Agreeing to disagree: Domestic institutional congruence and US dispute behavior

Domestic and international politics are linked so that domestic structure a nd domestic political preferences affect international conflict behavior. I n particular, states' policy preferences can be characterized by the congru ence of policy preferences between political institutions. As a slate's pol icy preferences become more congruent, as policy preferences between politi cal institutions are more similar, the state's conflict behavior changes. I hypothesize that as the domestic political institutions in a stale share s imilar policy preferences or policy goals, disputes become more likely and tend to last longer. I employ event count and continuous-time hazard models to analyze U.S. conflict propensity and conflict duration during the perio d 1945-1992. Using the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set (version 2.1 ), I model U.S. militarized dispute behavior as a function of congruence be tween the policy preferences of the U.S. President and the Congress. The mo dels reveal a strong relationship between preference congruence and both th e amount of conflict and the duration of the disputes in which the U.S. eng ages. The congruence hypotheses are robust across a variety of measures. Th e results add substantial strength and substance to claims that domestic po litical characteristics affect international conflict. The theory and empir ical analyses also refine the domestic-international linkage by allowing sc holars to consider the effect of normal political change in a single stale on that state's foreign policy decisions.