Books by Matthew Caverly
Cognella Academic, 2023
This is a sample chapter from the academic book, Issue Areas & Political Time: The multiple presi... more This is a sample chapter from the academic book, Issue Areas & Political Time: The multiple presidencies and congresses of foreign & domestic policy construction. It lays out the thesis that policy determines politics, no the other way around. And, that history serves as a setting condition for the construction of said policies between the two proactive branches of the national government--the presidency and the Congress.
The Drama of the American Political System, 2011
The Drama of the American Political System is a volume of canonical essays discussing the head an... more The Drama of the American Political System is a volume of canonical essays discussing the head and heart of American national politics. Exploring the full panoply of American national politics, these essays collectively suggest that our political system may best be understood as a dramatic metaphor. This metaphor asks us to watch the play of American politics in a theater representative of our polity. We will look across a stage that fragments power horizontally and vertically, and to a background of unifying characteristics called the American political culture. While in the foreground, we will see an arrangement of actors that originate from a core of national political institutions. From there we move out to a semi-periphery of political organizations, and finally disappear into the shadows where the media, political participators, and public opinion make their presence felt.
The Multiple Presidencies Thesis: Presidential-Congressional Foreign Policy Relations across Issues Areas and Political Time, 2008
Chapter 4 of the book published by VDM, this sample chapter lays out the empirical theory I devel... more Chapter 4 of the book published by VDM, this sample chapter lays out the empirical theory I developed in order to explain the foreign policy construction process. An inter-institutional policy making procedure shared between the president and the Congress via the component issue areas of foreign affairs across the vagaries of a politicized conception of historical time.
Articles by Matthew Caverly
This essay aspires to answer the question, “Why did the German polity so readily accept National ... more This essay aspires to answer the question, “Why did the German polity so readily accept National Socialism as its power-determining ideology?” Scholars, statesmen, journalists, and other interested onlookers have grappled with this question far longer than the Third Reich’s rise and fall. Some have claimed that the repressive peace imposed on the Germans in the wake of the First World War—the Treaty of Versailles—is to blame (Paxton 2011). Others have found specifically racialist and racist bases for the adoption of Nazism by the Germans with its twin pillars of Aryanism and Anti-Semitism speaking to long held traditions of Teutonic might and historical destiny (Peukert 1989; cf. Rosenberg 1930 and cf. Fichte 1808). Populist uprisings against both the extant capitalist bourgeois order and its Bolshevik communistic alternative have been portrayed as legitimate cause celebrity for the advancement of Nazism in Germany (Fritzsche 1990). Yet others have laid the claim/blame on the advancement of imperialism or on the excesses of unrestrained domestic and international capitalism as setting conditions for Hitler’s rise (Barkai 1990 and Hayes 1987). Of course, perhaps the most dominant portrayal of Nazi ideological adoption by German society is found in the veritable cult of personality developed by the party’s leader—Adolf Hitler as “Der Fuhrer” (Shirer 1990). Finally, the role of Pan-Germanic Nationalism as a unifying device which articulated a “cult of sacrifice” within the people of Germany or as the promoter of a nationalist-imperium have been examined as causes of the “descent to irrationalism” (Gerwarth 2006; Goldhagen 1997; and Koenigsberg 2009).
This paper will look at the role played by Germanic militarism as a determiner of Nazi ideological adoption by the German State and Society during the 1930’s. I will examine the historical background, socio-cultural characteristics, and generalizable implications from this case analysis for the broader political milieu. Unlike most of the other reasons given for the German people’s adoption of Nazism, the case of relatively unrestrained militarism is not unique to the Germans in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. In fact, militarism can be seen in other historical examples of nationalist uprisings, imperialisms, and general ideological renderings as parts of respective “philosophies of history.” The warnings that this piece will sound are not meant as after-the-fact accusations to a people and system (i.e. the Third Reich) now largely long dead. But, such warnings are done in order to showcase troubling patterns of ideological extremism that we continue to face in the modern world.
Book Reviews by Matthew Caverly
Library of Social Science, 2018
Review of Dr. Koenigsberg's Hitler's Holocaust.
A book review of Richard Koenigsberg's, Nations Have a Right to Kill published by the Library of ... more A book review of Richard Koenigsberg's, Nations Have a Right to Kill published by the Library of Social Science.
Encyclopedia Articles by Matthew Caverly
Encyclopedia article on the origins, ideology, and political influence of the conservative think ... more Encyclopedia article on the origins, ideology, and political influence of the conservative think tank--the Heritage Foundation.
