National security in presidential time: The politics of the National Security Council

Abstract

The National Security Council (NSC) is the preeminent national security feature of the modern U.S. presidency. The NSC is the president's council, but presidents have varied dramatically in how frequently they have convened formal meetings of the NSC since the NSC system was created in 1947. Under what conditions are presidents likely to hold NSC meetings? I argue that presidents are pragmatic about when to engage personally in national security affairs and that presidents are incentivized to conduct NSC meetings more frequently early in a presidency. Using a novel data set of all NSC meetings from 1947 to 1993, I find that presidents are likely to hold NSC meetings most frequently in the first year of office and that NSC meeting frequency is likely to decline substantially over a president's first 3 years in office, even after controlling for important international security conditions and domestic political factors previously thought to influence presidential national security behavior. The results affirm prior scholars' description of the NSC as a presidential mechanism for international crisis management but also suggest that time in office is an important determinant of presidential national security behavior.