How do regional parties influence foreign policy? Insights from multilevel coalitional bargaining in India

Nicolas Blarel,Niels Van Willigen

doi:10.1177/1354066120975072

Abstract

When and how do regional parties influence foreign policy in federal democracies with multiparty coalition governments? The existing literature has focused on situations of foreign policy disagreements between subnational parties and the central government in multinational states. By contrast, we argue that under varying conditions, central governments either decide to accommodate the preferences of small regional parties when designing foreign policies, or co-opt these regional parties to push their own foreign policy agenda. Some scholars looked at the role of decentralization and federal power arrangements in providing more control to political sub-units over the external affairs of a state. Other studies showed that certain coalition-building configurations facilitated the inclusion of the concerns of small parties in the foreign policy debate. Bridging these two literatures, we argue that both structural and agential conditions behind regional and national coalition building processes—visible in federal settings—affect foreign policy-making in different ways, and not necessarily toward disagreement and obstruction. To illustrate these hypothesized mechanisms, we look at two case studies in the Indian context: the role of regional parties in the debate over the US–India nuclear deal of 2008 and the role of regional parties in shaping India’s Sri Lanka policy from 2009 to 2014.

Highlights

Foreign policy-making has increasingly been a contested political space due to the blurring of the boundaries between domestic and foreign policies
Building on insights from Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and studies of regional and coalition politics, we argue that the combination of the degree of interest of regional parties in specific foreign policy issues and the prevailing institutional-coalitional configuration in place determines the timing, nature, and extent to which regional parties shape foreign policy outcomes
We suggest concentrating on how the particular combination of federalism and coalition politics helps explain how regional parties, which usually run and control many seats in regional legislatures, but are minor players in national parliaments, can influence foreign policy decisions made by governing coalitions at the center in a federal polity like India

Summary

Introduction

Foreign policy-making has increasingly been a contested political space due to the blurring of the boundaries between domestic and foreign policies. Some foreign policy decisions, such as signing trade deals, disproportionately affect particular regions or provinces (Keating, 1999). Even in the context of decisions of military interventions, some regions and provinces are varyingly affected, for instance, in the context of disproportionate humane and financial contributions to the war effort (Trubowitz, 1998). In spite of the recognition of regionalized and localized preferences in foreign and security policy issues, notably in the liberalism research program (Kaarbo, 2015; Moravcsik, 1997), we still do not know much about how regional constituencies and their representatives influence the national government’s foreign policy decisions. We still do not know when, in which ways, and to what extent regional parties— which compete mainly in regional legislatures—become involved in the national foreign policy-making process

Objectives

Conclusion