Another Look at the Cold War Consensus: The Eastern Establishment and the Bipartisan Bureaucracy.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in scholarly interest in the domestic underpinnings of America's liberal-internationalist foreign policy. While many scholars have agreed that a bipartisan consensus has been one of the key domestic components to this approach to foreign policymaking, studies attempting to identify the existence of a bipartisan consensus have typically produced mixed results. However, there exists a substantial, and largely qualitative literature, that points to the presence of bipartisanship within the executive branch. Indeed, several authors have claimed that the bipartisan consensus manifested itself in part through the appointment of prominent opposition party members to high-ranking positions within the bureaucratic agencies responsible for crafting and implementing foreign policy. Using a new dataset, this paper examines the patterns in bipartisan appointments to dozens of high-ranking bureaucratic offices since the onset of the Cold War. Results provide the most robust support for the traditional narrative regarding increased partisanship in wake of the Vietnam War, but provide less support for claims regarding further increases in partisanship following more recent events such as the Cold War and the September 11 attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]