic foreign policy, and how does their relationship with government officials enable or constrain national security debates? Drawing on Hall and Deardorff’s (2006) theory of lobbying as a legislative subsidy, we argue that think tanks and the broader marketplace of ideas operate by a similar logic: they primarily provide supportive information to allies rather than persuade opponents. We theorize two conditions shaping their involvement in consequential debates: (1) whether the policy narrative is settled or unsettled, and (2) alignment with the president’s preferred strategic ends and means. To evaluate this argument, we compile an original corpus of elite discourse on the Ukraine War from February 2022 through May 2025. The dataset includes all articles related to the Ukraine War in a prominent foreign affairs journal, think tank reports and commentary, and a corpus of New York Times and Wall Street Journal coverage. This approach enables us to trace how narrative situations evolve, how think tanks influence discourse, and how their contributions align with or contest government positions. The project advances research on national security politics, expertise, and democratic advantage in IR.

This project examines how fears over the threat of foreign adversary propaganda have shaped the American national security state from the early Cold War to the present. I trace the origins, evolution, and 2013 repeal of the Smith-Mundt Act’s ban on the domestic dissemination of U.S. government information originally created for foreign audiences. Debates over the ban’s repeal—and the threat of adversary information more broadly—reveal how elites have long treated the public as both a resource and a vulnerability for U.S. foreign policy. Drawing on American Political Development scholarship, I introduce the concept of an “information security regime” to explain how laws, institutions, and public-private partnerships have structured the circulation of foreign policy ideas. The ban reflected anxieties about overt propaganda and reliance on private actors to conceal government influence. Its repeal in 2013 signaled adaptation to a new digital and geopolitical era but did not resolve underlying tensions. This study is part of a broader project on U.S. influence activities and counter-influence efforts abroad, culminating in an analysis of the post-2016 rise and demise of the U.S.’s Global Engagement Center. Linking international pressures and domestic politics, I show how these dynamics narrow democratic discourse on U.S. foreign policy and contribute to a hawkish bias in IR.