The positions of political parties in various foreign policy questions and how such ideological stances matter in foreign and security policy decision-making remain largely unexplored beyond the specific case of the United States. Reviewing the “state of the art” in foreign policy analysis and comparative politics, this introductory article discusses the changing nature of both international politics and party systems and cleavages in Europe and beyond. It puts forward reasons why we should see different patterns of coalitions and party behavior in security policy, on the one hand, and in international trade and foreign aid, on the other hand. The articles in this Special Issue have been deliberately chosen to capture different elements of “partyness,” from analyzing party positions to actual behavior by legislatures and governments to transnational party networks. Our main argument is that there are genuine ideological differences between political parties and that the impact of these competing ideologies is also discernible in foreign policy decision-making.
How do political parties matter in foreign and security policy? Although there has been mounting evidence that foreign affairs are contested between political parties, our understanding of parties’ positions and their impact has remained limited. Systematic analyses of the role of parties in foreign and security policy are rare beyond the specific case of the United States. This scarcity is in large part explained by the “blind spot” resulting from the division of labor between the disciplines of political science and international relations—notwithstanding efforts to bridge the gap ( Kaarbo 2015; Brummer et al. 2019). While there is an abundance of research on the positions of national parties toward “domestic politics” issues, not least economic policy and the welfare state, comparative politics scholars have rarely “crossed to the other side” to analyze party behavior in foreign and security policy; positions on European Union (EU) seems the farthest students of political parties are prepared to go. Building on the seminal work of Lipset and Rokkan (1967), they continue to emphasize the importance of traditional socioeconomic cleavages, primarily the left–right dimension, that explain the establishment of individual parties and party families and voting behavior in elections. And while the rise of post-materialist values and the increasing salience of the sociocultural dimension have certainly altered party systems and the ideologies of parties in Europe and beyond (e.g., Kriesi et al. 2006), this perspective has hardly ever been applied to foreign and security policy questions. To be sure, external relations have barely given rise to new parties and cleavages but at the same time globalization and European integration certainly facilitated the rise of populist or nationalist parties ( Katz and Crotty 2006; Arzheimer, Evans, and Lewis-Beck 2017).
Foreign policy analysis scholars, or more broadly the international relations community, in turn usually pay scant attention to political parties. The realist notion of states as unitary actors responsive to international developments is still a viable tradition. Whereas in line with the “domestic politics turn” ( Kaarbo 2015) research on political institutions, public opinion, political culture, discourses, and media has been systematically incorporated into foreign policy analysis, political parties have been the “neglected element” ( Alden and Aran 2017, 80–82). Their inclusion in foreign policy analysis is also hampered by the fact that the majority of executives are coalition governments, where two or more parties assume the position of a veto player ( Oppermann and Brummer 2019, 98). Coalition governments thus make it difficult for parties to implement their foreign policy agenda even though they may occasionally be able to “hijack” a coalition and impose their preferences ( Kaarbo 1996). Some examples from recent leading texts in foreign policy analysis scholarship illustrate well this neglect of parties and ideologies. In his thorough review of external and domestic variables affecting national foreign policies, Hill (2016) examines political leaders, cabinets, and bureaucracy without any actual discussion of competing party platforms or ideologies. The indices of Beach (2012) and Smith, Hadfield, and Dunne (2008) do not include political parties. An exception is the analysis of American foreign policy, where scholars have investigated extensively the ideological preferences and behavior of the Democrats and the Republicans and individual congressional representatives in foreign affairs. However, this literature rarely includes comparisons with other countries.
The disciplinary divide also resonates with a strong norm of consensus in foreign affairs, particularly in security policy, according to which (party) politics should stop at the water's edge. Disunity, it is argued, weakens the executive's negotiation position and might undermine success abroad. Hence, legislatures and political parties should not take action that might jeopardize the defense of national interests. And for many if not most countries, the notion of a core “national interest” that forms the “raison d'être” of the country in international relations resonates across the political spectrum and in society more broadly. This core national interest might result from geographical location (such as proximity to an unfriendly neighbor), past historical events (such as experience in World War II), or military alliances (such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO). In such cases, there often is broad partisan and societal consensus behind the national interest.
More recently, however, the “politics stops at the water's edge” idiom has been challenged in various ways. Already some four decades ago, Manning (1977) coined the term “intermestic” to capture issues that fall somewhere between pure foreign and domestic policy. Increasing interdependence and globalization have internationalized issues previously decided in national capitals, such as immigration, trade, energy, and environmental policies or human rights questions. Not only are more issues decided in or influenced by European or international negotiations, but they also have more direct distributional consequences for voters and interest groups. In addition, the end of the Cold War has removed the straightjacket of a bipolar global architecture, giving individual countries more freedom to choose their partners and negotiating positions. What is more, the military's primary task is no longer territorial defense but “wars of choice” whose wisdom is more controversial.
