The Atlantic

The Secret Service reels from blunder to blunder, the Ebola virus finds new victims, and the black masks of ISIS march across Iraq. The embattled Democratic president’s foreign policy approval rating is plummeting. Voters across America have come to feel the Republican Party can better keep them safe.  

In other words, a series of novel and terrifying developments overseas have brought things back to normal in the United States.

Republicans have owned domestic security since 1970. For nearly all of the past 40 years, polls have consistently shown that Americans trust Republicans to handle security—and the related issues of foreign affairs and the military—better than Democrats.

“Own” is, in fact, the academic term. Political scientists refer to the fact that Americans associate the parties with strengths on issues in a way that is sustained and long term as issue ownership. But why do Republicans own foreign policy? And why, so quickly after a Democratic takeover during the Iraq War, are Republicans reestablishing security dominance?

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Natural security landed firmly in the GOP column through a combination of cultural forces and historical chances.

Foremost is simple prioritization, according to Patrick J. Egan, a political scientist at NYU. In Partisan Priorities: How Issue Ownership Drives and Distorts American Politics, Egan found that the issue ownership is mostly a product of the parties prioritizing certain issues. When a party comes to power, it must decide how to allocate a limited budget, and how it does that affects how competent voters perceive it to be on various issues. Since 1972, Republican Party voters have made military spending far and away their top spending priority, while Democrats have prioritized fighting poverty. (While actual—rather than desired—defense spending has been heavily dictated by external security circumstances like the collapse of the Soviet Union, Republican administrations, particularly Ronald Reagan’s, have prioritized it, especially in relation to other forms of spending.)

Issue-Ownership (in Percentage Points), 1970-2011

In short, ownership goes to the party that “cares” more. “Because the GOP prioritizes national security and military spending ... it usually comes back to Republicans owning those sets of issues,” Egan says. And this issue ownership holds true despite opinions on specific policies. For example, although polls often show that Americans think the country spends too much on the military,, the mere fact that Republicans care so deeply about national security increases their perceived competence. (In this post I use “foreign affairs,” “security,” and “the military” nearly interchangeably to refer to general beliefs about foreign policy as it relates to domestic security, rather than international development or trade agreements. )

Party Priorities and Issue Ownership, 1972-2008

The clearest issue ownership poll data dates from 1970--around the time when the parties took on their current roles in terms of national security. In mid-century, the Democrats were arguably the more hawkish party. Republicans like Ohio Senator Robert Taft strongly opposed FDR as he edged the United States toward an active role in World War II. In the early ’60s, President Eisenhower’s famous farewell address warned against the insidious influence of the military-industrial complex. As late as 1976, Republican Bob Dole was decrying the “Democrat Wars” of the 20th century that killed enough Americans “to fill up Detroit.”

But the Vietnam War split the Democratic Party and flipped perceptions of security competence. The young anti-war protesters outside the 1968 Democratic Convention stood for a New Left that rejected LBJ’s militarism and was horrified by Vietnam. Senator Hubert Humphrey, a supporter of that war, emerged from the fractious convention with the nomination but lost the general election to Richard Nixon, and by 1972 nominee George McGovern was the head of a party that wanted butter more than guns.

Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow in the foreign-policy program at the Brookings Institution, says social perceptions are an important factor. “In the ’60s and ’70s counter-cultural movements, the Democrats became very associated in mainstream America with a sort of anti-militarism, the sort of street protests that you saw in ’68 and in the earlier ’70s,” he says. “That created a real gulf between the Democrats and the military, which has also translated into being seen as not being tough on foreign policy.” These perceptions are quite resilient: When Democrats held their 1984 convention in San Francisco, a hotbed of anti-Vietnam sentiment, Jeane Kirkpatrick took the opportunity to attack the “San Francisco Democrats” for “blaming America first,” a talking point Mitt Romney adapted decades later in his charge that President Obama had conducted an “apology tour.”

While the party paradigms remain essentially stable, the success and failures of individual presidents can affect ownership. In fact, performance can be more important than prioritization with foreign-policy issue ownership, Egan told me, because voters can closely track the performance of a field dominated by the executive branch, and because foreign policy has relatively clear-cut goals. People may disagree as to whether an expensive welfare program has been effective; it is generally easier to tell if America is winning a war.

In some ways, history supports the idea that performance is most salient. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson shared the blame for American escalation in Vietnam. The Carter administration’s mishandling of the Iran hostage-rescue mission and ineffective response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan further damaged Democrats’ reputation. On the other hand, President Reagan brought the Iran hostages home, successfully invaded tiny Grenada, and won many “Reagan Democrats” to his cause, a rightward shift in the grassroots mirrored by neoconservatives who lined up behind Reagan’s party.