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The increasingly common involvement of the United States in military conflict resonates throughout American political institutions and affects the balance of power in important ways. We examine one particular aspect of executive augmentation of power in times of war—legislative deference—and move beyond a binary approach to the effect of war. Instead, we contend that executive advantage depends on the salience and severity of the conflict. Matters of war often drive upward the prevalence of security concerns in public discourse. Although this can leave the president to compete with Congress on a much more friendly playing field, perceptions of the war’s development can turn the tide. We empirically test our hypotheses with data spanning a 50-year period and find that the salience and severity of war matter, though not equally for both chambers of Congress. The findings hold implications for how we understand the institutional balance of power within and across conflicts, which represents a major aspect of American constitutional design and function.

Recent research reveals judicial tendencies to decide cases more conservatively during times of war. Building on studies in political psychology, we use the observed movement in favor of increased security versus liberty in times of war on the courts to investigate differences in how liberals and conservatives are motivated by threat concerns. We find that war mainly conditions decision making by liberal judges in criminal and civil liberties cases. The results furthermore suggest that ideological differences play little role in wartime decision making for civil liberties cases.

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Much of the state court literature assumes that decisions reached by state courts of last resort are independent of other state courts of last resort. Each state court has its own ideology as well as a particular set of institutional constraints and confronts different governors, publics, and state legislatures in rendering decisions. Scholarly research and its assumption of the independence of state-level judicial decision making and policy impact stands in marked contrast to much of the literature on the state-level adoption of policy. This diffusion literature has shown that states learn from and emulate similarly situated states that have previously adopted the policy under consideration. These national or state legislatures look to other nations and states for leadership in particular policy domains. In this manuscript, we apply the concept of diffusion to state courts. We do so through the examination of three waves of court-ordered state education finance reform. Using a dyadic data set covering the period from 1974 until 2002, we find that state courts do emulate other state courts but that emulation is different from legislative emulation and different for each wave of reform.We would like to thank the Editor, Nancy Reichman, for her generous time and assistance on this manuscript. The article is much stronger thanks to her help. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.