How do regional parties influence foreign policy? Insights from multilevel coalitional bargaining in India

Abstract

When and how do regional parties influence foreign policy in federal democracies with multiparty coalition governments? The existing literature has focused on situations of foreign policy disagreements between subnational parties and the central government in multinational states. By contrast, we argue that under varying conditions, central governments either decide to accommodate the preferences of small regional parties when designing foreign policies, or co-opt these regional parties to push their own foreign policy agenda. Some scholars looked at the role of decentralization and federal power arrangements in providing more control to political sub-units over the external affairs of a state. Other studies showed that certain coalition-building configurations facilitated the inclusion of the concerns of small parties in the foreign policy debate. Bridging these two literatures, we argue that both structural and agential conditions behind regional and national coalition building processes—visible in federal settings—affect foreign policy-making in different ways, and not necessarily toward disagreement and obstruction. To illustrate these hypothesized mechanisms, we look at two case studies in the Indian context: the role of regional parties in the debate over the US–India nuclear deal of 2008 and the role of regional parties in shaping India’s Sri Lanka policy from 2009 to 2014.

Introducing the International Treaty Ratification Votes Database

“…Based on ParlGov, the party-level data contain a textual ("gov_opp") and a numerical variable ("gov_opp_num") that records a party's belonging to the governing coalition or the opposition at the time of each vote. Finally, because of the relevance of regionalist parties in some countries, we also code whether a party is a regionalist one (for the relevance of regionalist parties in foreign policy see Lecours 2002 ;Hazarika 2014 ;Plagemann and Destradi 2015 ;Verbeek and Zaslove 2015 ;Blarel and Van Willigen 2021 ). We included a dummy variable "regional_party" for every party in addition to our family coding.…”

Coalition or Opposition? The Behaviour of Regionalist Parties in Multi-level Competition: The Cases of the Basque Country and Scotland

“…This is a relative approach to the understanding of mainstream parties meaning that the dominant regionalist party could be a mainstream party at the regional level, however, at the national level, the party loses this status due to insufficient electoral power. Blarel and Willigen [2021] conclude that foreign policy is an area of bargaining between SWPs and RPs, which can be operationalized as coordination (policy convergence between SWPs and RPs on foreign policy matters), compromise (SWPs make concessions to the regional level), quid pro quo (SWPs push for their foreign policy agenda but make concessions to the regional level in other policy areas), and absent dialogue (SWPs ignores the regional level preferences). The foreign policy area accounts for both the centre-periphery and left-right dimensions.…”

Understanding Indian Public Opinion Toward China: Evidence from Seven Decades of Survey Data

“…Our article adds to existing valuable research on the domestic politics of Indian foreign policy. Among others, Sasikumar and Verniers (2013) the curious case of the US-India nuclear deal, Raghavan (2010) highlights the ever-ratcheting domestic pressures on Nehru in the run-up to the 1962 war with China, Hymans (2006) ties domestic nationalist projects to nuclear proliferation, Gaikwad and Suryanarayan (2021) shows fascinating linkages between caste hierarchy and views of globalization, Blarel and van Willigen (2020), explore how public opinion is manifested through federalism, Ogden (2010) and Hall (2019) study the impact of Hindu nationalism on foreign policy issues, Plagemann and Destradi (2019) link populism to shifts in the making of India's foreign policy, and Narang and Staniland (2018) seek to theorize how "accountability environments" vary across governments and issues in India.…”