"Learning Geography the Hard Way: The Influence of International Conflict on the US Political Agenda".

The old adage is that war is how the world teaches Americans geography. In some ways it is also how we teach our political leaders international relations. Strangely the direct linkage between international conflict and the American political agenda has been given relatively little attention by scholars. This paper hopes to begin to remedy this. We seek to demonstrate the effect of international conflict on the domestic agenda of American political institutions. Research indicates that individuals and institutions process information serially and not in a parallel fashion (Jones 1994; Jones 2003; Baumgartner and Jones 2005; Jones, Sulkin, and Larsen 2003). Leaders and institutions are subject to attention limits and attention to one policy area inevitably results in less attention to other policy areas. Using data from the Correlates of War Project's Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) dataset and the Policy Agendas Project data documenting the agenda of the major political institutions of the US, this paper examines the connection between the frequency and severity of international conflicts and the relative importance of international affairs within the US political agenda. Our findings demonstrate that political leaders are bad at making trade-offs, and domestic policy attention is influenced by the degree to which the US finds itself involved in international conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]