The Limits of Radical Parties in Coalition Foreign Policy: Italy, Hijacking, and the Extremity Hypothesis

Abstract

Scholars increasingly suggest that coalition governments produce more extreme foreign policies than single-party governments. Extremity is especially likely when governments include radical parties that take extreme positions on foreign policy issues and are "critical" to the government's survival, as the radical parties push the centrist ones toward the extremes. A look at Italy's Second Republic provides an important counterpoint to the extremity hypothesis. In three high-profile cases of military operations-Albania 1997, Kosovo 1999, and Afghanistan 2006-08-Italy had a center-left government that depended on radical parties for its survival. In all cases, the radical parties opposed military operations but did not prevent the government from acting by forcing the government's fall. Our article seeks to explain the limits of leftist radical parties in Italy's Second Republic. We argue first that radical parties are reluctant to threaten or force government collapse as this can lead to an opposition coalition coming to office and voters' being blamed for the outcome. Second, we claim that foreign policy has been less important to radical parties than domestic issues. Finally, we argue that radical parties have appealed to their voters through theatrical politics and have affected the implementation of military operations. Scholars studying the foreign policies of democracies with coalition governments have increasingly argued in favor of an "extremity hypothesis." In 2008, Juliet Kaarbo and Ryan Beasley first made the case that coalition governments are more likely to adopt extreme foreign policies than single-party governments. One reason why coalition governments are more likely to be extreme is that they are vulnerable to being hijacked by junior parties (Kaarbo and Beasley 2008, 70). The literature further suggests that junior party hijacking that leads to extreme policy

Italian Political Parties and Military Operations: An Empirical Analysis on Voting Patterns

“…Nevertheless, the attention paid to Italian parties and defence policy has generally remained inadequate. There are few studies on the nexus between parliament and defence issues (Bono 2005; D’Amore 2001), on parties and coalition foreign policy (Coticchia and Davidson 2018; Verbeek and Zaslove 2015) and almost none on voting patterns across the entire post-Cold War period 1 . Indeed, the above-mentioned consequences of parliamentary oversight on defence policy have never been examined in the case of Italy.…”

The barking dogs: junior coalition partners and military operations abroad in Italy

“…In line with Coticchia and Davidson (2018), I hypothesize two causal mechanisms leading to this outcome: lack of salience attributed by the junior partner to security policy and fear of being punished by voters for the collapse of the government. On the basis of extensive qualitative empirical material, including interviews to policymakers, newspaper articles, memoirs and reports of the parliamentary debates, I highlight how these two mechanisms played out differently in the two cases.…”

“…In line with Coticchia and Davidson (2018), I hypothesize two elements underlying junior partner's decision to stay in government despite a disliked foreign policy outcome, and in particular, the decision to participate in a military intervention: low salience attributed to the issue and fear of being blamed by voters for the collapse of the cabinet. These two explanations are neither exclusive nor exhaustive: they may verify in conjunction and be complemented by other factors.…”

“…Kaarbo (2012) loosely refers to 'political calculations' linked to office-seeking and vote-seeking dynamics. Analysing the case of pacifist extreme-left parties and military operations in Italy, Coticchia and Davidson (2018) underline the crucial role of salience attributed to the issue and fear of being blamed by voters. The article extends this work to a new case, contestation regarding the participation in the multilateral intervention in Libya in 2011, to provide a stronger test of these two factors.…”

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

“…However, while their analysis of parliamentary voting data confirms that radicalleft parties tend to oppose military deployments, their data only include four MPs of radical-right parties, who never voted against military deployment. The case studies of Verbeek and Zaslove (2015) and Coticchia and Davidson (2016) on the impact of radical parties in Italian government coalitions suggested that extreme parties were less supportive of the use of force, but that this did not prevent the government from deploying military force. Given that empirical research has not yet arrived at conclusive results on the foreign policy preferences of radical parties, the fifth hypothesis is based on the more traditional left-right axis:…”