Description:

Faculty & Fellows Colloquium

United We Act, Divided We Halt: The Effect of Policy Incongruence on Coalition Foreign Policy Behavior

What are the domestic politics determinants of international commitment in parliamentary democracies? While one group of scholars have argued that coalitions behaved more aggressively at the international level when compared to single-party governments, some argued otherwise, claiming that single-party governments engaged in more aggressive behavior. The literature has thus remained inconclusive over the effect of coalitions on foreign policy behavior. The paper brings in quantitative data from European parliamentary systems between 1994 and 2004 to show that foreign policy behavior is affected by how much policy incongruence exists inside a government, and more specifically inside different types of coalition governments.

Sibel Oktay is a visiting predoctoral fellow from Syracuse University, where she is completing her dissertation “Unpacking Coalitions: Explaining Extreme Foreign Policy Behavior in European Governments, 1994-2004.” Her research interests include coalition theory, comparative foreign policy and events data analysis, as well as political psychology with a focus on political leadership. Sibel also collaborates with Seth Jolly on explaining mass and elite Euroskepticism in Turkey since 2002. She holds an MA degree in Political Science from Sabanci University (Turkey).