Abstract
When do presidents delegate policy-making authority to their foreign ministries? And is foreign policy unique in this respect? We posit that six international, national, and personal factors determine the opportunity and motivation of presidents to delegate, and then analyse the cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in 1946–2015. By applying fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we find that four combinations of factors are sufficient paths to delegation: (1) international stability and elite consensus on foreign policy; (2) international stability, right-wing president, and low diplomatic professionalisation; (3) international stability, right-wing president, and low presidential expertise on foreign policy; or (4) absence of authoritarianism combined with elite consensus on foreign policy and right-wing president. Our study of foreign ministries reinforces some of the main findings of the scholarly literature on other ministries, thus challenging the view of foreign policy-making as different from domestic policy areas.
Highlights
As expected in configurational analysis, we found equifinality: many roads led to presidential delegation to foreign ministries in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in 1946–2015
Various configurations of international stability, low diplomatic professionalisation, elite consensus, right-w ing presidents, and low presidential expertise on foreign affairs were found sufficient for delegation
There are four alternative paths to delegation: (1) international stability and elite consensus; (2) international stability, right-w ing president, and low diplomatic professionalisation; (3) international stability, right-w ing president, and low presidential expertise; and (4) absence of authoritarianism combined with elite consensus and right-w ing president
Summary
Why do chief executives delegate authority to professional bureaucrats instead of politicians, private-s ector technocrats, interest-g roup representatives, or cronies? This is a key question to understand policy-m aking in presidential regimes, given that presidents, as opposed to prime ministers, hold individual rather than collective responsibility for government. It is no wonder that there has been a growing comparative literature on the issue, with a strong focus on economic and social ministries in Latin America (Camerlo and Pérez-Liñán, 2015; Centeno and Silva, 1998; Dargent, 2014; Kaplan, 2017). The first domestic factor is political and concerns the presence of an elite consensus on foreign policy – or the absence or politicisation thereof When such a consensus is present, presidents have incentives to delegate policy-m aking authority to professional diplomats; when the consensus breaks or never develops, more presidential foreign activism is to be expected. The rationale underlying this factor is identical to the logic of central bank autonomy: when political and economic elites converge on the goal of keeping inflation low and stable, they grant autonomy to a central bank staffed with high- quality economists (Cukierman, 2008). Note: Stability [S] is coded as 0 (fully out), 1 (fully in); Authoritarianism [A] is coded 0 (fully in), 1 (fully out); Consensus [C] is coded as 1 (fully in), 0.6 (mostly in), 0 (fully out); Right-wing [R] is coded 0 (Leftist), 0.25 (Centre-left), 0.5 (Centre), 0.75 (Centre-right), 1 (Rightist); Expertise [E] is coded as 0 (fully out), 0.25 (mostly out), 0.5 (neither in nor out), 0.75 (mostly in), 1 (fully in); Professionalisation [P] is coded as 0 (fully out), 0.6 (mostly in), 1 (fully in); Delegation is coded as 0 (fully out), 0.17 (mostly but not fully out), 0.33 (more or less out), 0.50 (neither in nor out), 0.66 (more or less in), 0.83 (mostly but not fully in), 1 (fully in). *In Mexico, professionalisation started in 1967; since it took place in the middle of the term of Díaz Ordaz rather than in the beginning, we coded his presidency as non-professionalised (0) but assigned the value 0.7 to professionalisation under his successor, Echeverría
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