¹ Two volumes that do seek to address the domestic sources of America's Soviet policy are Wolfe, Alan, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1979)Google Scholar, and Nye, Joseph S. Jr., ed., The Maying ofAmerica's Soviet Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984Google Scholar). The latter provides a very fragmented picture, however, and the principal thesis contained in the former is not, in this author's opinion, truly convincing. On the domestic sources of the superpower hostility, and of the ups and downs in their relations, see also Nincic, Miroslav, Anatomy of Hostility: The US-Soviet Rivalry in Perspective (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989)Google Scholar.

² An early statement of the probable irrelevance of the public's foreign policy opinions to elections is provided in Almond, Gabriel, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950Google Scholar). More recent examples of studies that dismiss or play down the relevance of foreign affairs are Walter Burnham, Dean, “The 1984 Election and the Future of American Politics,” in Sandoz, Ellis and Crabb, Cecil V. Jr., eds., Election 1984: Landslide without a Mandate (New York: New American Library, 1985Google Scholar); Ladd, Everett C., “On Mandates, Realignments and the 1984 Presidential Election,” Political Studies Quarterly 100 (Fall 1985), 1–25Google Scholar; and Michael Kagay and Greg Caldeira, “I Like the Looks of His Face,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 1975.

³ An early treatment of this theme is found in Stokes's, Donald E. seminal article, “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency,” American Political Science Review 60 (March 1966), 19–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more recent studies, see Miller, Arthur H. and Miller, Warren, “Ideology in the 1972 Election: Myth or Reality?” American Political Science Review 70 (September 1976), pp. 832CrossRefGoogle Scholar–49; Miller, Arthur H., Wattenberg, Martin P., and Malenchuk, Oksana, “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates,” American Political Science Review 80 (June 1986), 521–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ For example, see Light, Paul C. and Lake, Celinda, “The Election: Candidates, Strategies, and Decision,” in Nelson, Michael, ed., The Election of 1984 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1985Google Scholar). More generally, see Fair, Ray C., “The Effect of Economic Events on Votes for the President,” Review of Economics and Statistics 60 (May 1978), 159–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Sigelman, Lee, “Presidential Popularity and Presidential Elections,” Public Opinion Quarterly 43 (Winter 1979), 532–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, Michael Lewis and Rice, Tom W., “Presidential Popularity and Presidential Vote,” Public Opinion Quarterly 46 (Winter 1982), 534–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brody, Richard and Sigelman, Lee, “Presidential Popularity and Presidential Elections: An Update and Extension,” Public Opinion Quarterly 47 (Fall 1983), 325–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ This argument is developed in Miroslav Nincic and Barbara Hinckley, “Foreign Policy and Presidential Elections” (forthcoming).

⁷ For President Reagan, approval was measured by responses to the question: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Ronald Reagan is handling his job as President?” as reported in The Gallup Report No. 264, September 1987. Approval for President Carter was assessed in terms of positive responses to the question: “How would you rate the job President Carter is doing as President?” The Harris Survey (various issues).

⁸ For Reagan, the question was: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Ronald Reagan is handling the economy?” For Carter, the wording was: “How would you rate him on handling the economy?” (Sources as in footnote 7.)

⁹ For Reagan, the wording was: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Ronald Reagan is handling foreign affairs?” For Carter, it was: “How would you rate him on handling of foreign policy matters?” (Sources as in footnote 7.)

¹⁰ For example, President Carter's decision to cede control of the Panama Canal to the Republic of Panama was, by all indications, based on principle alone, and was taken despite the expectation that the decision would not be popular domestically. Similarly, President Truman's decision to dismiss General Douglas MacArthur, despite the public adulation for the World War II hero, was politically risky and rooted mainly in a judgment of what the national interest demanded.

¹¹ This necessity is buttressed by a realization that much voting is “retrospective,” i.e., based on an estimate of a candidate's past performance rather than his program for the future. See Fiorina, Morris P., Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981Google Scholar), and Miller, Arthur H. and Wattenberg, Martin P., “Throwing the Rascals Out: Policy and Performance Evaluations of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1980,” American Political Science Review 79 (June 1985), 359–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² If we were to assume that the leader or candidate were not concerned with minimizing errors but with maximizing successes, the conclusion would be the same. The reasons for the bias are identical in both cases.

¹³ I develop these arguments in much greater detail in Nincic (fn. 1), chap. 4.

¹⁴ The model assumes that the American public responds most powerfully to relatively current policies. Thus, although actions in the earlier years of the cycle may have some impact, political memory is, for most people, not very long. The notion that past policies are discounted when political evaluations of the president are made is substantially confirmed in the literature on the determinants of presidential elections and popularity. See, e.g., Hibbs, Douglas A. Jr., The American Political Economy: Macroeconomics and Electoral Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987Google Scholar), and Barbara Hinckley and Paul Brace, “The Powers and Limits of the President: The Case of the Polls” (forthcoming).