An American interest group that lobbies on behalf of the interests of the State of Israel.
An American left wing party that promoted Marxist-socialism.
An American minor political party that operated, mostly, in the right wing of the country's polit... more An American minor political party that operated, mostly, in the right wing of the country's politics. It had an emphasis on the promotion of isolationism and to a lesser extent, nativism as policy focuses.
An American minor political party that operated under Nazi ideology.
A minor party in American politics that operates at the left wing end of the polity.
The American Conservative Union (ACU) is an interest group that is, perhaps best known, for promo... more The American Conservative Union (ACU) is an interest group that is, perhaps best known, for promoting the ideals of conservatism by rating the votes of congressional and state legislators according to their perceived proximity to conservative orthodoxy. Conservative
A conservative think tank that lobbies and analyzes policy issues.
The American Foreign Service Association is an interest group which serves as the professional as... more The American Foreign Service Association is an interest group which serves as the professional association for the United States Foreign Service. It lobbies on behalf of the bureaucrats who serve at all levels within the various national level departments that are principally engaged in civilian foreign affairs. The organization represents and recruits its
Examines the American Farm Bureau Federation in terms of its origins and impacts on the interest ... more Examines the American Farm Bureau Federation in terms of its origins and impacts on the interest group universe of American politics.
The American Immigration Control Foundation (AIC-Foundation) is an interest group dedicated to re... more The American Immigration Control Foundation (AIC-Foundation) is an interest group dedicated to restricting immigration by enforcing and expanding upon the existing legislative,
A historical and contemporary overview of the American minor political party called the Democrati... more A historical and contemporary overview of the American minor political party called the Democratic Socialists of America (1982-present). The party uses an evolutionary form of socialist ideology and largely operates within the far left wing of the Democratic Party and its ideological affiliates.
Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Organizations that Shaped America, 2018
CSP is an American think tank that promotes neo-conservative perspectives on foreign security pol... more CSP is an American think tank that promotes neo-conservative perspectives on foreign security policies. Encyclopedia article for Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Organizations that Shaped America.
Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Organizations that Shaped America, 2018
Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) is an interest group that lobbies office... more Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) is an interest group that lobbies officeholders as well as the general public for the promotion of enforcing the separation of church and state within the United States. Encyclopedia article for Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Organizations that Shaped America.
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Books by Matthew Caverly
Articles by Matthew Caverly
This paper will look at the role played by Germanic militarism as a determiner of Nazi ideological adoption by the German State and Society during the 1930’s. I will examine the historical background, socio-cultural characteristics, and generalizable implications from this case analysis for the broader political milieu. Unlike most of the other reasons given for the German people’s adoption of Nazism, the case of relatively unrestrained militarism is not unique to the Germans in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. In fact, militarism can be seen in other historical examples of nationalist uprisings, imperialisms, and general ideological renderings as parts of respective “philosophies of history.” The warnings that this piece will sound are not meant as after-the-fact accusations to a people and system (i.e. the Third Reich) now largely long dead. But, such warnings are done in order to showcase troubling patterns of ideological extremism that we continue to face in the modern world.
Book Reviews by Matthew Caverly
Encyclopedia Articles by Matthew Caverly
This paper will look at the role played by Germanic militarism as a determiner of Nazi ideological adoption by the German State and Society during the 1930’s. I will examine the historical background, socio-cultural characteristics, and generalizable implications from this case analysis for the broader political milieu. Unlike most of the other reasons given for the German people’s adoption of Nazism, the case of relatively unrestrained militarism is not unique to the Germans in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. In fact, militarism can be seen in other historical examples of nationalist uprisings, imperialisms, and general ideological renderings as parts of respective “philosophies of history.” The warnings that this piece will sound are not meant as after-the-fact accusations to a people and system (i.e. the Third Reich) now largely long dead. But, such warnings are done in order to showcase troubling patterns of ideological extremism that we continue to face in the modern world.
Accordingly, in this study, I present a theoretical alternative to the above accounts which I believe captures the inherent “nuances” of the real world conditions which foreign policy construction occurs in (at least as far as the American case is concerned). Therefore, I propose that foreign policy construction is best analyzed through an “issue areas” perspective that examines each of the “sets” of issue areas contained within foreign affairs including trade, aid, immigration and security. Furthermore, I suggest that within these “sets” of foreign policy issue areas internal categorical differences pervade like for instance various “types” of foreign aid including economic, military and humanitarian. A study of these issue areas as separate and only loosely interrelated “categories of foreign policy” will offer a truer “picture” as to how foreign policy is “actually” constructed rather than the “cookie-cutter one size fits all” statist and domestic variables applications to a single category presentation of “foreign policy.”
