Who Gets What in Foreign Affairs? Explaining the Allocation of Foreign Ministries in Coalition Governments

Abstract

In coalition governments, political parties are concerned not only with how many but also with which departments they control. The foreign ministry is among the most highly considered prizes in coalition negotiations. This article develops hypotheses to explain under which conditions the foreign ministry is likely to be allocated to a ‘junior coalition partner’. The factors that are hypothesized to affect the allocation are: the relative size of coalition parties; the proximity of their foreign policy positions; the party family of the junior coalition party; the salience of foreign policy to the coalition parties; and past allocations of the foreign ministry to junior coalition partners. Employing a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis, the article demonstrates that although the conjunction of the junior partner being relatively large and it having led the foreign ministry in the past is not sufficient by itself, those two factors are very influential in the junior partner being allocated the foreign ministry.

Political time in public bureaucracies: Explaining variation of structural duration in European governments

“…However, studies differ in which information they retrieve from these sources. Formal codifications are used to ascertain their timing, most notably on the (re‐)allocation of policy authority across and between ministerial departments (Bäck et al, 2011; Batista, 2018; Oppermann & Brummer, 2019; Sieberer et al, 2019). Accordingly, structural change is attributed by proxy instead of assessing it explicitly, partly because the outcome of the government formation process is the key research interest—and thus the codifications or statutes are relevant for their existence and not for the variation or types of structural change that they also may document in full.…”

Qualitative Comparative Analysis

“…As in other fields of the social sciences, a majority of FPA studies using QCA are situated at the country level, comparing across a medium number of states. Examples include democracies' involvement and non-involvement in the Iraq War of 2003 (Mello 2012(Mello , 2014, countries' participation in the multilateral coalition against the "Islamic State" (Haesebrouck 2018;, NATO burden sharing in Libya (Haesebrouck 2017b), the role of junior partners in coalition warfare (Schmitt 2018), the political contestation of military missions (Haesebrouck and van Immerseel 2020), the implementation of sanctions against "Arab Spring" countries in the Middle East and North Africa (Boogaerts 2018;Boogaerts and Drieskens 2020), the occurrence of unintended consequences of UN sanctions in targeted states (Meissner and Mello 2022), and the allocation of the foreign ministry to junior partners in governing coalitions of parliamentary democracies (Oppermann and Brummer 2020).…”

The “5,000-kilometre screwdriver”: German and French police training in Afghanistan through the EU and NATO

“…These divergences also reflected the dynamics of Germany's coalition politics, where the federal foreign office is often held by the junior coalition partner (Hofmann, 2019;Oppermann & Brummer, 2020). Held by the leading coalition partner Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) during the second Merkel cabinet (2009-2013), BMI and BMVg were "always eager to cooperate with each other" on Afghanistan (interview with German official 1).…”