Overall, the public pays more attention to international issues as a result of higher levels of education and more varied sources of information ( Norris 2011). International relations have become politicized ( Zürn 2014) and international governance has been more salient for political parties ( Ecker-Ehrhardt 2014) and providing a stronger “electoral connection” to international issues ( Aldrich et al. 2006; Oktay 2018). The increasing salience of the sociocultural dimension indicates that citizens are motivated by such issues and take them into account when choosing between parties in elections. Furthermore, domestic actors, not least political parties, have more access points to influence international politics than before: they can bypass national governments and form transnational networks and other contacts with like-minded groups abroad. This development is particularly striking in the EU, where the multi-level nature of the European polity facilitates horizontal and vertical coordination between political parties and legislatures. Taken together, the line between domestic and foreign policies is increasingly blurred, which creates strong incentives for domestic actors from ordinary citizens, interest groups, to political parties and parliaments to take a more active interest in foreign and security policy ( Raunio and Wagner 2017).
Bringing together expertise from international relations and comparative politics, this Special Issue advances our understanding of political parties in foreign and security policy by examining two interrelated questions:
The next two sections review the “state of the art” in foreign policy analysis and comparative politics, and discuss the changing nature of both international politics and party systems and cleavages in Europe and beyond. 1 They theorize why we should see different patterns of coalitions and party behavior in security policy, on the one hand, and in international trade and foreign aid, on the other. The five articles comprising this Special Issue were deliberately chosen to capture different elements of “partyness” in national and European foreign policy, from analyzing party positions to actual behavior in legislatures and governments to transnational party networks. Assessing the contribution of the Special Issue to foreign policy analysis, the latter part of this article suggests avenues for future research, highlighting particularly the need to explore the interaction between party positions and foreign policy in non-Western contexts. It also discusses the potential influence of changing cleavage structures for foreign policy and the multiple channels parties can use for advancing their foreign policy objectives.
It is customary to argue nowadays that at least in European or “Western” countries the party-political space is dominated by two dimensions. The left–right cleavage continues to be in most countries the main axis of contestation, with the sociocultural or gal/tan (green–alternative–libertarian versus traditional–authoritarian–nationalist) dimension constituting the second cleavage ( Kriesi et al. 2006; Hooghe and Marks 2018). According to the general comparative literature on party positions, drawing either on party manifestos or expert surveys, parties that are leftist tend to be on average more “dovish” when it comes to use force, put more emphasis on international agreements and multilateralism, and advocate human rights, social and environmental issues, and development aid to poorer countries. Right-wing parties in turn tend to be more “hawkish” and in favor of higher defense spending, military alliances and free trade, and place more trust in defending the “national interest.” This literature also suggests that with the exception of countries such as Israel or Turkey, foreign and security policy is—beyond the opening of borders associated with globalization and the EU—normally not a very salient issue for the parties or the voters (see, e.g., Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge 1994; Budge et al. 2001; Benoit and Laver 2006; Klingemann et al. 2006). However, these studies have not examined in any detail or in systematic fashion party positions in foreign policy. Hence, their general descriptive findings need to be understood as preliminary starting points for our comparative analysis.
Existing research leans toward indicating that cross-national ideologies have more explanatory weight than countries—that is, membership in a party family is a better predictor of how individual parties view particular policies than the positions of other parties from the same country, a finding which also applies to party positions on the EU (see, e.g., Hix 1999; Marks and Wilson 2000; Hooghe, Marks, and Wilson 2002; Marks et al. 2006; Almeida 2012; Prosser 2016; Hooghe and Marks 2018). To what extent this logic extends to foreign and security policy and to countries beyond the EU, however, has hardly been addressed. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted that party preferences on foreign and security policy can be straightforwardly deducted from their positions on either the left–right dimension or the sociocultural dimension. This strand of research has also indicated that the dimensionality of party systems is quite different between “Western” Europe and the younger, Central and Eastern European (CEE) democracies. Whereas in the former party systems evolved around the cleavages identified by Lipset and Rokkan (1967), socioeconomic lines of conflict have so far been much less relevant in the post-communist democracies. Whether such differences between Eastern and Western, or indeed Northern and Southern, Europe manifest themselves in the foreign policy preferences of political parties is another so far unexplored topic examined in several articles in this Special Issue.
