Opposition Politics and International Crises: A Formal Model

Abstract

Foreign policy choices are dependent both on expected international outcomes and on the factors shaping the power and behavior of the domestic opposition, including institutional rules. Kenneth Schultz’s model of domestic political competition and international crisis bargaining (2001) posits that an opposition's policy positions send credible signals of the government's intentions to adversarial target states. This paper builds on Schultz’s theory, but relaxes his assumption that oppositions have no influence over foreign policy. Instead, we assume that oppositions control some political resources and attempt to influence the government's policy decisions. We find that opposition behavior is predicted to be different than previous models, but is still informative to the target state.