Public, Legislative, and Executive Constraints on the Democratic Initiation of Conflict

Reiter, Dan; Tillman, Erik R.

doi:10.1111/0022-3816.00147

Cited by 131 publications

(142 citation statements)

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“…Could we operationalise the domestic political institutions of democracies and test their influence on their international behaviour? In a number of influential contributions Prins and Sprecher (1999), Ireland and Gartner (2001), Reiter and Tillman (2002), Davis (1997, 1999), Leblang and Chan (2003) and Palmer, London, and Regan (2004) have answered these puzzles with sophisticated quantitative analyses.…”

Section: Bringing 'Foreign Policy' Back In: Explicating the Link Betwmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Oktay

Beasley

2016

Eur Polit Sci

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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...

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Section: Bringing 'Foreign Policy' Back In: Explicating the Link Betwmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Oktay

Beasley

2016

Eur Polit Sci

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“…Consider the Iraq case: countries with parliaments having only 'basic' or 'deficient' war powers became more involved militarily, while those with 'comprehensive' powers made little or no contribution (Dieterich et al 2008). In their study on variation in treaty ratification procedures, Reiter and Tillman (2002) found that countries affording stronger voice to legislatures in treaties were less likely to initiate militarized interstate disputes.…”

Section: Institutional Legal and Constitutional Authoritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Security issues that are salient to the public, and public opinion that challenges the government's preference, can facilitate parliamentary influence in security policy (Reiter and Tillman 2002;Dietrich et al 2009;Author 2010). If the cabinet is out of touch with the sense of the country, parliaments may play their role of representing the will of the people.…”

Section: Public Opinionmentioning

confidence: 99%

No, prime minister: explaining the House of Commons’ vote on intervention in Syria

Kaarbo

Kenealy

2015

European Security

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On 29 August 2013 the UK House of Commons inflicted the first defeat on a PrimeMinister over a matter of war and peace since 1782. Recalled to debate and vote on UK intervention in Syria, the Commons humbled the government and crucially impacted the development of UK foreign policy. This article places that vote, and the developments leading to it, in the context of the role of parliaments in security policy and explores the relationships between parliamentary influence, leadership, intra-party and intra-coalition politics, and public opinion. From an in-depth analysis of leaders' statements and parliamentary debate, we find a combination of intra-party politics and party leadership were most significant. An additional factor -the role of historical precedent -was also important. Our analysis explores the fluidity and interconnectedness of the various factors for parliamentary influence in foreign policy and offers directions for future theoretical development and empirical research.Keywords: foreign policy analysis; decision-making; UK foreign policy; parliaments. 2'A leader humbled, a nation cut down to size ' (Rachman 2013 This was an unusual case of a parliament defying a PM's preference on a decision to deploy military force. This vote was unprecedented in UK politics and challenges conventional wisdom that Westminster has little influence in security policy. Yet this case also resembles instances of parliamentary influence elsewhere and the factors that explain this vote are consistent with other cases. After a brief description of the backdrop to the vote, we establish the theoretical context of parliaments' role in security policy, setting out the general expectation that parliaments are not particularly influential. At the heart of the article we consider -through a consolidation of previous research -factors that facilitate parliamentary influence in security policy and examine the impact they each had in the Syria vote. In concluding, we use this case to suggest directions for future research. Our aim is to explain this particular vote and to advance research and understanding about the role of parliaments in security policy. We ground our analysis of parliamentary influence in a conceptualisation of political dynamics focusing on group and individual actors from a decision-making perspective. From this wide-ranging research, we consolidate and specify several facilitating factors for parliamentary influence in security policy. They include:• Institutional powers of parliament; 8• Public opinion;• Cabinet type;• Intraparty factions; and• Prime Ministerial (PM) leadership style.These factors can, and often do, act together, but here we present the logic of each separately. Furthermore, none are deterministic; there are caveats to the logic of each of them. Following a comparative, general analysis of factors for parliamentary influence in foreign and security policy, we apply these to the Syria vote.

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“…The coders of this dataset rated (subjectively) each of the latter dimensions, and these individual ratings are usually summed by analysts to produce an aggregate measure of a country's "democraticness" or "autocraticness." This practice can often conceal more than reveal important differences, 11 because the same aggregate score can reflect very different underlying traits. It is as if a physician simply looks at a patient's body weight without considering this person's age, gender and physical stature (e.g., a short, fat person compared to a tall, thin person).…”

Section: The Economics Of Peace and Security Journal Issn 1749-852xmentioning

confidence: 99%

The democratic peace proposition: An agenda for critical analysis

Chan¹

2009

EPSJ

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The proposition that democracies are more peaceful than autocracies has spawned a huge literature. Much of the relevant quantitative research has shown that democracies indeed rarely, if ever, fight each other, although they are not necessarily less bellicose than autocracies in general. This essay seeks to identify several areas of concern that offer fruitful directions for further research to extend and clarify this proposition. These concerns relate to (1) conceptual clarification, (2) methodological assumptions, (3) causal interpretations, and (4) policy relevance.

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Public, Legislative, and Executive Constraints on the Democratic Initiation of Conflict

Cited by 131 publications

References 32 publications

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

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

No, prime minister: explaining the House of Commons’ vote on intervention in Syria

The democratic peace proposition: An agenda for critical analysis

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