Previous research has focused almost exclusively on the importance of the left–right dimension in explaining party positions and behavior in foreign policy. On a more general level, Noël and Therien (2008) and Rathbun (2004, 2007) argued that in global politics the difference between parties of the left and right stems from different core values, such as hierarchy and equality, with the left advocating more egalitarian policies both in terms of economy and security that are more effectively reached through stronger international rules and institutions. Most of the empirical studies have examined the specific question of the use of force, with the research from the United States and Europe mainly confirming that “hawks” are more often found among right-leaning legislators and “doves” on the left. Wagner et al. (2017) showed how ideology impacts preferences regarding both policy and procedures. Utilizing Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data, they first demonstrate that across European countries political parties on the right with the exception of the radical right were more supportive of military missions than those on the left (see also Wagner 2020). The second stage of their analysis showed that in Germany, France, and Spain, parties on the left tended to favor stronger parliamentary control whereas those on the right tended to prefer an unconstrained executive.
Examining British, French, and German responses to conflicts on the Balkans, Rathbun (2004) demonstrated that parties on the left were more likely to support multilateral cooperation and endorsed a broader notion of the national interest that included the protection of human rights abroad. However, ideological differences between individual parties and party families were not always consistent or clear-cut, with party behavior influenced by variables such as new events or electoral considerations. Analyzing the development of the EU security and defense policy in the 1990s, Hofmann (2013) in turn showed how the positions of British, French, and German parties were stable but not simply deductible from their positions on the left–right continuum, especially when considering how complex issues like multilateralism or the Common Foreign and Security Policy/Common Security and Defence Policy (CFSP/CSDP) can be. Also other existing scholarship at least suggests that ideologically centrist party families tend to support the security policy or military dimension of European integration, while parties at both ends of the left–right cleavage are more opposed to CFSP/CSDP. Hence, one of the questions explored in more detail in this Special Issue is whether party positions on CFSP/CSDP are independent or not of their general preferences toward European integration.
Another until now largely unexplored question is the temporal dimension, and particularly the impact of the end of the Cold War on party preferences. During the Cold War, the bipolar world order divided countries into two opposite camps, and at least in those “Western” countries that had more powerful communist or socialist parties that division surfaced also in domestic foreign policy debates. The post–Cold War era is, on the one hand, more unipolar and characterized by stronger and more numerous international organizations and treaties, not least through NATO and the EU. This multilateralism can result in broader cross-party consensus about the need to engage in international collaboration. The notable exception are the populist or radical right parties, most of which oppose the political establishment and combine critique of internationalization and opening of borders with a strong emphasis on national interests, territorial defense included ( Liang 2007; Verbeek and Zaslove 2017)). On the other hand, even within NATO, there have been severe disagreements about entering “wars of choice.” The more varied types of conflict can also produce different kinds of domestic coalitions. When military force is justified by governments as “saving strangers” ( Wheeler 2000) from state-sponsored violence (as in Kosovo 1999 and in Libya 2011) or to support a state-building process (as in Afghanistan from 2001 onward), the justifications resonate also with “post-materialist” values and are likelier to see broader partisan consensus behind the operations. Hence, an expectation, tested in this Special Issue, is that leftist parties are more critical of the use of military force (unless used for humanitarian purposes) and that right-wing governments use military force more frequently, especially for strategic purposes.
Party positions in international trade and development aid should follow a different logic. Overall, foreign trade has direct distributional consequences with winners and losers inside individual countries. Therefore, it is plausible that constituency interests influence party preferences and legislative bargaining about trade. As the studies utilizing parliamentary votes indicate (see below), legislators from left parties are in general more likely to support development aid and international financial institutions. Right-wing parties in turn are overall more supportive of free trade than leftist parties that are more willing to use protectionist measures to safeguard social, consumer, industrial, or environmental interests. Populist and radical right parties in turn are particularly critical of development aid. As Milner and Judkins (2004, 114) conclude: “The partisan identity of a party has a consistent impact on the choices of the electoral manifesto positions that it adopts on trade policy. Left-wing parties in advanced industrial countries advocate more protectionist policies than do right-wing parties. These findings remain true even when holding many other political and economic variables constant. Partisanship based on class cleavages is a good predictor of a party's trade policy position.”
Turning to actual foreign and security policy, previous foreign policy analysis and international relations scholarship has often downplayed the importance of ideologies, instead emphasizing how national foreign policies are explained by changes in the international system and how parties converge around a core “national interest.” It is indeed logical to expect the actual role of party positions to be moderated on account of several factors. To begin with, some issues are simply not likely to produce party-political contestation. In addition to more humanitarian military operations mentioned above, emergency funding to crisis areas is an example of a question where all-party consensus can be expected. What is more, coalition governments that are common in the majority of liberal democracies make compromise inevitable and hamper the translation of party manifestos into government policy ( Oppermann and Brummer 2019, 98).
