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The international relations literature largely presumes that leaders engage in foreign policy substitution but does not provide a compelling theoretical explanation or convincing empirical evidence that substitution occurs. This article offers a theory of foreign policy choice based on the differences between private and public goods. It assumes that private goods and public goods are useful under different circumstances and conditions. Leaders select a policy based on political needs, so private- and public-goods approaches are employed alternatively depending on domestic situations: policies are substituted one for another. The trade-off between aggressive unilateral economic behavior and military conflict as the United States conducted foreign policy during the cold war is examined. Results show that leaders facing economic concerns and/or domestic opposition prefer trade aggression, a patently private-good-like policy, and substitute such policies in response to changing domestic stimuli.

I hypothesize that as the domestic political institutions in a state share similar policy preferences or policy goals, disputes become more likely & tend to last longer. I employ event count & continuous-time hazard models to analyze US conflict propensity & conflict duration during the period 1945-1992. Using the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set (version 2.1), I model US militarized dispute behavior as a function of congruence between the policy preferences of the US President & the Congress. The models reveal a strong relationship between preference congruence & both the amount of conflict & the duration of the disputes in which the US engages. The congruence hypotheses are robust across a variety of measures. The results add substantial strength & substance to claims that domestic political characteristics affect international conflict. The theory & empirical analyses also refine the domestic-international linkage by allowing scholars to consider the effect of normal political change in a single state on that state's foreign policy decisions. 4 Tables, 42 References. Adapted from the source document.

While a growing body of work provides empirical support for the notion that political leaders "substitute" foreign policies depending on a variety of domestic political and economic conditions, little work examines the underlying strategic causes of substitution. This article argues that foreign states behave strategically in order to (a) avoid becoming the targets of domestically troubled executives or (b) to take advantage of the domestic trouble another state endures. Such "strategic interaction" delimits the set of foreign policies reasonably available to leaders in trouble at home, thus producing the impetus for policy substitution. This article develops a theoretical model of strategic behavior and policy substitution and reports empirical results of a multivariate probit model.