No abstract

One of the shortcomings of foreign policy role theory is its tendency to black‐box the state. Role theorists often assume a national role conception, without paying too much attention to the domestic political processes regarding how a role is selected to represent the state out of a number of potential competing roles. We develop a model of role contestation and role selection that draws on existing knowledge of foreign policy creation resulting from competition between governing elites and opposition, multi‐party coalitions, cabinet dynamics, and bureaucratic politics. We incorporate expectations from role theory to explain how conflict over role selection may be resolved. The model is examined in light of several cases in immediate post‐war Germany. We find that government and opposition dynamics are the primary sources of contestation over NRCs in our cases, some evidence for bureaucratic politics, and little evidence that coalition politics was at play. Finally, there were few instances in which role conflict resolution mechanisms were used.

The main contribution of this article is that it:• Introduces a distinction between different pathways for junior partner influence on the foreign policy of coalition governments; • Provides nuanced insights into the effects of coalition government on foreign policy as well as on the causal mechanisms behind these effects; • Contributes to the 'unpacking' of coalitions and the analysis of coalition governance more generally; • Features a comparative analysis of the current coalition governments in the United Kingdom and Germany.This article contributes to research on the foreign policy influence of junior partners in coalition governments. In particular, it takes up the call to pay greater attention to different patterns and pathways of such influence. To this purpose, this article distinguishes two types of coalition set-ups for foreign policy making. In the first type, junior partners hold one or more departments in the foreign policy executive, and their foreign policy influence rests on the powers that controlling ministries in the field brings. In the second type, junior partners do not hold any department in foreign affairs, and their influence comes from their ability to constrain the discretion of the senior partner in foreign policy. The article exemplifies its theoretical contentions in comparative case studies on the current coalition governments in Germany and the UK, which represent the first and second type respectively.

Multiparty coalitions are an increasingly common type of government across political regime types and world regions. Since they are the locus of national foreign policy making, the dynamics of coalition government have significant implications for international relations.Despite this growing significance, the foreign policy making of coalition governments is only partly understood. This symposium advances the study of coalition foreign policy in three closely related ways. First, it brings together in one place the state of the art in research on coalition foreign policy. Second, the symposium pushes the boundaries of our knowledge on four dimensions that are key to a comprehensive research agenda on coalition foreign policy: the foreign policy outputs of multiparty coalitions; the process of foreign policy making in different types of coalitions; coalition foreign policy in the 'Global South'; and coalition dynamics in non-democratic settings. Finally, the symposium puts forward promising avenues for further research by emphasising, for instance, the value of theory-guided comparative research that employs multi-method strategies and transcends the space of Western European parliamentary democracies.

Leaders matter in international politics. One of the main tools for assessing at-a-distance psychological characteristics of political leaders is Leadership Trait Analysis. To facilitate empirical studies, a Leadership Trait Analysis coding scheme for automated text analysis was developed to replace hand-coding. However, the coding scheme has been available only for English-language texts. To broaden research opportunities, this article presents a novel Leadership Trait Analysis coding scheme for the German language. This coding scheme allows engaging in empirical analysis based on original German language sources, thereby shedding new or different light on German foreign policy. At the same time, it contributes to moving automated content analysis beyond the English language more generally.