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

Abstract

Various studies explored under which conditions junior coalition partners are able to have an impact on foreign policy outcomes. However, these parties do not always manage to get what they want. In this situation, they face a dilemma: defecting or staying? In the Italian context, as far as Military Operations Abroad (MOA) are concerned, the latter option has invariably prevailed. In particular, Italy's involvement in Operation Allied Force in Kosovo (1999) and Operation Unified Protector in Libya (2011) raised considerable contestation from junior partners that did not result in the termination of the respective cabinets. Employing extensive qualitative data, including a set of original interviews with relevant policymakers, this article aims to understand why junior partners did not defect in these two cases. The empirical findings highlight a variation in parties' motivations according to their ideological leaning: while extreme-left parties were afraid of being punished by their own voters for leaving the cabinet because of the participation in the operation in Kosovo, the far-right and autonomist Lega Nord did not consider opposition to the military intervention in Libya as a salient issue. Therefore, the article has considerable implications for the research agendas on the party politics of military interventions and government termination.

Methods of Foreign Policy Analysis

“…While foreign policy analysts, in a conscious departure from systemic theories of world politics, have always highlighted the considerable variation in national foreign policies and pointed at the relevance of domestic-level variables for explaining this behavior (Legro 1996;Elman 2000;Beasley et al 2013;Kaarbo 2015), the current level of domestic and transnational politicization of world politics in areas as broad as trade, climate change, or security, and the resulting contestation of policies seems unprecedented. Exploring some of these dimensions, recent work has begun to examine the shifting context of foreign policy decision-making (Aran, Brummer, and Smith 2021), the influence of multi-party cabinet dynamics (Kesgin and Kaarbo 2010;Kaarbo and Kenealy 2016;Vignoli 2020;Oktay 2022), the party-political contestation of foreign policy (Wagner et al 2017;Haesebrouck and Mello 2020;Raunio and Wagner 2020), the role of leaders, their reputations, and personal characteristics (Brummer et al 2020;Lupton 2020), the rise of populist parties and their impact on foreign policy (Chryssogelos 2017;Verbeek and Zaslove 2017;Plagemann and Destradi 2019;Jenne 2021;Ostermann and Stahl 2022), the involvement, politicization, and influence of parliaments in security policy (Raunio and Wagner 2017;Mello and Peters 2018;Oktay 2018;Strong 2018), and the role of emotions for foreign policy-making (Eberle 2019;Koschut 2020;Ghalehdar 2021).…”