More important, however, is the political culture in foreign and security policy. In domestic issues and increasingly also in the EU policies, party-political conflicts and public discussions are seen as normal or prerequisite for democratic deliberation, whereas foreign policy decision-makers often evoke—in the spirit of the “politics stops at the water's edge” idiom—notions of national unity and demand that the major political parties at least try to build consensus on these issues so that the country speaks with one voice ( Hegeland 2007; Lüddecke 2010). Here again it is important to underline variation between different categories of foreign affairs questions. The notion of consensus applies stronger to security and military issues. The effective formulation and defense of national interest implies that the executive is given sufficient wiggle room, which may require also secrecy. Political parties and their MPs may share the belief that public criticism of the government during military operations might undermine national security ( Raunio and Wagner 2017, 3f.). Governments can furthermore seek to constrain both party-political debate and legislative action through framing issues as security threats—in line with what the Copenhagen school termed “securitization” ( Wæver 1995; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998).
Policy-making culture in questions not directly tied to national security should in turn be more in line with standard practices from domestic policies. For example, whereas parliamentary foreign affairs and defense committees may aim at unanimity in security matters, debates on international trade are likely to see more public party-political disagreements. Recent developments also clearly suggest that international trade has become a much more contested and salient issue area, with politicians subject to active lobbying from interest groups and citizens ( Laursen and Roederer-Rynning 2017). Measuring conflict with reservations added to committee reports, Jerneck, Sannerstedt, and Sjölin (1988) demonstrated that while foreign and security policy were characterized by consensus in the Swedish Riksdag, disagreement in the committees was more pronounced as regards foreign aid and to a lesser extent general defense policy (because decisions on the opening or closure of military bases has a big impact on constituencies).
The same logic applies to voting in legislatures, where scholars have uncovered differences between various foreign policy questions and, on the other hand, variation between domestic policy and foreign policy matters. Parliamentary support in the US Congress and other legislatures for development aid, trade, and international financial institutions is more likely when an MP represents an electoral district with high-skilled workforce. Right-leaning legislators are more supportive of free trade while their left-wing colleagues are likelier to favor protectionist measures and foreign aid (see, e.g., Verdier 1994; Hiscox 2002; Broz and Hawes 2006; Broz 2011; Milner and Tingley 2015). Milner and Tingley (2015) showed how budgetary items with more direct connections to national security allow the US president greater freedom from Congressional constraints than foreign trade and aid, in which decision-making is shaped more by constituency interests and party-political differences ( Raunio and Wagner 2017, 4). Prins and Marshall (2001) found that domestic policy votes were characterized by higher levels of conflict in the Congress than foreign policy votes, and also concluded that bipartisanship was less evident in foreign aid and trade issues than in foreign and defense policy votes. Both Kupchan and Trubowitz (2007) and Hurst and Wroe (2016) found stronger evidence of bipartisanship in foreign policy votes than in domestic politics votes in the US Congress.
Moving to Europe, Wagner et al. (2018) reported higher levels of voting unity for military deployments as compared to issues of domestic politics in France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Indeed, votes on military conflicts, particularly those where national survival is at stake, are often demonstrations of patriotism and national unity. International crises thus bring about, at least temporarily, a “rally-around-the-flag” effect that makes criticism of the government look inappropriate ( Mueller 1973; Oneal, Lian, and Joyner 1996). Drawing on a mixture of roll-call votes and survey data, Onuki, Ribeiro, and de Oliveira (2009) in turn found that the positions of Argentinian and Chilean parties were similar in domestic and foreign policy matters, with Chilean parties exhibiting stronger polarization in foreign policy.
The notion that “parties influence policy” lies at the heart of the partisan theory of public policy ( Hibbs 1977; for a recent overview, see Häusermann, Picot, and Geering 2013). In line with the concept of responsible party government, electoral choices made by citizens only matter to the extent that political parties in government follow up on the competing promises given while campaigning ( Thomassen 1994). However, students of public policy, by and large, focus on domestic policy and the welfare state in particular. This partly results from the notion that political parties are agents of socio-structural classes that mobilize in order to pursue economic goals ( Korpi 1983). This lends plausibility to parties differing over social and economic policies but not over foreign policy. It also resonates with students of democratic theory who see foreign and security policy as a realm beyond the reach of democratic politics. Furthermore, it resonates with scholarship in international relations, especially in the tradition of (neo)realism, that points to pressures emanating from the international system to which states must succumb if they do not want to put their own security at risk. Indeed, one of the few studies examining defense spending finds that “socioeconomic and geopolitical factors are of particular importance” whereas “domestic politics appear to have little influence on the actual effort devoted to external security” ( Keman 1982, 192), although they may occasionally retard developments. This combination of several theoretical arguments suggesting that partisan theory is limited to domestic policies led to an initial neglect of foreign and security policy in the comparative study of public policy.
