Parliamentary war powers and the role of international law in foreign troop deployment decisions: The US-led coalition against “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria

Abstract

Parliamentary war powers and the role of international law in foreign troop deployment decisions: The US-led coalition against "Islamic State" in Iraq and Syria INSTRUCTIONS1. Author groups: Please check that all names have been spelled correctly and appear in the correct order. Please also check that all initials are present. Please check that the author surnames (family name) have been correctly identified by a pink background. If this is incorrect, please identify the full surname of the relevant authors. Occasionally, the distinction between surnames and forenames can be ambiguous, and this is to ensure that the authors' full surnames and forenames are tagged correctly, for accurate indexing online. Please also check all author affiliations. Missing elements:Please check that the text is complete and that all figures, tables and their legends are included. URLs:Please check that all web addresses cited in the text, footnotes and reference list are up-to-date, and please provide a 'last accessed' date for each URL.All commenting tools are displayed in the toolbar.To edit your document, use the highlighter, sticky notes, and the variety of insert/replace text options.

Incentives and constraints: a configurational account of European involvement in the anti-Daesh coalition

“…Precisely, it is the absence of this institutional constraint that characterizes Path 2 and Path 3 (either in combination with an external threat and public threat perception or together with alliance value, a right executive, and the absence of public threat perception, respectively). This finding broadly resonates with studies that have emphasized the relevance of parliamentary veto power on military deployments (Peters and Wagner, 2011;Ruys et al, 2019), but which have also highlighted that there is an interaction between institutional rules, political preferences, and the context of military missions (Wagner, 2018, 131;Mello, 2019, 49). Of those that participated militarily, only the legislatures in Germany and Denmark have formal veto rights over military deployments (hence these two countries are uniquely covered by Path 1 instead of Path 2), and Germany limited its involvement to air support, arguably due to political and constitutional considerations, if the parliamentary debates in the Bundestag following upon the terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan are taken as an indicator.…”

“…Across the configurations entailed in the set-theoretic solution, these either combine with other 'push' factors or with the absence of constraints against military involvement. In line with the latter, the paper highlights the policy relevance of institutional constraints, especially legislative veto rights, since most of those countries that were involved in the airstrikes of the anti-Daesh coalition did not have formal parliamentary involvement on matters of military deployment policy (Ruys et al, 2019). This suggests that legislative veto rights can, under certain preconditions, constrain the war involvement of democracies, which resonates with prior studies' findings (Dieterich et al, 2015;Wagner, 2018) and underlines the political importance of this institutional constraint.…”

“…This broadly resonates with expectations formulated in realist-inspired empirical work on state behavior with regard to military coalitions (Davidson, 2014;Pedersen and Reykers, 2020). Yet, it is also clear that domestic factors cannot be disregarded, especially institutional constraints like parliamentary war powers (Peters and Wagner, 2011;Ruys et al, 2019). These seem to have posed an effective constraint on executive decision-making, as only two countries with a legislative veto on military deployments, Denmark and Germany, participated in the airstrikes, and the latter restricted its military involvement to air support functions, arguably for political reasons.…”

“…Decisions on military contributions are usually decided at the cabinet level, which means they are subject to party politics (Wagner et al, 2017). Governments further operate under institutional and legal constraints, such as parliamentary veto rights over military deployments (Peters and Wagner, 2011;Ruys et al, 2019) and they usually observe public opinion, which can form an additional constraint against military involvement (Baum and Potter, 2015;Everts and Isernia, 2015). Building on previous efforts to combine such international and domestic-level explanations (e.g., Bennett et al, 1997;Haesebrouck, 2018;Massie, 2019;Mello, 2019), this article develops an integrative theoretical framework to explain EU member states' military contributions to the anti-Daesh coalition in Iraq and Syria, as outlined in the following sections.…”

When does politics stop at the water’s edge? A QCA of parliamentary consensus on military deployment decisions

“…Since the 1990s, there has been a general trend towards greater parliamentary involvement in decisions to deploy armed forces abroad (Ruys et al, 2019). Even in the absence of a legal obligation to do so, governments have increasingly sought parliamentary approval for troop deployments.…”