US Arms Sales and Congressional Oversight

• In Event: Elites and Foreign Policymaking in the US

Abstract

What explains why some members of the United States Congress vote for exporting arms in congressional floor voting? This paper examines when a member of Congress votes for or against a proposed joint resolution, prohibiting a presidential arms sale request under the Arms Export Control Act. The AECA requires the president to notify foreign arms sales plans to Congress before the export license is issued. Members from congressional committees that have jurisdiction over arms exports (i.e., the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee) could propose joint resolutions if they do not support the plans. If the proposed joint resolution is supported by the majority of committee members from both chambers, the resolution is forwarded for roll call votes. Any member of Congress could decide to vote for or against the resolutions.
Recent studies suggest that congressional oversight efforts have become weaker due to the increased polarization in Congress. However, it does not necessarily mean that the polarization always makes congressional oversight less likely for arms export policies. Particularly, when joint resolution proposals against president’s arms export plans reach the floor voting after passing the committee hearings, it implies that the committee members share an interest in oversight of the plans even though they belong to the same party with the president. Considering this shared interest in joint resolutions among the committee members, polarization is less likely to be the major factor that affects floor vote choices by non-committee members. Instead, the voting outcomes are affected by the members’ individual political interests.
In this paper, I focus on discussing factors that could affect the vote choices of individual members of Congress. I argue that the military experience of individual members of Congress and financial contributions to them from defense contractors have a significant influence on their vote choices regarding arms export policies. For the empirical analyses, I collected the data of roll-call votes of the joint resolutions regarding foreign military sales by the members of both chambers from the 105th to 115th Congress. I also collected data of the financial contributions (from opensecrets.com) to the members from defense contractors that are designated to sell arms to foreign countries by the president’s arms sale proposals. Lastly, I collected information about the military experience information of each member of Congress.
The empirical outcomes show that both military experiences of individual members and financial contributions from the defense contractors have significant effects on the vote choices of the members of Congress. The members who served in the military longer are more likely to support exporting arms to foreign countries than those without or less military experience. In addition, members of Congress are more likely to be supportive of arms exports to foreign countries if they have received financial contributions from defense companies that are designated to export the arms. In addition to these findings, the empirical analysis also shows the significant influence of a political situation of recipient countries on the members’ vote choices. If the potential recipient countries have been experiencing human rights violations for the last five years, the probability of supporting arms sales to the countries by the veteran members and members who have received financial contributions are lower.
The findings of this paper have several contributions to the existing literature, expanding the discussion of congressional oversight of US arms exports to foreign countries. First, the paper emphasizes the effective role of the personal experiences of individual members on their arms sale policy preferences. Second, it also shows the significant effect of lobbying (in the form of financial contributions) on congressional vote choices. Most importantly, unlike what has been generally known by previous studies, the paper’s empirical findings support that congressional oversight efforts are not simply swayed by the polarization within Congress. Instead, it shows that there are other factors that can significantly affect the efforts at least in terms of arms sales policy decisions.

Author

• Hoshik Nam, Jacksonville State University