quantitative approaches in coalition foreign policy: scope, content, process

Abstract

QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES IN COALITION FOREIGN POLICY: SCOPE, CONTENT, PROCESS INTRODUCTION:From Britain to Israel, coalitions have been observed more frequently as the form of executive power across a broad range of parliamentary systems. Consequently, they have become the loci of foreign policy decisions. As this symposium demonstrates, the literature on coalition foreign policy has theorized that coalition parties shape foreign policy debates by way of their ideological positions as well as their relative size in the parliament and in the government. The quantitative study of coalition foreign policy offers to refine and test these expectations on the content of policy and its behavioral characteristics. Do coalitions constrain international commitments or do they enable extreme behavior at the international level? Are some coalitions more constraining or enabling than others, and which mechanisms explain those relationships? Does the ideological cohesion of coalition parties alleviate constraints? How does the relative ideological positioning of coalition parties influence foreign policy choices? This symposium contribution presents an overview of the quantitative literature on coalition foreign policy that has grown at a remarkable speed over the last decade to respond to these puzzles among others.These studies have not only dissected coalition governments to highlight the effects of their arithmetic and ideological setup on foreign policy behaviour, but situated the empirical analyses within frameworks ranging from coalition theories in Comparative Politics to theories of group psychology. In so doing, they have been successful in realising Foreign Policy Analysis "as a bridging field linking international relations theory, comparative politics and the foreign 3 policymaking community" (Hudson and Vore, 1995: 228). These studies have also moved away from the context of conflict behaviour in International Relations, which provides only a subset of all international interactions, towards a more inclusive scope. Indeed, empirical tools such as events data have allowed for the comprehensive analysis of the cooperative as well as the conflictual behaviour of coalition governments, and may open further avenues in examining the wide variety of state behaviours in the international system.The remaining sections of this article survey the emergence and development of this literature, its debates, contributions, limitations, and possible avenues for further research. We begin by presenting the motivations behind the coalition foreign policy research agenda and its contributions by situating it vis-à-vis the previous generation of scholarship that focused on the effects of domestic politics on the international conflict behaviour of democracies. The third section discusses the explanandum (Hudson, 2014) in coalition foreign policy. What is the nature of coalition foreign policy behaviour: is it more cooperative, conflictual, or generally more extreme or committed? Furthermore, what other types of measures can we deve...

Comparative Foreign Policy Analysis

“…The development of large events-based datasets for the study of foreign policy-such as the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB;Azar 1980Azar , 1982 and the Comparative Research on the Events of Nations (CREON;Hermann et al 1973) data set-were driven by the desire to bridge traditional and more quantitative approaches (Schrodt 1995). Indeed, events data offer a more nuanced and wide ranging set of dependent variables than the more conflict-oriented datasets that focus more on conflict and war (Oktay & Beasley 2016). Moving toward more event-based datasets, McClelland (1978), for example, created the 'World Event Interaction Survey, or 'WEIS', data set which coded the discreet behaviors of countries around the world.…”

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

“…More specifically, we expect weak governments to have strong incentives for seeking opposition support, resulting in logrolling between parliaments and governments. Legislative logrolling does not involve reaching a political compromise on the issue at hand (Oktay and Beasley, 2017), but concerns policy pay-offs on other issues and/or office payoffs, which can lead to higher levels of parliamentary consensus for controversial proposals. 1 Government coalitions can suffer from structural and situational weaknesses (Oktay, 2018).…”

Clarity of responsibility and foreign policy performance voting

“…Hagan () argues that foreign policy is constrained by the same factors that confront economic policy, such as government type and political party ideology, which delimit policy options and stall decision making. Similarly, studies on coalition foreign policy suggest that foreign policy resonates with economic policy in the ways in which domestic political institutions constrain or facilitate decision making (Oktay & Beasley ).…”

“…Finally, this study contributes to FPA scholarship by validating the ‘responsibility diffusion effect’. Why democracies engage in costly, extreme or committed international behaviour has received ample attention (Oktay & Beasley ). Studies propose ‘responsibility diffusion’ to explain why certain governments, like coalitions, engage in extreme or high‐cost and high‐commitment behavior, including international conflict (Beasley & Kaarbo ; Hunter & Robbins ; Leblang & Chan ; Oktay ; Palmer et al.…”