The party scene: new directions for political party research in foreign policy analysis

Abstract

Research on political parties and foreign policy has grown in recent years in response to disciplinary and real-world changes. But party research still bears the imprint of earlier scepticism about the role of parties. The result is scholarship which is disaggregated, which avoids difficult cases for parties, and which has focused more on showing that parties matter relative to structural accounts of foreign policy-making. This article takes stock of recent research on political parties, party politics and their role in foreign policy-making. We argue that it is time for party research not only to embrace the question of whether parties matter but also how, when and where they matter. This requires a move away from most-likely cases and the realist foil towards an embrace of the complexity of party positions. Building on International Relations, comparative politics and foreign policy analysis scholarship, we suggest four avenues deserving of greater scholarly focus: 1) ideological multidimensionality; 2) parties as organizations and the role of entrepreneurs; 3) parties as transnational foreign policy actors; and 4) the interaction between parties and the changing global order. We propose how these literatures can help identify new research questions, contribute to theory development and help define scope conditions. This will hopefully help scholars establish benchmarks for judging the efficacy of parties in foreign policy-making.

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

“…Third, the analysis shows that rightist partisanship was associated with military involvement, which resonates with the direction expected by most of the literature on party politics and security policy (Hofmann and Martill, 2021;Wagner et al, 2017). Yet, this finding must be qualified because a right executive features in only one of the three solution paths and this combination is solely populated by Poland (Path 3).…”

Party ideologies and UN debates

“…Comparative research on the relevance of party ideologies for foreign policy is rare (Raunio and Wagner 2020; Hoffmann and Martill 2021). My analysis contributes to filling this research gap.…”

“…Liberalism, on the other hand, had a focus on domestic political institutions and their interaction with the economic interests of voters and corporations. Over the last two decades, liberalism inspired the “domestic politics turn” in foreign policy analysis, which centered on the effect of political institutions such electoral systems, executive-legislative relations, public opinion, and the media (Kaarbo 2015; Hoffmann and Martill 2021). By consequence, the relevance of parties has often been reduced to organizing and representing the diverging (primarily economic) interests.…”

“…Nevertheless, research in recent decades has accumulated evidence for a partisan theory of foreign policy: leftist governments tend to be less inclined to use armed force and more inclined to commit to international law and institutions; they also tend to be less supportive of free trade and spend more on development aid (Raunio and Wagner 2020: 523). However, “arguments based on linear connections between ideology or party type and foreign policy outcome were (and still are) few and far between” (Hoffmann and Martill 2021: 306).…”

The party politics of the EU’s relations with the USA: evidence from the European Parliament

“…Most of the empirical studies have focused on the use of force, with research on the US and comparative papers mainly confirming that "hawks" are more often found among right-leaning legislators and "doves" on the left (for overviews of the literature, see Raunio and Wagner 2020a, Wagner 2020, Hofmann and Martill 2021. Party positions in international trade and development aid are also linked to the left-right dimension, with preferences explained by the core values and constituents of the parties.…”