Domestic Political Competition Research Articles

Why and when democracies ban political parties: a classification of democratic state orientations to party bans

AbstractDefending democracy requires undemocratic steps; one of the most radical is the prohibition of political parties. The functioning of political parties is fundamental to healthy and pluralistic democracies. Thus, their exclusion from the political process raises a severe dilemma for a democratic society, which has to address sufficiently why and when a political competitor can legitimately be kicked out of the political arena. The latter is crucially important because of the rise of far-right parties and attempts by authoritarians to infiltrate the domestic political competition of democratic countries. The approaches of various national courts in cases concerning the prohibition of political parties are far from uniform. Experiences in Spain, Ukraine, the UK and, eventually, Germany demonstrate significant contrasts regarding the political theory and legal rationale for prohibition. While democracy is a universal value for a pan-European context, the courts set different limits of democratic tolerance for guarding it. The paper offers a new paradigm that explains why and when democracies ban political parties. The classification of democratic state orientation to party bans consists of liberal, institutional and militant models, which illustrate different concepts around finding the balance between personal rights on the one hand and the interests of a democratic society on the other.

Politicization, Ratification of International Agreements, and Domestic Political Competition in Non-Democracies: The Case of Iran and the Paris Climate Accords

While some degree of competition is present in many authoritarian regimes, the implications of such controlled competition on international issues have not received much consideration, including towards international environmental accords. We attempt to rectify this through a framework where we focus on internal political competition in a hybrid, nondemocratic system where national elections are held regularly. Specifically, we argue that the presence of multiple actors competing in elections in nondemocratic settings results in them assuming positions on various issues, justifying their positions, and attempting to mobilize their supporters with considerable implications for international environmental policies. We display our argument in the context of Iranian debates on the ratification of the Paris Climate Accords. Our findings demonstrate that the competing Iranian sides rely on different justifications for their environmental positions, resulting in extensive (negative) competitions of rhetoric where the international dimension emerges as an important feature in the internal competition. Overall, we show that political competition within non-democracies is likely to add to the complexity of international (environmental) negotiations and cooperation.

Foreign Policy as the Continuation of Domestic Politics by Other Means: Pathways and Patterns of Populist Politicization

Abstract This article argues that populism in power translates into a greater tendency to politicize foreign policy, in the sense of defining and articulating foreign policy preferences in opposition to political predecessors, using foreign policy as an instrument and ground to battle political opponents, and over-prioritizing domestic incentives and considerations over external ones. Paradoxically, compared to other classical determinants of foreign policy, how populism relates to domestic political competition has received scant attention. Yet, populist actors’ strategies in dealing with political opposition are at the same time distinctive and consequential. This article advances a typological theoretical framework shedding light on the pathways, patterns, and implications of populist politicization, which it illustrates empirically with reference to the case of Poland.

Evolution of US public diplomacy: Domestic political determinants, priorities and new challenges

Public diplomacy remains one of the most dynamic and important areas of the modern US foreign policy. As such, the US public diplomacy, — its institutional structure, principles of functioning, key priorities, etc. — attracts increasing attention within both Russian and foreign academic literature. However, for a more complete understanding of the contemporary US public diplomacy specifics and prospects, it seems appropriate to try to fit it into a broader context of the evolution of the US political system in general. The first section of the paper identifies the major domestic political factors that determined the development of the US foreign policy mechanism, as well as the key stages of its evolution. The author argues that one of the key trends in the almost 250-year history of the American political system development was its gradual democratization, aimed to promote inclusion of a larger section of population in political processes. The second section examines the role of public diplomacy within the framework of the contemporary US foreign policy. The author notes that the latest developments in information and communication technologies have turned publicity and PR-campaigns into the most important factors of domestic political competition in the United States in the 21st century. The Internet and social networks have opened up virtually unlimited opportunities for political campaigning both inside and outside the state, giving a new impetus to the development of the US public diplomacy. At the same time, digital technologies have also generated new challenges, raising the problem of ensuring information security in the face of expansion of social networks. In this regard, the third section touches upon the issues of evaluating the effectiveness of the US public diplomacy. The author concludes that in terms of possible directions for further research the interactions between the United States and the EU countries which share common values are of particular importance. This may allow for a better understanding of the possibilities and limits of the US public diplomacy tools based on the institutions of a developed civil society.