A new momentum for studying partisan influence on foreign and security policy came from students of international relations whose prime interest was conflict behavior. Encouraged by a wave of studies pointing to the importance of domestic politics and ideas, they added government ideology, that is, the party-political orientation of government, to a set of variables in order to explain variation in the foreign and security policy of democratic countries. The majority of these studies address the traditional key concern to scholars of international relations: states’ use of force. While in the US context it is customary, at least since the Vietnam War, to view Democrats as “doves” and Republicans as “hawks,” it is less clear whether the partisan affiliation of the president impacts on the use of force abroad ( Gowa 1998; Foster and Palmer 2006; Howell and Pevehouse 2007; Clark, Fordham, and Nordstrom 2016; Lewis 2017). Examining eighteen parliamentary democracies during the Cold War, Palmer, London, and Regan (2004) found that right-wing governments were more likely to be involved in militarized disputes than leftist governments. For the period 1960–1996, Arena and Palmer (2009) concluded that right-wing governments were more likely to initiate them—a finding confirmed by Clare (2010) for the period 1950–1998 while Bertoli, Dafoe, and Trager (2019) found that electing right-wing leaders increases the likelihood of countries initiating high-level military disputes. Using qualitative comparative analysis, Mello found that right-wing governments were more willing to engage militarily than their leftist counterparts with a view to the Kosovo conflict and the Iraq war. By contrast, “for the Afghanistan conflict partisanship did not generate a conclusive pattern” ( Mello 2014, 197). Schuster and Maier (2006) confirmed Mello's Iraq war finding for Western European but not for CEE democracies.
In their study of liberal democracies’ fight against the so-called Islamic State, however, Haesebrouck (2018) and Saideman (2016) did not find support for the influence of government ideology. According to Koch (2009), governments of the left engage in shorter disputes, while Koch and Sullivan (2010, 627) found that “executives from parties of the political right are less likely to terminate foreign military interventions when public approval of their job performance is low. But left party leaders become more likely to terminate foreign military interventions as their domestic popularity declines, even if they must withdraw short of victory.” According to Heffington's (2018) study of twenty-six democracies, the executive's position on defense, as indicated in party manifesto statements on the military and peace, had an impact on conflict initiation whereas its general left–right position did not. Taken together, and with individual conflicts possibly exempted, scholarship in this field finds consistent support for the notion that right-wing governments tend to be more “hawkish” or “bellicist” than left governments.
A number of studies have examined the impact of government ideology in another area of interest to international relations scholars: international cooperation and international law. These publications have focused on the ratification of international human rights treaties and international humanitarian law (IHL). Simmons (2009) found left-wing governments to be more likely to ratify human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Along similar lines, Neumayer (2008) reported that leftist governments were more likely to commit to the abolition of the death penalty under international law. Finally, according to Wallace (2012), leftist governments were more likely to commit to the protection of civilians under IHL. Taken together, the finding is thus very clear: left-wing governments are more supportive of international law in the areas of human rights and humanitarian law.
Outside the two core areas of armed conflict and international cooperation, examinations of government ideology are scarce. Although the governance of international economic relations is widely seen as a political issue on which left and right disagree, there are very few comparative studies of government ideology's impact in this area. Dutt and Mitra (2005, 71) showed that left-wing governments “adopt more protectionist trade policies in capital-rich countries, but adopt more pro-trade policies in labor-rich ones.” Another pair of economists, Chang and Lee (2012, 59), also concluded that “an increase in the left percentage of the government may lead to more restrictive or less open trade policies.” Gray and Kucik (2017) in turn found that ideological turnover of countries’ executives brings about increased barriers to trade, particularly when the ideological shift is toward left-wing leaders. Importantly, these studies examined also “non-Western” cases, indicating thus that at least in trade policy the structure of contestation is broadly similar across the world.