¹⁵ The Harris Survey, May 9, 1983.

¹⁶ See Nincic, Miroslav, “The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Politics of Opposites,” World Politics 40 (July 1988), 452–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ The text of NSC-68 (declassified in 1975) is reprinted in Etzold, Thomas H. and Gaddis, John Lewis, Documents in American Foreign Policy and Strategy: 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 385–442Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Quoted in Divine, Robert A., Foreign Policy and US Presidential Elections: 1952–1960 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 44Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Ibid., 53.

²⁰ Gaddis, John Lewis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 128Google Scholar.

²¹ Divine (fn. 18), 73.

²² “Kennedy Attacks Nixon ‘Weakness,’” New York Times, August 25, 1960Google Scholar.

²³ See “Nixon and Kennedy Clash on TV over Issue of Quemoy's Defense,' New Times, October 8, 1960.

²⁴ “Nixon Gives Budget Priority,” New York Times, August 25, 1960.

²⁵ See, for example, Sorensen, Theodore C., Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1966), 216–17Google Scholar.

²⁶ Schlesinger, , A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 298Google Scholar.

²⁷ Stuart and Starr, “The ‘Inherent Bad Faith Model’ Reconsidered: Dulles, Kennedy, and Kissinger,” Political Psychology 3 (Fall/Winter 1981–82), 8.

²⁸ Goodwin, , Remembering America: A Voicefrom the Sixties (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 234Google Scholar.

²⁹ The text of the American University Speech is available in “Text of Kennedy's Address ‘Strategy of Peace’ for Easing the Cold War,” New York Times, June 11, 1963Google Scholar.

³⁰ Reagan, quoted in Ford, Gerald R., A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 337Google Scholar.

³¹ Ibid., 353.

³² The 1976 election is described and analyzed in Pomper, Gerald, ed., The Election of 1976 (New York: David McKay, 1977Google Scholar).

³³ For the full text of the University of Notre Dame speech, see “Carter Says Failure in the Mideast Now Could Be Disastrous,” New York Times, May 23, 1977.

³⁴ “Reagan Assails Carter's Foreign Policy as Weak,” Wail Street Journal, January 28, 1980.

³⁵ For the impact of Carter's Soviet policy on the outcome of the 1980 election, see Nincic and Hinckley (fn. 6), 15.

³⁶ An excellent treatment of the bureaucratic momentum that may account for the rate of growth of military budgets is to be found in Kanter, Arnold, Defense Politics: A Budgetary Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

³⁷ On this point, see Nincic, Miroslav, The Arms Race: The Political Economy of Military Growth (New York: Praeger, 1982)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Most importantly, summits and arms control agreements depend on Soviet cooperativeness as well as on U.S. attitudes.

³⁹ An overview of the first eleven superpower summits is provided in Weihmiller, Gordon R., US-Soviet Summits: An Account of East-West Diplomacy at the Top, 1955–1985 (New York: University Press of America, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ See Lafeber, Walter, America, Russia, and the Cold War: 1945–1984, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1985), 200Google Scholar.

⁴¹ For summits, the first terms are counted as of Eisenhower's presidency because he was the first postwar president to attend such a meeting (Geneva, 1955). For arms control agreements, we begin counting in 1961, since the Kennedy administration was the first to achieve such an accord (the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963). For strategic spending, see footnote to Figure 2.

⁴² See Kelley, Stanley Jr., Interpreting Elections (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983CrossRefGoogle Scholar), chap. 5.

⁴³ See Nincic (fn. 1), chaps. 4 and 5.

⁴⁴ On the link between the cold war and the configuration of power within the Soviet Union at that time, see Linden, Carl A., Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957–1964 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966Google Scholar). On the anecdotal side, it is reported that, upon returning from his 1959 visit to the United States, Khrushchev astonished his aides by announcing: “I really believe that the US … has no militaristic, aggressive intentions and is interested in working for lasting peace.” Mikhail Suslov, chief ideologue and unrepentant Stalinist, was overheard to remark: “The Americans have really got him.” Quoted in “K's Four-Front ‘War,’” Newsweek, August 1, 1980, p. 36.

⁴⁵ Axelrod, , The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984Google Scholar), esp. chap. 1.

⁴⁶ On the initial shift in Soviet views of the domestic sources of U.S. foreign policy, see Schwartz, Morton, Soviet Perceptions of the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978Google Scholar), chap. 5.

⁴⁷ “Moscow Looks at US Election Campaign,” Soviet World Outlook, May 15, 1976, p. 6.

⁴⁸ “On Soviet-American Relations,” Pravda, April 2, 1976, pp. 4–5.

⁴⁹ “Moscow Unhappy with US Presidential Campaign,” Soviet World Outlook March 15, 1980, p. 6.

⁵⁰ “After the US Election,” Pravda, November 8, 1984, p. 6.