International Negotiations in the Shadow of Elections

Within a formal model of international agreements in the shadow of renegotiations and domestic competition, we highlight three important ways elections shape international agreements. Elections determine who will be in control of policy in the future, which affects how leaders bargain today. Elections also determine the deals policymakers will agree to. Finally, proposers have the opportunity to shape the contours of domestic political competition with what is offered in pre-electoral bargaining. We identify that several canonical results in the literature – like the Schelling conjecture or the idea that hawkish leaders have an innate bargaining advantage over dovish leaders – only hold under certain restrictions on how voters evaluate their leaders. In contrast, we show paradoxically that when voters are prospective, electoral incentives shade the ability for domestic leaders to negotiate better deals for their publics. Counterintuitively, this leads to hawks agreeing to more conciliatory agreements than doves.

Explaining patterns in the onset of interstate war

Over the past 30 years empirical international relations has discovered a number of conflict patterns which are variously considered to be competing, contradictory, or emanating from unique processes. I present a simplified and corrected selectorate model of war which unifies four such lines of research: the autocratic, democratic, and capitalist peaces with diversionary war. It is shown that domestic political competition, as understood within the selectorate approach, contains microfoundations for context conditional risk preference as a rationalist explanation for war. This novel mechanism, in turn, coherently explains the main findings from these various areas of enquiry. And so the discoveries of these four lines of enquiry can be understood not as apparently accidental or competing patterns but as aspects of the same mechanism operating under different empirical contexts.

When Ideologies Became Dangerous: An Analysis of the Transformation of the Relationship Between Security and Oppositional Ideologies in US Presidential Discourse

ABSTRACT This article investigates, by means of computer-assisted qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis, how and when ideology was securitized in US presidential speech. It reveals how securitizing speech justifies methods and targets in the resistance of “dangerous ideologies” that are problematic for democracies. The analysis reveals that the entanglement of oppositional ideologies with security was articulated in the context of the War on Terror. While the original need to see ideologies as an existential threat was necessary to justify the exclusion of the ideologies of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2004 and 2005 respectively, the securitization of ideologies then spread to issue areas beyond terror and to geographic contexts outside of these two countries, all the way to US domestic political competition. The need to avoid embarrassment in Iraq and Afghanistan may have thus affected US democracy.

The EU’s Central Asia policy: no chance for change?

ABSTRACT One of the distinguishing characteristics of the European Union’s (EU) policy in Central Asia has been its continuity. Although the EU has recently revised its strategy for the region, Brussels’ priorities saw little change both thematically and in terms of approach. This article argues that two mutually reinforcing factors help explain the continuity of the EU’s Central Asia policy. First, the sui generis nature of the EU means the decision-making system is both complex and decentralized. The multitude of veto actors serves to make the status quo more realistic. Furthermore, the EU leadership is immune from the incentives and pressures of domestic political competition, an essential factor in the foreign policymaking of national leaders. The compounding factor is Central Asia’s peripherality for Brussels. The region is distant geographically and marginal economically. As a result, continuing existing approaches and commitments remains the least costly and most feasible policy option.

Turkey’s Journey from Democratization to De-democratization: External Democracy Promotion versus Domestic Political Competition

ABSTRACT Democratic reform processes of candidate countries of the EU have been widely explained from a rationalist external incentives perspective. So, until recently, Turkey had been seen as a textbook example of how effective a conditionality strategy could be. However, Turkish responses to EU conditionality have displayed significant fluctuations over time, even under the same government. This article will argue that the current literature on the Europeanization of candidate countries suffers from an overriding focus on the external impact of the EU upon Turkey and its democratization process. In response, this article instead focuses on the role of political parties as active agents of change by evaluating the validity of these claims in light of a qualitative analysis of Turkish democratization since 2005. Building on the emerging literature that focuses on domestic factors in Turkey’s de-Europeanization, this article contributes to this literature by presenting these domestic factors in the theoretical framework of constructivism. It argues that EU demands do not represent inherent costs or benefits. Instead, their perception as costs or benefits matter in the context of Turkish politics. This means that outcomes are contingent on the nature of contestation and power balance among competing parties in Turkey.

