Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications

"Partisanship, Foreign Policy Ideological Orientations, and Elite Cues" (Sowon Park*, Todd Sechser, and Sunggun Park)

● American Journal of Political Science, Forthcoming

What kinds of elite messages influence public opinion on foreign policy? Unlike in domestic politics, where partisanship and liberal-conservative ideology are tightly intertwined, party affiliation and ideological orientations in foreign policy are only weakly aligned. This weaker alignment creates a more diverse and complex cue environment for voters in the realm of foreign policy, in which individuals frequently encounter messages from elites who share their party but not their ideological orientations—or their ideological orientations but not their party. To examine whether, and to what extent, foreign policy ideological orientations shape the effectiveness of elite cues independent of partisanship, we conduct three pre-registered survey experiments on a nationally representative sample of 12,600 American adults. The results suggest that partisanship does not dominate cue-taking in foreign policy; instead, foreign policy ideological orientations serve as an independent and influential heuristic in shaping public opinion on foreign affairs.

PDF Appendix

Working Papers

"Beyond the Party Line: Ideological Heterogeneity in Legislative Foreign Policy Preferences"

● Job Market Paper

● Co-winner of the 2025 Best Graduate Student Paper Award in the Foreign Policy Section, American Political Science Association

Congress today is widely understood to operate in strong partisan alignment across most issues. Foreign policy, however, has long been viewed as a domain where legislative behavior may transcend party lines. Yet the nature and sources of this distinction remain difficult to theorize. This paper provides a new, individual-level account of foreign policy preference formation by tracing the ideological foundations of senators’ behavior. Using supervised text classification on more than 100,000 Senate floor speeches from 1947 to 2020, it develops an original measure of senators’ isolationist, cooperative internationalist, and militant internationalist orientations. These orientations consistently and powerfully explain legislative behavior in foreign policy, revealing that parties in this domain function less as unified blocs than as coalitions shaped by enduring ideological diversity. This heterogeneity not only complicates prevailing assumptions about partisan unity but may also mark foreign policy as an area where Congress is beginning to reassert its institutional prerogatives.

PDF Appendix

"Nuclear Weapons and National Prestige" (with Todd Sechser and Sunggun Park)

"Domestic Bargaining and the Partisan-Ideological Landscape of Congress"

 

Work in Progress

"Foreign Policy as a Legislative Luxury Good” (with Philip Potter)

"Threats and Polarization in South Korea" (with Rachel Myrick)

"Democratic Responsiveness in Foreign Policy" (with Hohyun Yoon)

"Democratic Noise in Times of International Crises"

"Violence and Prosocial Motivation" (with Todd Sechser)