Turning to foreign aid, Therien and Noël (2000) examined levels of development assistance among countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). They found no support for partisan theory when using the standard indicator of the strength of the left in the cabinet but did establish a strong and statistically significant relation between levels of foreign aid and cumulative leftist power. This measure had been used by scholars of comparative public policy ( Huber, Ragin, and Stephens 1993) to capture that partisan influence in some issue areas is not instantaneous but builds up over time and works through a country's institutions and practices. The explanatory power of cumulative measures of partisan power has not been put to a test in issue areas such as international conflict and cooperation. A number of scholars have also explored whether government ideology influences types of aid. These comparative studies show leftist cabinets to be more generous in aid provision and to target more poverty alleviation, whereas right-leaning governments seem more concerned with improving trade relations ( Tingley 2010; Brech and Potrafke 2014; Allen and Flynn 2018; Greene and Licht 2018). Finally, Wenzelburger and Böller (2020) examine whether there is a trade-off between development aid and military spending. Refining the “guns vs butter” paradigm (e.g., Bove, Efthyvoulou, and Navas 2017), Wenzelburger and Böller find support for their “bomb-or-build” balance equation. Analyzing twenty-one OECD countries from 1988 to 2014, they show that the more the ideological position of the government is favorable toward the military, the more the government also spends on defense as opposed to foreign aid (and vice versa). All in all, 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.
The five articles this Special Issue each identify patterns of party positions and behavior in foreign and security policy. The articles were selected because they analyze different aspects of “partyness” in foreign policy until now neglected by scholars: party positions regarding EU's foreign policy, voting behavior in the European Parliament (EP), party preferences and government participation in military missions, reactions of parties toward military casualties in conflicts, and transnational party cooperation by German parties. Each article thus advances our understanding of the role of parties in foreign and security policy while, perhaps more importantly, opening up new avenues for further inquiry.
The article by Cicchi, Garzia, and Trechsel (2020) investigates the positions of national parties across the EU on selected foreign and security policy issues. Utilizing data from two transnational Voting Advice Applications (EU Profiler and euandi) in the 2009 and 2014 EP elections, the article shows that the positions of party families regarding immigration and terrorism load onto the classical left–right cleavage, while in questions about the further development of the EU's foreign and security policy, party preferences resonate more with the gal/tan-dimension, or with their overall attitudes toward integration. The regression analysis confirms that the positions of parties are strongly related to their overall positions on European integration. As a result, the authors conclude that parties do not seem to hold specific attitudes about CFSP/CSDP—instead, if a political party supports the EU, it will also support the further development of EU's foreign and security policy, and vice versa. A preliminary assessment also finds a rather high congruence between parties and voters regarding EU's foreign policy. Further analyses are clearly needed to better understand both party positions in various foreign policy questions on the agenda in “Brussels” as well as to investigate the development of public opinion toward CFSP/CSDP.
Also, the second article focuses on the EU, with Raunio and Wagner (2020) analyzing all plenary roll-call votes in the European Parliament from 1979 to 2014. Their analysis of coalition patterns in the 6th and 7th parliament (2004–2014) provides further evidence for the importance of the classical left/right dimension: neighboring party families have a significantly higher voting likeness than party families that occupy more distant positions on the left/right dimension. Furthermore, Raunio and Wagner show that—unlike in the US Congress—foreign policy does not constitute a “special case”: members of the EP (MEP) do not rally around an EU flag nor do national interests surface any more than in internal market votes. The findings are also remarkably stable, with hardly any differences over time or between sub-categories of foreign policy votes based on policy areas or geographical regions. The EP is used to building large majorities behind its resolutions—vis-à-vis the Commission, the Council, and the outside world—and also external relations find broad agreement between the main party groups, with opposition coming often from the Eurosceptical right and the radical left groups. The results about the “normality” of external relations will hopefully lead scholars to pay more attention to party politics, as until now research on the foreign policy activities of the EP have tended to treat the institution as a unitary actor, thus neglecting the role of competing ideologies behind parliamentary positions.
Contributing to the body of work exploring the relationship between party ideology and the use of force, the article by Haesebrouck and Mello (2020) examines both party preferences and government behavior. Comparing twenty-eight countries and using CHES and Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data, the article first shows that centrist and center–right parties display highest level of support for military missions, with support weaker toward both ends of the left–right dimension. Drawing on a new dataset covering twenty-four countries and eight operations launched between 1999 and 2014, Haesebrouck and Mello then find, interestingly, that leftist governments were actually more inclined to participate in military missions with inclusive goals, such as peacekeeping operations and humanitarian interventions, while right-wing governments were more inclined to participate in strategic operations. Hence, the article demonstrates the need to differentiate between various types of military operations when examining party attitudes toward military deployments. Haesebrouck and Mello also test the impact of the gal/tan-dimension, showing that support for operations is strongest around the center of that dimension, with support weaker closer to either the libertarian/post-materialist or the traditional/authoritarian extremes. Significantly, they find variation between Western and Eastern Europe: in the former libertarian/post-materialist executives were more inclined to participate in peacekeeping operations while in the latter traditional/authoritarian governments were more likely to provide military contributions to peacekeeping operations. Variation between different groups of countries, in Europe and beyond, and the need to take into account other ideological dimensions than the usual left–right axis are topics clearly requiring further analysis.