Political turnover, regime type, and investment behavior

ABSTRACT Firms and individuals condition their investment choices on domestic political factors in host countries. Existing research describes how government preferences and policy choices influence investment behavior. Some have argued that investors take a cautious approach in response to possible government turnover. We argue that the results of domestic political competition also matter. Domestic turnover creates uncertainty about the future direction of policy in a variety of areas relevant to investment decisions – e.g., changes in privileged relationships between the state and certain domestic producers or industries, trade barriers, and tax policies. Investors and firms should therefore hesitate to invest following domestic turnover in potential host countries. However, various institutional features of democracies should mitigate the extent to which domestic turnover causes uncertainty and deters investment. Our statistical analysis suggests that while non-democracies see less foreign direct investment in the wake of a change in the source of leader support, investment to democracies does not change significantly following domestic turnover. The note enhances our understanding of the determinants of investment and provides further evidence that democratic institutions matter for conditioning the effects of domestic turnover in a new empirical domain.

Oil Fuels Guyana’s Internecine Conflict

This essay situates Guyana’s recent election standoff in a longer, relatively unbroken trajectory of racially divisive politics. It explores how historically oppressed peoples have directed their hostility at each other while governments have worked with extractive industries to perpetuate a neo-imperial economic structure. The recent discovery of major offshore oil deposits has started a new cycle of this economic dependency on commodity exports and multinational corporations while raising the stakes of racialized domestic political competition.

Domestic contestation over foreign policy, role-based and otherwise: Three cautionary cases

Foreign policy role theorists have recently placed domestic role contestation central to their accounts of foreign policy continuity and change. Yet, contestation over national role conceptions is only one aspect of domestic competition over political power that can impact the roles states play in world politics. Frequently, foreign policies are an outgrowth of political struggle over matters only indirectly related to a state’s international role. In this article, I draw role theorists’ attention to cases where non-role-based political competition affects role performance, urging them to trace empirically the connections between role contestation, non-role-based political competition with role implications, and role performance. To make this case, I develop three plausibility probes: America’s embrace of the hegemon role after 1945, Britain’s 2016 Brexit vote, and the United States’ recent turn towards a more transactional foreign policy. Highlighting non-role political competition with role implications offers a productive challenge that promises to enrich role theory in foreign policy analysis (FPA) by bringing it a step closer to domestic political competition.

Convergence, capitalist diversity, or political volatility? Immigration policy in Western Europe

ABSTRACT Are immigration policies in European countries converging? Or do some countries remain more open to immigrants than others? We address these questions through an analysis of labour migration policies in five European countries from 1990 to 2016. Using an original immigration policy index (ImPol) to measure policy restrictiveness we examine whether policies have converged, to what extent immigration regimes reflect distinct ‘varieties of capitalism’, and whether national policy trajectories are shaped by domestic politics. We find little evidence of convergence; mixed evidence that immigration policy regimes reflect capitalist diversity; and strong evidence that policies respond to changes in domestic political conditions. Whilst ‘varieties of capitalism’ may set the broad parameters for immigration regimes, the direction and timing of policy changes are determined by domestic political competition.

Domestic Political Consequences of International Rivalry

Given the conventional claim that external threats increase internal cohesion and government capacity, cross-country studies have examined how interstate conflict events influence domestic politics. This article reevaluates the in-group and out-group mechanisms by examining how international strategic rivalry, which indicates the presence of persistent external threats even in the absence of military conflict, affects domestic political competition. An alternative explanation suggests that the effect of external threats on political incentives of domestic actors differs between regime supporters and oppositions. We posit that the presence of international threats from rival states inflames domestic unrest and oppositions’ antiregime challenges, while making governments rely more on repressive tactics given resource constraints and a high level of domestic political intolerance. In addition, we propose that the domestic consequences of international rivalry are heterogeneous depending on the characteristics of political systems and the level of threat perception. Empirical tests reveal robust evidence for the hypotheses.

A global game of diplomacy

Diplomacy always occurs in the shadow of domestic political competition. We develop a model of top-level diplomatic exchange between an incumbent and a foreign leader, embedded within a global game of regime change, and examine four mechanisms that induce a relationship between diplomatic visits and regime survival. First, the foreign leader chooses to visit incumbents who are ex ante more secure in office (a selection effect). Second, because the foreign leader’s decision is based partly on private information, the citizens update on the revelation of that information (a learning effect) and are discouraged from mounting a challenge. Third, the foreign leader can bolster the incumbent’s strength in office with a transfer of material support (a strengthening effect). The latter two effects are then amplified by the complementarities in the citizens’ strategies (a multiplier effect). Contrary to standard global games results, we show that increased precision in the public information transmitted strategically by the foreign power induces a unique equilibrium, as citizens coordinate on the foreign leader’s action. Our findings explain why leaders are so eager to receive state visits from major world powers.

