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The global wave of populism has recently drawn the attention of foreign policy analysts. Despite significant contributions, we still know little about populist leaders’ conceptions of their nation's identity and how these inform foreign policy preferences. What understanding do populists have regarding what their nation stands for and how high it stands in comparison to others? In this article, I introduce a theoretical model of identity-driven foreign policymaking that examines the national identity conceptions of six populist leaders and their non-populist predecessors via an original quantitative content analysis of foreign policy speeches. The article further assesses whether this identity conception translates into foreign policy preferences for revisionism toward the liberal international order by examining voting behavior in the UN General Assembly. The article contributes to conceptual and methodological approaches in foreign policy analysis to study individuals, as well as provides comparative empirical evidence for what drives populists’ foreign policy thinking.

Research indicates that polarization has led to an increasing dispersion between moderate and more extreme voters within both parties. Intraparty polarization supposedly affects the nature of interparty competition as it creates political space for new political realignments and the rise of anti-establishment candidates. This article examines the extent and impact of intraparty polarization in Congress on US trade policy. Specifically, the article examines whether (and which) trade policy preferences are distributed within and between both parties, as well as how intraparty polarization has influenced the outcome of US trade negotiations. It is theorized that intraparty polarization causes crosscutting legislative coalitions around specific trade policies and political realignments around ideological factions, with consequences for the outcome of trade negotiations. By relying on a unique dataset of congressional letters and co-sponsorship legislation, the article first derives trade policy preferences from members of Congress and computes their ideological means. Two contemporary cases of US trade policy are examined: The Transpacific Partnership Agreement and the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement. Via a structured-focused comparison of both cases, the paper finally assesses under which combinations of preference-based and ideology-based intraparty polarization Congress manages to ratify trade agreements. Findings suggest that both parties are intrinsically polarized between free trade and fair trade preferences yet show variance in their degree of ideology-based intraparty polarization. These findings contribute to existing work on bipartisanship as well as factions in the foreign policy realm, as it shows under which circumstances legislators can build crosscutting coalitions around foreign policies.

Polarization in the USA has been on the rise for several decades. In this context, few observers expect politics today to stop “at the water’s edge,” as the old cliché goes. But key questions about the relationship between polarization and US foreign policy remain to be fully answered. To what extent are American ideas about foreign policy now polarized along partisan lines? How is polarization changing the foreign policy behavior of the US Congress and President? And how is polarization altering the effectiveness of US foreign policy and influencing America’s role in the world? In this introductory article to our special issue “Domestic Polarization and US Foreign Policy: Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Implications,” we provide an overview of key debates and existing knowledge about these questions, highlight important new findings from the contributions to the special issue, and suggest avenues for further research on this increasingly important topic.

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