The Contours and Determinants of The President's Security Agenda.
Abstract
What issues comprise the president's security agenda? Why does the president's security agenda include some issues and not others? These questions are approached by assessing the president's attention to armed conflicts in speeches and comments from October 1987 to July 1996. The security agenda's composition is found to differ with administrations while remaining limited in scope. The president's overall involvement in security issues climbs and falls dramatically. A series of regression models identify inertia, the persistence of an issue once it has received the president's attention, as the most influential force in determining whether a conflict will receive the president's attention. Despite the strength of inertia, these models show new issues are pushed onto the president's security agenda by factors from the international environment, domestic politics and the president's experience in foreign policy making. The most powerful of these forces of change are shifts in a conflict's intensity and media attention to a conflict. These forces are, however, more important in selling the level of the president's involvement with a conflict than in determining whether the conflict becomes a part of the security agenda.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 09, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA319881
Entities
People
- Carl N. Brenner
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology