This article adopts a ‘party-political’ approach to studying legislative influence on security policy-making. It argues that legislative logrolling constitutes a key mechanism for the government to secure votes in parliament while facilitating the opposition to advance its own interests, especially when the government requires parliament’s consent for security policy. The article investigates legislative logrolling in the context of weak executives, specifically looking at minority coalitions and majority coalitions with ideological and policy divergences. Logrolling is critical for these types of governments, as their structural and situational weaknesses force them to cooperate with opposition parties to maintain parliamentary support. Using the Danish and Dutch decisions to participate in the 2003 Iraq War, and Israel’s 2005 decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, this article elucidates the ways in which legislative logrolling between the governing and opposition parties facilitates security policy-making in parliament.

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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...

Coalition governments are observed frequently in parliamentary systems. Approximately 70% of all governments in postwar Europe have been one type of coalition or another. Israel has never been ruled by a single-party government in its history. Recently, majoritarian systems like Britain produced coalitions, taking many by surprise. The prominence of coalitions in parliamentary democracies compels researchers to study them more closely. The Comparative Politics literature investigates, in particular, the dynamics of coalition formation and termination, as well as the domestic policy outputs of coalitions, especially compared to governments ruled by a single party. Coalitions have generated interest on the International Relations front as well. One avenue of research transcends the “political party” as a building block and conceptualizes coalitions as a “decision unit” by focusing on the group of veto players in a regime’s foreign policy apparatus. Another line of scholarship, situated in the “Democratic Peace” framework, looks at coalitions as a domestic-institutional factor to observe their effects on the likelihood of international conflict. Departing from the “Democratic Peace” tradition, more recent research in Foreign Policy Analysis rejuvenates the study of coalitions in international politics. This literature not only encourages theory development by scrutinizing why coalitions behave differently than single-parties in the international arena but also bridges the gap between International Relations and Comparative Politics. Emphasizing the organic relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy, foreign policy researchers dissect coalition governments to highlight the role political parties play on foreign policy formulation and implementation. This literature also illustrates the merits of methodological plurality in studying foreign policy. Using a combination of comparative case studies, process tracing, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and regression modeling, it sheds light not only on the broader trends that characterize coalition foreign policy but also on the causal mechanisms and contextual factors which often go unaccounted for in purely statistical analyses. The recent advances in role and image theories in Foreign Policy Analysis are expected to influence the study of coalitions and their foreign policies, offering an interpretivist take alongside this positivist trajectory.

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