From Austria to New Zealand, coalition governments often pave the road to foreign policy. In Western Europe, nearly 90 percent of postwar governments include two or more political parties. Israel, the Middle East's only consolidated democracy according to many, has never experienced single-party rule in its history. Even the United Kingdom, known for its long streak of single-party rule, now navigates multiparty cabinets. Coalitions are everywhere, but we still have little understanding of how they act in foreign affairs. History shows that coalitions can sometime engage in powerful international commitments such as participating in military operations, but at other times, they postpone their decisions, water down their policy positions, or promise to do less than they otherwise would. What explains these differences in behavior?
Governing Abroad unpacks the little-known world of coalition governments to find out. Oktay argues that the specific constellation of parties in government explains why some coalitions can make more assertive foreign policy decisions than others. Building on the rich literature in political science on coalitions, legislatures, and voting behavior, the book weaves together sophisticated statistical analyses of foreign policy events across thirty European countries alongside in-depth case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland. It brings political parties back into the study of foreign policy, demonstrating that the size of the coalition, the ideological proximity of the governing parties, and their relationship with the parliamentary opposition together influence the government's ability to act in the international arena. This book challenges our existing perceptions about the constraints and weaknesses of coalition governments. It sheds new light on the conditions that allow them to act decisively abroad.
Abstract Why were some countries faster than others at introducing COVID-19 mitigation policies? Existing research shows that leaders are central to defining and making sense of crises, which then shapes their governments' crisis response. I argue that crisis-sense-making depends on leaders' personality traits pertaining to how they perceive their power status, collect and process information, and interact with their environment, subsequently influencing their governments' crisis response speed. I test this argument in the context of the European experience with COVID-19, combining an original Leadership Traits Analysis dataset of thirty-two leaders with the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker data. I show that leaders who were highly self-confident or exhibited a tendency to challenge constraints were significantly slower at introducing pandemic mitigation policies. Leaders who were open to information were significantly faster to do so. I also show that policy emulation between countries over time dissipated the slowing effects of the leaders' need for power and conceptual complexity on response speed. The results present new and systematic evidence on how leader personality shaped pandemic policy-making, contributing to the literature on crisis policy-making and political leadership. They also offer science advisors food for thought on how to communicate with leaders.
This article adopts a 'party-political' approach to studying legislative influence on security policy-making. It argues that legislative logrolling constitutes a key mechanism for the government to secure votes in parliament while facilitating the opposition to advance its own interests, especially when the government requires parliament's consent for security policy. The article investigates legislative logrolling in the context of weak executives, specifically looking at minority coalitions and majority coalitions with ideological and policy divergences. Logrolling is critical for these types of governments, as their structural and situational weaknesses force them to cooperate with opposition parties to maintain parliamentary support. Using the Danish and Dutch decisions to participate in the 2003 Iraq War, and Israel's 2005 decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, this article elucidates the ways in which legislative logrolling between the governing and opposition parties facilitates security policy-making in parliament.
Do voters' assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the 'clarity of responsibility' in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion‐inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi‐presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship.
AbstractDo voters' assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the 'clarity of responsibility' in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion‐inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi‐presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship.