Using the above framework with a roll call analysis of presidential position votes in the appropriate categories and sub-categories for the initial years of the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Clinton presidencies reveals that the answer to the state-centrism vs. domestic variables approach “question” is found in the Aristotelian “Golden Mean,” in that, those issue areas that are of a security nature and/or successfully “securitized” as such state-centrist approaches are best for understanding the foreign policy construction process. However, in those issue areas that are of a more “domesticated” nature (meaning that they have a high level of interaction with domestic policy groups like non-security/ non-securitized aid, trade and immigration) a domestic variables perspective is most appropriately employed.
The implications of such findings are that they can tell us a lot about the “real world” of foreign policy rather than the “constructed” realm established by over simplified models and even theories. Another implication is in the employment of “synthesizing approaches” which attempt to take what is best from the existing scholarship and reject what is worst in it. Also, the marriage of two competing theoretical frameworks from competing paradigms suggests that future research in world politics could benefit from more “mixed theoretical and perhaps even paradigmatic perspectives” which conceivably could lead to a greater mutual respect for ideas that on the surface may seem irreconcilable.
Operating at the structural (systemic) level of the political environment itself, the forces of macro-level economic and historical change alters the contours of presidential-congressional foreign issue area relations by privileging certain opportunity structures over others in distinct periods of time. This mechanism can lead to a periodization scheme for categorizing the “types” of presidential-congressional foreign issue area relations during the Post-War Era (1953-2004).
I test this theory by employing time series and longitudinal regression analysis of presidential position vote success rates in foreign policy and the component issue areas of foreign affairs across the time-line of the Post-War Era (1953-2004). The variable success rates along the issue areas support the basic thesis from a unit level perspective. Also, macro-level economic and historical factors are found to be influential on presidential success in foreign affairs relative to the Congress. This finding suggests that time plays a major part as a structuring element for the political environment of executive-legislative foreign issue area relations. In fact, no less than three distinct orders of such relations can be time-delineated including: (1) a War Power Order (1953-1972), (2) a Confrontation Politics Order (1973-1989) and (3) an Imperial Presidency Politicized Order (1990-present).
This paper will deal with presidential-congressional relations regarding the differential responses by each of the Bush presidencies to the emergent foreign policy and intermestic security dilemmas of their early terms—the War on Drugs for President George H. W. Bush and the War on Terror for the George W. Bush presidency. Basically, this is a comparison contrast paper that emphasizes the similar foreign policy context of extant executive-legislative relations for the two Bush administrations near the beginning of their perspective terms in office. Also, it will emphasize the differing responses of the two Bush presidencies regarding the major security dilemmas of their respective situations.
I will employ a quantitative study of presidential position votes on the relevant foreign policy issues as they are conditioned by structural and agential factors in combination with a qualitative study of the legislative histories involved to answer the question, “What, if anything, dictated the differential responses of the two Bush administrations to similar extra-systemic dilemmas, the ‘War on Drugs’ for Bush I and the ‘War on Terror’ for Bush II?” I argue that Archer’s (1985) morphogenetic thesis as re-interpreted for foreign policy decision making by Carlsnares (1992) is the best device for understanding extant presidential-congressional relations in these two cases. The claim is that the exogenous and endogenous structural environments faced by the national security state provide a series of opportunities or constraints that impact the individual leader’s agential factors in their ability to be utilized freely in the construction of security dilemma responses. The external structuration factor for this study is the uni-polar position of the United States in the international system. The internal structuration factor of concern is the partisan behavior of the Congress relative to the presidency. And, the agential factor in this study is operationalized as the political belief system of the president as derived from his operational code, foreign policy ideology, and characterological personality traits.
Finally, this analysis will shed some light on the issue of security dilemma response to the new security threats facing the American national security state in the immediate past, the present and most likely the future.
