Introduction

• Author: Gerhard Loewenberg
• Date: 01 November 2007
• Published date: 01 November 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3162/036298007782398459

503Introduction

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XXXII, 4, November 2007 503

Introduction

The assumption that the U.S. Congress cannot influence foreign

policy seems confirmed by the apparent inability of a Congress

controlled by the Democratic Party after 2006 to influence the conduct

of the Iraq War. That may be one reason why the public evaluates the

performance of Congress even more negatively than the performance

of the President in the context of an increasingly unpopular war. The

first two articles in this issue of the Quarterly provide clear evidence

that the congressional election of 2006 did turn considerably on the

issue of the war. Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen compare the

vote share of Democratic and Republican candidates in the senatorial

elections of 2000 and 2006. They use the incidence of war casualties

and of casualty rates as their indicator of the impact of the war, testing

whether the uneven distribution of battle deaths across states and across

counties within states explains variance in vote shares between the

parties. Casualties and casualty rates during the Vietnam War had had

a strong negative effect on Senators’ vote shares between 1966 and

1972. Kriner and Shen demonstrate that Iraq War casualties have had

the same effect, even at a far lower casualty rate than during the Vietnam

War. So voters are demonstrably sensitive to the costs of war when the

conduct of that war is the issue.

Christian R. Grose and Bruce I. Oppenheimer provide additional

evidence of the influence of the Iraq War, taking their evidence from

the 2006 elections for members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

They find that between the House elections of 2004 and 2006, the

swing from Republican to Democratic votes can be explained by three

factors related to the war: casualties experienced in the district, the

position taken by the incumbent on the resolution that authorized the use

of force in Iraq four years earlier, and Republican party responsibility for

an increasingly unpopular war. The authors refer to “anticipatory

representation theory,” which asserts that legislators will be guided in