Over the last 25 years, there has been a noteworthy turn across major International Relations (IR) theories to include domestic politics and decision-making factors. Neoclassical realism and variants ...of liberalism and constructivism, for example, have incorporated state motives, perceptions, domestic political institutions, public opinion, and political culture. These theoretical developments, however, have largely ignored decades of research in foreign policy analysis (FPA) examining how domestic political and decision-making factors affect actors' choices and policies. This continues the historical disconnect between FPA and "mainstream" IR, resulting in contemporary IR theories that are considerably underdeveloped. This article revisits the reasons for this separation and demonstrates the gaps between IR theory and FPA research. I argue that a distinct FPA perspective, one that is psychologically-oriented and agent-based, can serve as a complement, a competitor, and an integrating crucible for the cross-theoretical turn toward domestic politics and decision making in IR theory.
Every day, coalition cabinets make policy decisions critical to international politics. Juliet Kaarbo examines the dynamics of these multiparty cabinets in parliamentary democracies in order to ...assess both the quality of coalition decision making and the degree to which coalitions tend to favor peaceful or military solutions. Are coalition cabinets so riddled by conflict that they cannot make foreign policy effectively, or do the multiple voices represented in the cabinet create more legitimate and imaginative responses to the international system? Do political and institutional constraints inherent to coalition cabinets lead to nonaggressive policies? Or do institutional and political forces precipitate more belligerent behavior?
Employing theory from security studies and political psychology as well as a combination of quantitative cross-national analyses and twelve qualitative comparative case studies of foreign policy made by coalition cabinets in Japan, the Netherlands, and Turkey, Kaarbo identifies the factors that generate highly aggressive policies, inconsistency, and other policy outcomes. Her findings have implications not merely for foreign policy but for all types of decision making and policy-making by coalition governments.
British foreign policy stands at a turning point following the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum. Drawing on role theory, we trace the United Kingdom’s efforts to establish new foreign policy roles as it ...interacts with the concerned international actors. We find that the pro-Brexit desire to ‘take back control’ has not yet translated into a cogent foreign policy direction. In its efforts to avoid adopting the role of isolate, the United Kingdom has projected a disoriented foreign policy containing elements of partially incompatible roles such as great power, global trading state, leader of the Commonwealth, regional partner to the European Union (EU) and faithful ally to the United States. The international community has, through processes of socialisation and alter-casting, largely rejected these efforts. These role conflicts between the United Kingdom and international actors, as well as conflicts among its different role aspirations, have pressed UK policies towards its unwanted isolationist role, potentially shaping its long-term foreign policy orientation post-Brexit.
This article examines international reactions to Scotland’s 2014 bid for independence as an instance of socialisation of an aspirant state, what we term ‘pre-socialisation’. Building on and ...contributing to research on state socialisation and role theory, this study proposes a nexus between roles and sovereignty. This nexus has three components: sovereignty itself is a role casted for by an actor; the sovereign role is entangled with the substantive foreign policy roles the actor might play; and the sovereign role implicates the substantive foreign policy roles of other actors. The Scottish debate on independence provides an effective laboratory to develop and explore these theoretical dimensions of pre-socialisation, revealing the contested value and meaning of sovereignty, the possible roles that an independent Scotland could play, and the projected implications for the role of the UK and other international actors. Our analysis of the Scottish case can provide insights for other cases of pre-socialisation and is more empirically significant following the UK’s 2016 referendum to leave the European Union.
Research on international relations of the Middle East (IRME) has suffered from a schism between International Relations (IR) theory and regional particularities. To address this, scholars have ...offered corrective accounts by adding domestic factors to IR structural approaches. Studies on IRME thus reflect the turn to decision-making and domestic politics that has recently occurred. This article develops a critical analysis of the domestic politics orientation in IRME. We argue that this scholarship ignores work in foreign policy analysis (FPA) with its psychological-oriented and agent-based dimensions and that this constitutes a missed opportunity for the study of the region. The article offers suggestions for incorporating FPA research into IRME and argues that an FPA perspective offers an alternative and complementary approach to the eclectic frameworks predominant in the scholarship on IRME.
Abstract
This article considers how leaders' personality traits change over time. I focus on how leaders become more authoritarian, overconfident and more mistake-prone; how, when and why do leaders ...‘break bad’? Temporal evolution of leaders is an important topic given the long tenure of many political leaders and the influence these leaders have over policies, including foreign policies. There is very little work on how leaders' personalities develop and how they interact with changing constraints and opportunities. This article is an agenda-setting review, designed to push foreign policy analysis in new directions. This is especially important given the resurgence in research on personalities and the renewed interest in leaders. Drawing on diverse and multi-disciplinary scholarship on the psychological effects of aging, experience, learning and power-holding, this article develops expectations about leader personality change. I discuss challenges for research in this area, focusing on how ‘bad’ can be conceptualized, and offer specific avenues for future investigations.
This article explores how differences in prime ministers’ leadership styles may affect parliamentary influence in security policy. Drawing on work on personality differences in political psychology, ...I argue leadership style is a critical but often overlooked factor in the growing area of research on parliaments and foreign affairs. My key argument is that prime ministers vary in how they respond to and manage parliamentary involvement in security policymaking. I propose Leadership Trait Analysis to capture prime ministers’ orientations towards parliamentary involvement. I examine the plausibility of my argument with intra-country comparisons of Turkish and UK prime ministers’ orientations towards parliament in specific cases of security policy. More generally, this article challenges more formal-institutional approaches to parliaments’ role in security policy. A focus on prime ministers has an analytic advantage of bringing together some of the various factors (such as intraparty divisions and public opinion) to explain parliamentary influence in security policy.
This analysis investigates the role of historical analogies in the influence that parliaments have in foreign policy. Our empirical focus is the UK Parliament's unusual opposition to the Prime ...Minister on UK involvement in Syria in 2013. The vote challenges many conventional expectations about the role of parliament in security affairs. Important in this vote were lessons learned and strategically used from UK participation in the intervention of Iraq in 2003. This argument is developed theoretically based on research on historical analogies: parliaments, 'learn' (primarily negative) lessons about past foreign policy events which guide parliamentary preferences and procedures and can enhance parliaments' role in subsequent foreign policy. The article contributes to research on analogies by extending the logic to lessons on process. This use of precedents can offer more structurally oriented perspectives that translate critical junctures into reforms in procedures and policy-making practices.
Many of the strengths of research in Foreign Policy Analysis have been overlooked by role theorists. Role theorists often assume that roles are shared across elites and masses, that elites can ...manipulate masses, or that public opinion on roles constrains elites. Role theorists also tend to assume that there is a consensus among elites over national roles. Research in Foreign Policy Analysis, on the other hand, demonstrates that foreign policy may be contested both vertically (between elites and masses) and horizontally (among elites) and that these conflicts affect foreign policy decision making and foreign policy behavior. We propose that (i) contested roles mean that roles and foreign policy are not as stable as is often implied; (ii) research on contested roles offers Foreign Policy Analysis a less preference-oriented way of conceptualizing policy disagreements and decision making; and (iii) structures reveal themselves as important when agents use them in domestic discourse over contested roles, but the impact of international norm and role structures is not automatic, as it is shaped by the agents (and domestic structures) in the domestic political process. We suggest that research on the strategic use of roles could bring together these benefits of examining contested roles.
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