Congress and American normal-bilateral foreign policy: The making of United States China policy during the 1980s

Existing theories on the United States Congress's role in foreign policy focus on the power-sharing and multilateral policy-making dimensions. They are inadequate to explain legislative behavior in the making of U.S. bilateral foreign policy.;Applying concepts in the area of legislative decision-making, this study offers a theoretical interpretation of the following phenomenon in the making of U.S. bilateral policy: As the relationship between the United States and another country develops into a normal period, Congress tends to become increasingly critical of the foreign country's domestic and foreign policies and restrictive on U.S. policies toward that country. The study explores how and why coalitions of such congressional opposition are formed and how they influence U.S. bilateral foreign policy.;The study focuses on the making of U.S. China policy during the normal period (1982-1988) of the American relations with China. Employing both quantitative methods (content analysis of the Congressional Record and analysis of roll-call votes) and case studies (U.S.-China nuclear agreement, Chinese textiles exports to the United States and Chinese family planning policy) with extensive interviews and documentation, this study argues that in a normal-bilateral relationship between the United States and another country, congressional opposition will arise as lawmakers' attitudes toward that particular country become diversified, which is caused by changes in both the external and internal environments to which the lawmakers are exposed. This diversification of attitudes leads to the emergence of various issue-focused coalitions of congressional opposition to U.S. policies toward that country. Such coalitions are formed around three types of issues--external/strategic, electoral/economic and emotive/moral--each meeting a particular type of lawmakers' personal goals and inducing an inward, outward or mixed orientation of congressional interest. These different types of issues produce different intensities, functional roles, policy effects and levels of influence of those coalitions.;This study supports a pluralistic perspective on the legislative decision-making process and advances a theory that can be used to explain Congress's role in the making of U.S. normal-bilateral policies toward other countries.