The fourth article in this collection deals also with military operations, with Kuijpers and Schumacher (2020) exploring how political parties react to military casualties in the post–Cold War period. Drawing on a large dataset comprising seventy-five parties in eleven advanced democracies in Europe and North America, and utilizing CMP data to detect party positions on the military, the authors show that the more military casualties during the previous electoral term, the more parties in government become negative in their next manifesto while parties in the opposition become more positive. Hence, governing parties do not increase their commitment to the military, the more military casualties, while the parties in the opposition blame the government while not criticizing the military itself. These results apply particularly to right-wing parties. As Kuijpers and Schumacher recognize, the downside of relying on manifesto data is that it does not capture parties’ more immediate reactions to casualties or other developments in the on-going military missions. Another challenge for subsequent research is to measure how the parliamentary strength and popularity of the government affect the equation irrespective of the ideological color of the cabinet, as literature suggests that insecure governments are more prone to escalatory policies.
The final article of the Special Issue goes beyond mapping patterns of party-political contestation to examine whether and how such patterns are reached and maintained by transnational coordination among sister parties. Drawing on Resource Dependence Theory, Groen (2020) traces the transnational activities of German parties in the case of EUNAVFOR Med, the controversial EU military operation to combat human trafficking in the Mediterranean Sea. Groen finds evidence for transnational information exchange and coordination among the radical left and green parties in the opposition, but less so by the governing social democrats. The degree of transnational party activities can thus be partly understood by the different resource needs of government and opposition parties. As Groen points out, the institutional strength of the Bundestag implies that German parties probably have less need for transnational links. Future studies should thus preferably adopt comparative research designs and include different types of foreign policy questions to uncover potential variation between issues, party families, and countries.
Referring back to the research questions formulated at the start of this introductory article, the papers in this Special Issue thus show that political parties differ systematically in various foreign policy questions and that parties genuinely impact on actual foreign policy decision-making. Our understanding of how parties differ is advanced in two ways: first, the left/right dimension is no longer unchallenged as the structuring principle of the political space in foreign affairs. Several studies not only report evidence in support of the left/right dimension as a dominant structure, but also find evidence for a “new politics” cleavage in foreign affairs. Second, the left/right dimension—as well as the “new politics” dimension—is best understood as a bell-curve, rather than a linear function. For example, support for military interventions is strongest in the center of the political spectrum, not at the far right end (let alone the far left end).
While offering new evidence of how parties matter in foreign policy, this Special Issue has obviously only managed to provide individual examples of how to study the role of parties and ideologies in foreign policy decision-making. This final section of the introductory article therefore identifies three topics that we regard as particularly important avenues for future research: changing cleavage structures, voting and other forms of parliamentary behavior, and transnational party networks.
In terms of changing cleavage structures, comparative politics scholars have identified significant changes in Europe and beyond: the sociocultural or gal/tan-dimension has become more important, populists and nationalists have increased their vote shares at the expense of traditional governing parties, and in general elections are more unpredictable then in previous decades. It is thus pertinent that students of parties and foreign policy reach beyond the left–right cleavage and include the sociocultural dimension in their models—in line with the articles by Haesebrouck and Mello (2020) and Cicchi, Garzia, and Trechsel (2020) in this Special Issue. Particularly noteworthy is also the potential impact of populist or nationalist challenger parties that contest the expansion of international authority ( Ecker-Ehrhardt 2014) on the foreign policy positions of mainstream parties, which may destabilize established patterns of international trade, regional integration, and security cooperation—but also result in stronger defense of internationalism by centrist/gal parties as seen recently in a number of European countries. Moreover, in Europe, the cleavage structure is often not similar in the younger, post-communist CEE democracies, and how this impacts on party positions and government behavior in foreign and security policy deserves further scrutiny.
Knowledge of non-Western countries is particularly limited: lessons drawn from the United States or Europe may not apply in other parts of the world without qualifications. The cleavages structuring party competition in Europe, the left–right, and sociocultural dimensions, may not be the most important axis of contestation in other continents. According to Deegan-Krause (2007, 547), for example, “few Asian countries followed Western European cleavage patterns.” Hence, there is a clear need for both comparative and in-depth case studies of non-Western cases, from Latin America to Asia and Africa. In their studies of populist regimes in the Global South, India included, Destradi and Plagemann (2019) and Plagemann and Destradi (2019) show that instead of altering the substance of their countries’ foreign policies, the effect of populism concerns mainly procedural aspects, with foreign policy leadership becoming more centralized and personalized in the leaders.
Much of existing scholarship has understandably focused on recent events, but we want to encourage research designs that examine patterns over time. Research on American foreign policy has produced interesting evidence of both continuity and change, for example, regarding congressional voting or use of force. An excellent example is Lewis (2017): analyzing the US presidency from 1900 to 2009, Lewis in fact shows that when controlling the presidency for a longer period both Democrats and Republicans alter their positions toward stronger foreign intervention, and when in the opposition, both parties become less supportive of foreign intervention. Similar longitudinal research designs should be encouraged also in Europe and non-Western countries, as Joly and Dandoy (2018) do in their case study of how the foreign policy priorities of different parties influenced the programs of Belgian governments formed between 1978 and 2008. Historians have indeed shown how political parties (or their predecessors) differed in Europe over foreign policy already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ( Onnekink and Rommelse 2011), and they most probably did so also in later periods. Furthermore, knowledge across issue areas is highly uneven. Because the use of force has been the traditional core concern of international relations scholars, we find a long list of issues that have remained understudied, including the role of parties in sanctions, arms exports, or development aid.
A second strand of research we identify is voting and other forms of parliamentarybehavior. The article by Raunio and Wagner (2020) in this Special Issue deliberately focused on the “big picture” in the European Parliament, as case studies of highly contested policy processes can exaggerate the level of parliamentary disagreement found within individual policy areas. This underlines the need to engage in systematic analysis of larger voting datasets, with preferably votes on foreign and security policy compared with “domestic politics” votes. Research on voting in the US Congress provides many theoretical and methodological tools to be utilized in other contexts. An interesting start in Europe is the Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database (PDVD), which collects and shares data on parliamentary votes on the deployment of armed forces. 2 Foreign policy scholars should also make active use of publicly available data on various parliamentary instruments, not least plenary speeches and oral or written questions. Data on committee work is often more difficult to gather, but it can be even more important as often the most sensitive debates take place in the committees.
Finally, we would encourage further research on transnational party networks. Such networking is most pronounced in the multi-level context of Europe, where political parties have institutionalized cooperation in Europarties and their EP party groups. Interparliamentary cooperation has certainly intensified in the twenty-first century, including in the field of foreign and security policy, providing thus platforms for exchanges among MPs, both in Europe and in other continents (e.g., Crum and Fossum 2013; Lupo and Fasone 2016; Stavridis and Jančić 2017; Raube, Müftüler-Baç, and Wouters 2019). The article by Groen (2020) in this Special Issue illustrated some of the advantages and limitations of both horizontal (between national parties from the same party family) and vertical (between the national and European levels) interparty links, and research on Europarties is also quite divided about the extent to which Europarties influence the positions and behavior of national parties (e.g., Chryssogelos 2017; Johansson 2017). Whether these interparliamentary and partisan exchanges contribute to the foreign policy positions of national parties and how national parties use EU level or other transnational networks for advancing their foreign policy agendas deserve serious scrutiny. Here one must remember that both national parties and Europarties often work together with various non-governmental organizations (NGO), which provide another avenue for party-political influence (e.g., Crespy and Parks 2017).
Scholars should also examine party-political alliances in international organizations and in transnational parliamentary assemblies. A good example is the analysis by Potrafke (2009) on the voting behavior of twenty-one OECD countries in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1984–2005. He found that government ideology had a strong influence on countries aligning with the United States: leftist governments were less sympathetic to the United States, particularly when the American president was a Republican. Examining the voting behavior of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the UN from 1946 to 2008, Hanania (2019) in turn showed how these countries voted more likely with the rest of the world when liberal (left-leaning) as opposed to conservative (right-leaning) parties were in power. The historical dimension is also under-researched: how transnational party networks shaped the positions of national parties. Perhaps the most famous case of such transnational party cooperation is among the socialist or social democratic parties, but particularly in the post-Second World War period also, the other party families intensified their cooperation that potentially influenced the foreign policy views of their member parties.
Tapio Raunio is a Professor of Political Science at Tampere University. His research interests cover legislatures and political parties, the European Union, and semipresidentialism, and have appeared in journals such as the European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Party Politics, and West European Politics.
Wolfgang Wagner is a Professor of International Security at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on the democratic politics of foreign, security, and defense policy, and has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, Journal of Common Market Studies, West European Politics, and the European Political Science Review.
The literature review focuses on comparative empirical studies and includes insights from case studies only insofar as they have broader relevance for our topic. The review excludes also research on public opinion on foreign policy and publications examining party attitudes toward the EU unless they also cover party positions or behavior in foreign and security policy. The contributions to this Special Issue contain more detailed literature reviews of the specific topics covered in the articles.