The Israel Lobby and Congressional Foreign Policy

One of the most contentious issues in contemporary international relations is the US’s alliance with Israel. It is generally undisputed that Israel and the US have a close relationship – Israel is America’s biggest client for foreign aid and military assistance, receiving about $3 billion each year. However, the cause of America’s support for the small Middle Eastern nation is disputed. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt argue that the main cause of the American-Israeli alliance is the “Israel Lobby.” In fact, the two scholars argue that “a key pillar of the lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in the US Congress,” which largely determines the allocation of funds to Israel and general American political sentiment towards it.[1] On the contrary, others have argued that American support for Israel stems from the recognition of a mutual identity between the two countries. “The Israel Saga – of courage and will,” writes Roger Cohen, “echoes in American mythology, far beyond religious identification.”[2]

The purpose of this study is to test Mearsheimer and Walt’s hypothesis that the Israel Lobby has a strong influence on the US Congress. The study measures the effect of increased campaign donations by the pro-Israel lobby on congressional support for Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt state that, “Given the strategic importance of the Middle East and its potential impact on others, both Americans and non-Americans need to understand and address the lobby’s influence on U.S. policy.”[3] Indeed, the Middle East continues to be an international hotspot and it is important to understand the factors that govern the US’s relationship with the region.

The study measures the percentage of pro-Israel bills that each member of the House of Representatives voted in favor of across the 110^th, 111^th, and 112^th congresses. The 110^th congress, which lasted from 2007 to 2009, is used as a baseline. In 2010, in a case titled Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee, the Supreme Court ruled that interest groups cannot be limited in the amount they spend on campaign-related contributions. In this model, then, the 111^th and 112^th congresses which follow the Citizens United decision are the post-treatment groups, in which the pro-Israel lobby is assumed to have more influence over congressional campaigns and, subsequently, is thought to have more influence on congressional matters.

Table 1. Summary Statistics

	Mean	Std. Dev.	Min.	Max.	Description
Party	N.A.	N.A	0.0	1.0	1: Republican, 0: Democrat
Congress 110	N.A.	N.A.	110	110	110th Congress, 2007-2009
Congress 111	N.A.	N.A.	111	111	111th Congress, 2009-2011
Congress 112	N.A.	N.A.	112	112	112th Congress, 2011-2013
Percentage for Israel	0.80	0.25	0.0	1.0	Percent of Pro-Israel Bills House Rep Supported
Observations	804

The study observed voting patterns for 286 House Representatives, all of whom were in office between 2007 and January of 2012. The model does not measure support for Israel in the Senate, since senatorial action may be dependent on approaching election seasons. The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is constantly in election season since representatives are voted into office every two years, instead of six. The dataset excludes representatives who served for some but not all of the congressional sessions to reduce bias caused by reverse causality. In other words, one of the reasons that the representatives did not get reelected is because of their voting patterns on this issue; this would cause bias estimates in the model and, therefore, those cases are omitted.  Data about voting patterns was sourced from the GovTrack.[4] The dependent variable, Percentage for Israel, measures the percent of pro-Israel bills that each House member voted in favor of in each congressional session (for a full list of variables used see Table 1). The model in the study is a cross-section time-series model with a fixed effects estimator.[5] The model uses fixed effects in order to control for time-invariant confounds that apply to representatives during their time in office. For example, a fixed effects model allows the study to control for every congressman’s specific party, state, demographic makeup of constituency, seniority within the party, and competitiveness for the representative’s seat.

TABLE 1. Support for Israel per Congress, Fixed Effects

	DV: Percentage of Pro-Israel Bills Supported
Congress 111	-0.186***
	(-9.07)
Congress 112	-0.218***
	(-10.61)
Party	0.000
	.
Constant	0.937***
	(64.59)
R-Squared – Overall R-Squared – Within	.15 .20
Observations Representatives	804 286

T statistics in parenthesis. ^* p < 0.05, ^** p < 0.01, ^*** p < 0.001

The findings of the study demonstrate that an increase in funding and donation contributions by the Israel Lobby did not have a positive effect on the percentage of pro-Israel bills that House members supported (for a visual of the average decline in pro-Israel votes see Figure 1). In fact, both periods after the treatment – the 111^th and 112^th congresses – observed a decline, on average, of support for pro-Israel bills. The 111^th Congress observed an average decline of 19% in support, and the 112^th congress dropped even lower by 22% (see Table 2 for all regression estimates). In other words, although the pro-Israel lobby was allocating more funding towards congress people, this money was not translating into higher support for Israel – at least not in terms of voting for bills that are considered pro-Israel.

Although the study does not find a positive correlation between increased funding by the pro-Israel lobby and congressional support for Israel, there may be other variables that affect this relationship that are beyond the scope of this study. For example, congressional lobbying does not solely consist of donation funding – it may also consist of various meeting, briefings, and interactions between the lobbying group and congressional representatives that are difficult to measure.

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[1] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.” University of Chicago, 2006.

[2] Roger Cohen. “Why Americans See Israel the Way they Do.” New York Times. August 2, 2014.

[3] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.” University of Chicago, 2006.

[4] GovTrack.us is a project of Civic Impulse, LLC which tracks Congressional operations and voting patterns. https://www.govtrack.us/about

[5] Although the Hausman test permitted a random effects model for this dataset, a fixed effects model is more accurate in reflecting the effect since it controls for all time invariant variables for each representative.