My thesis is that legislative-executive relations in the domestic sphere are contingent on two primary forces, the one, is institutional in orientation and builds around the degree to which the Congress dominates the domestic policy making environment via the policy’s functional category as first observed by Theodore Lowi (i.e., regulatory, distributive, re-distributive, and constituency). This phenomenon is itself a function of the proximity of the policy-to-institutional or individual behavioral orientations within the Congress. Thus, the relationship between the policy and the institution/individual captures the dynamic of the Congress-as-an-aggregate or as-a-collection-of-often-competing-MC’s (members of Congress) because it is a function of how convergent or distal that policy is in its relationship to individual MC’s constituent level of domestic policy saliency. Institutionally based functional categories like re-distributive and to a lesser extent regulatory policies have a more nationally focused orientation and hence constituency. In these domestic policy areas, the Congress is more likely to follow the lead of an activist legislative presidency and therefore be less prone to engage in anything more than pork barrel legislating. However, in those functional categories that are closer to individual MC’s constituent interests like those in distributive and possibly constituent policies; the Congress will take a more active lead in policy creation, implementation, evaluation, and revision. Hence, the Congress will be less likely to follow presidential legislative leadership in these domestic policies because they are inherently more particularistic in orientation. And, particularistic policy making is what the Congress has been seen to be most effective in as opposed to national policy making which is more prone to be a presidential endeavor.
The second force impacting the domestic legislative-executive policy relationship is the ebb and flow of historical political time. As Davidson (in Thurber, 1996) has shown, there are perceptible eras of congressional behavior during the Post-War Period (the time since the end of the Second World War) where the legislative flow was largely explained by certain ideological and partisan coalitions including: the Bipartisan Conservative Era 1947-1964, the Liberal Ascendancy Era 1965-1978, and the Post-Reform/Party Unity Era 1979-present.
I argue that when ideology became a “way to order policies” in terms of their directions and purposes, it set itself up as quasi-religious dogma. The attempted rationalizations by the Hegelians, Marxists, Pragmatists and others opened the door by the end of the 19th century for emotive based understandings of the proper role of such party platforms in Western societies. The rise of existentialism as a philosophical alternative to logical analysis was all that was left to turn ideology away from politics and toward religion. I do not mean that religion somehow supersedes politics in modern policy discourse, what I mean is that political discourse has taken on the quality of religious fervor. The ecstatic spectacles found in Nazi and Communist events (and more recently the rise of Islamofascism) are only the more extreme versions of what one can see in the political channeling of Republicans and Democrats. I further suggest that the difficulty of “truth in the absence of proof” when applied to politics ultimately presages potential acts of extreme brutality as the opposition is re-cast as secular political infidel.
Accordingly, in this study, I present a theoretical-methodological alternative to the above accounts which I believe captures the inherent “nuances” of the real world conditions which foreign policy construction occurs in (at least as far as the American case is concerned). Therefore, I propose that foreign policy construction is best analyzed through an “issue areas” perspective that examines each of the “sets” of issue areas contained within foreign affairs including trade, aid, immigration and security. Furthermore, I suggest that within these “sets” of foreign policy issue areas internal categorical differences pervade like for instance various “types” of foreign aid including economic, military and humanitarian. A study of these issue areas as separate and only loosely interrelated “categories of foreign policy” will offer a truer “picture” as to how foreign policy is “actually” constructed rather than the “cookie-cutter one size fits all” statist and domestic variables applications to a single category presentation of “foreign policy.”
To test my thesis I employed a roll call analysis of political determinants including partisan/ideological, popular and electoral factors on annual presidential position success rates vis-à-vis the Congress in the appropriate foreign issue area categories for the Eisenhower-W. Bush presidencies. The results reveal that the answer to the state-centrism vs. domestic variables approach “question” is found in the Aristotelian “Golden Mean.” In that, those issue areas that are of a security nature and/or successfully “securitized” as such state-centrist approaches are best for understanding the foreign policy construction process. However, in those issue areas that are of a more “domesticated” nature (meaning that they have a high level of interaction with domestic policy groups like non-security/ non-securitized aid, trade and immigration) a domestic variables perspective is most appropriately employed. Regarding the specifics inherent within the multiple presidencies of presidential-congressional relations, partisan and to a lesser extent ideological factors are more predictive of foreign affairs outcomes at least as measured by the annual presidential success rates across the main issue areas of concern.
The implications of such findings are that they can tell us a lot about the “real world” of foreign policy rather than the “constructed” realm established by over simplified methods and theories. Another implication is in the employment of “synthesizing approaches” which attempt to take what is best from the existing scholarship and reject what is worst in it. Also, the marriage of two competing theoretical frameworks from competing paradigms suggests that future research in world politics could benefit from more “mixed theoretical and perhaps even paradigmatic perspectives” which conceivably could lead to a greater mutual respect for ideas that on the surface may seem irreconcilable.
This research was done with original archival materials, emboldened by then-contemporary accounts of journalists and Kennedy team members.
Furthermore, this research combined archivist and historical approaches with social scientific theorizing in order to produce a cross-disciplinary hybrid of humanistic arts and socially-specified science.