Research
Working Papers
"Beyond the Party Line: Ideological Heterogeneity in Legislative Foreign Policy Preferences"
● Co-winner of the 2025 Best Graduate Student Paper Award in the Foreign Policy Section, American Political Science Association
What motivates legislators to support or oppose foreign policy? Much of the existing scholarship points to electoral cleavages in domestic politics to explain legislative behavior in security and diplomatic affairs. While these frameworks offer appealing parsimony, they often overlook the distinctive nature of foreign policy, which often requires a high degree of consistency across administrations. Structural explanations assume partisan incentives drive legislators to respond differently to substantively similar policies, risking a portrayal of legislative behavior as largely inconsistent and opportunistic. In this paper, I develop a more nuanced account of legislative preference formation and decision-making in foreign policy by examining the role of individual legislators’ ideological orientations. Using supervised text classification on over 100,000 Senate floor speeches on foreign policy from 1947 to 2020, I develop a new measure of senators’ isolationist, cooperative internationalist, and militant internationalist preferences. The findings challenge aggregate party-level assumptions, showing that parties frequently fail to function as homogeneous, unitary actors in foreign policy because individual legislators interpret and act on issues through the lens of their own ideological commitments.
"Partisanship, Ideology, and Elite Cues in Foreign Policy" (Sowon Park*, Todd Sechser, and Sunggun Park)
● Invited to R&R at the American Journal of Political Science
What kinds of elite messages influence public opinion on foreign policy issues? It is well established that an elite’s political party plays a significant role in determining the effectiveness of cues. However, in the realm of foreign policy, parties exhibit substantial ideological diversity. This often produces more complex patterns of support and opposition among political elites, leading even members of the same party to disagree on key foreign policy issues. As a result, party labels alone may not always offer voters clear and consistent guidance. In this paper, we argue that foreign policy ideology offers a more stable and precise lens through which individuals evaluate elite messages in foreign policy. Drawing on three pre-registered survey experiments conducted with a nationally representative sample of 12,600 American adults, we find that foreign policy ideology serves as powerful and distinct heuristics in shaping public opinion on international affairs.
Work in progress
"Nuclear Weapons and National Prestige" (Sunggun Park, Todd Sechser, and Sowon Park)
▶ Abstract"Foreign Policy as a Legislative Luxury Good” (Philip Potter and Sowon Park)
"Democratic Noise in Times of International Crises"
"Violence and Prosocial Motivation" (Todd Sechser and Sowon Park)