Tip-toeing through the Tulips with Congress: How Congressional Attention Constrains Covert Action

Over the years, the US has intervened covertly in many countries to remove dictators, subvert elected leaders, and support coups. Explanations for this focus on the characteristics of target countries or strategic incentives to pursue regime change. This book provides an account of domestic political factors constraining US presidents' authorization of covert foreign-imposed regime change operations (FIRCs). We argue that congressional attention to covert action alters the Executive's calculus by increasing the political costs associated with this secretive policy instrument. We demonstrate that congressional attention is the result of institutional battles over abuses of executive authority and has a significant constraining effect independent of codified rules and partisan disputes. These propositions are tested using content analysis of the Congressional Record, statistical analysis of Cold War covert FIRCs, and causal-process evidence relating to covert interventions in Chile, Angola, Central America and Afghanistan.

 

Madison Schramm is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Non-resident Fellow in the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Her research focuses on international security, the domestic politics of foreign policy, political psychology, and gender and foreign policy. Schramm has books published or forthcoming on the conflict behavior of liberal democracies (Oxford University Press) and US covert imposed regime change during the Cold War (Cambridge University Press Elements Series in International Relations). Additionally, she has published peer-reviewed research exploring democratic constitutional systems and international security (Political Science Quarterly and the Journal of Global Security Studies), gender and conflict initiation (Security Studies), corruption charges against women heads of government (Canadian Journal of Political Science), and diversity and inclusion in post-conflict states (in Untapped Power, Oxford University Press 2022). Schramm's commentary and reviews have been published in Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, the Texas National Security Review, the Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, Inkstick, the Duck of Minerva, Stimson.org, and CFR.org; and her research and analyses have been cited in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Jerusalem Post.

 

This event is organized by the Department of Political Science and the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto.