Abstract
Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making is a welcome addition to the scarce literature on how coalition politics influences foreign policy. While there have been few direct examinations of the influence of coalition politics in foreign policy decision-making, the literature has developed a number of theoretical expectations derived from analyses of the role of institutions, accountability and group processes. One is that coalitions will develop especially peaceful foreign policy courtesy of the inherent constraints of multiparty decision-making (for example, the need to find a common position). Conversely, others have suggested that coalitions produce more aggressive foreign policy to compensate for a perceived weakness in domestic politics or that smaller, ideologically extreme coalition partners can hijack foreign policy if their presence in the cabinet is crucial to its survival. Further expectations relate to the quality of decision-making with some claiming that coalitions produce delayed and fragmented policy while others propose that multiparty governments deliver more considered policy outputs as coalition partners act as natural devil’s advocates.
The book investigates the evidence for these theoretical expectations using a mixture of quantitative comparative analysis and case studies of prominent foreign policy decisions in three countries: The Netherlands, Japan and Turkey. It is these case studies that provide the greater part of the empirical evidence in this volume. Significantly, the decisions that are examined are not limited to international conflict situations. Decision-making in some conflict situations is examined – for example, The Netherlands’ participation in the Iraq War (2003) – but other general foreign policy situations are also considered, such as the liberalization of rice imports to Japan (1993) and the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey (1999–2002). In selecting these more prosaic matters of foreign policy for assessment, Kaarbo ensures that the case studies are not simply those decisions taken during extraordinary circumstances that may naturally produce more extreme reactions from within governments or result in the suppression of intra-government dissent that is common during conflict situations. In total, 12 foreign policy decisions are examined with each case study following an identical structure: a discussion of the context of foreign policy in each country; an outline of the actors involved in foreign policy decision-making; an overview of the decision in question; the parties involved and their position in the policy space; an assessment of the disagreements and decisions made; and finally an analysis of the role of coalition politics in the process.
The multi-method empirical strategy produces some important results for scholars of foreign policy decision-making. The quantitative analysis indicates that coalition governments take more extreme decisions than single-party governments. Furthermore, coalitions that contained a greater number of parties were likely to take more aggressive policy decisions. However, coalitions that contained rightist junior partners were found to produce more cooperative foreign policy. The case studies largely reinforce these conclusions and offer more detailed explanations of how coalition politics affected policy outcomes. Across the cases, the most common explanatory factors behind policy decisions were: party disunity, issue divisibility, locus of authority, political calculations and the consistency of the junior partner’s position. For example, the Japanese Socialists’ failure consistently to argue their opposition to Japan’s participation in the 1995 Golan Heights peacekeeping operation meant that the party was unable to constrain its senior coalition partner in the government. Of some importance is the further explanation that the case studies offer for the unexpected finding that governments with rightist junior partners tend to produce more cooperative foreign policy. In Japan, the conservative junior partner at the time of the rice liberalization case advocated greater cooperation by way of liberalization, though this may simply reflect that the junior partner’s preferences coincided with those of the leading party in the coalition. Another explanation put forward in the book is that rightist junior parties may have advocated conflicting foreign polices but simply failed to have any influence, which was the case in each of the Turkish foreign policy decisions examined.
While the quantitative analysis of coalition politics and foreign policy decision-making represents just a single chapter, it is also the weakest element of the book. A number of problems are evident. First, the presentation of the data and analysis is incomplete. There is a lack of descriptive statistics for the variables included in the regression models, and the reporting of the results of the analysis is unusual. The results tables fail to report the coefficients for any of the control variables included in the models and no overall model fit statistics are reported. Second, the operationalization of the party left–right positions variable could be improved. It is difficult to understand why a single source that did not rely on the author’s own coding is not used; for example, the Manifestos Project Database. The interval data provided by the Manifestos Project Database would also have allowed the author to investigate whether the extent of the difference between coalition partners – as opposed to merely being located left or right of the senior partner – had any effect on policy outcomes. Third, it would have been interesting to control for the number of veto players in the statistical models, something that is raised in the case study analyses. Finally, the book should have addressed whether it is relevant that the quantitative data cover a period from 1966 to 1989 while 10 of the 12 case study decisions took place after that period. Can the results of the quantitative analysis be extrapolated to the case studies given that the events that comprise cases in the former took place during the Cold War while most of the case studies took place in a very different international environment?
Despite these problems, this book has much to recommend it. It is well written with minimal use of jargon. The case studies provide valuable insight into coalition decision-making and the choice of countries and events is unexpected and interesting. In a field dominated by analyses of foreign policy decision-making from the perspective of the major global powers, Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making stands out and will be an essential text for scholars and students of international relations. It will also be of interest to those researching party politics and coalition politics.