Ukraine’s commitments under Association Agreement: challenges and opportunities for the steel industry

The steel sector stands for a quarter of Ukraine’s industrial gross value added and is a backbone of the country’s economy. However, owing to lastingly insufficient investments to modernisation, the industry is largely obsolete: 70–80% of the production facilities are in operation beyond their final designed term of exploitation. Technology backwardness, coupled with excessive iron ore mining, results in an enormous environmental footprint. Owing to the domestic political and socioeconomic factors and severe competition on the global scale, the steel output hit its historic low in 2017. Recently, the EU became major Ukraine’s trade partner with steel export share of 32% in 2017. Modalities of this partnership will be gradually shaped in context of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (entered into force since 01.09.2017), which stipulates transposition into Ukrainian law of some European directives, potentially sensitive for the iron and steel sector. In this paper, the current state of Ukraine’s steel industry was analysed, focusing competitiveness and environmental impact. The analysis performed reveals that short-term implications of the Association Agreement may expose the Ukrainian steelmakers to additional costs; however, the need to comply with the EU regulations is seen as an important factor, motivating the steel industry to modernise and, in the long-term, improve its economic performance and reinforce competitiveness.

Nationalism, Collaboration, and Resistance: France under Nazi Occupation

Does nationalism produce resistance to foreign military occupation? The existing literature suggests that it does. Nationalism, however, also can lead to acquiescence and even to active collaboration with foreign conquerors. Nationalism can produce a variety of responses to occupation because political leaders connect nationalist motivations to other political goals. A detailed case study of the German occupation of France during World War II demonstrates these claims. In this highly nationalistic setting, Vichy France entered into collaboration with Germany despite opportunities to continue fighting in 1940 or defect from the German orbit later. Collaboration with Germany was widely supported by French elites and passively accommodated by the mass of nationalistic French citizens. Because both resisters and collaborators were French nationalists, nationalism cannot explain why collaboration was the dominant French response or why a relatively small number of French citizens resisted. Variation in who resisted and when resistance occurred can be explained by the international context and domestic political competition. Expecting a German victory in the war, French right-wing nationalists chose collaboration with the Nazis as a means to suppress and persecute their political opponents, the French Left. In doing so, they fostered resistance. This case suggests the need for a broader reexamination of the role of nationalism in explaining reactions to foreign intervention.

Hired Guns: Using Pro-Government Militias for Political Competition

ABSTRACTPro-government militias (PGMs) are armed, political organizations that assist regime and state elites through illicit violence. This article considers how and where to situate militias within larger frameworks of political violence and its emerging contexts. Pro-government militias have increased in recent years, along with their participation in conflict events, including those resulting in fatalities. This is in step with increases in domestic political competition and regime fragmentation across developing states. Using a new PGM dataset that collects discrete events perpetrated by these groups across Africa from 1997–2016, two conclusions are reached: PGM groups are more active outside of civil war periods than within, and their actions and numbers have increased as more countries transition to democracy. Further, activity by PGMs is not well explained by government attempts to delegate violence for reputational reasons or low capacity. Political fragmentation at the national level and diffuse opposition threats better account for the spatial and temporal patterns of PGM activity.

Whose legitimacy? The EU and Russia in contest for the eastern neighbourhood

ABSTRACTThe impact of external actors on political change in the European neighbourhood has mostly been examined through the prism of elite empowerment through externally offered incentives. The legitimacy of external policies has received less scrutiny, both with regard to liberal powers promoting democracy and illiberal powers preventing democracy. This article investigates the conflicting notions of legitimate political governance that underpin the contest between the European Union (EU) and Russia in the Eastern neighbourhood. It proposes four mechanisms of external soft influence that take into account the EU’s and Russia’s actorness and the structural power of their norms of political governance, and consider their effects on domestic actors and societal understandings of appropriate forms of political authority. It finally traces the EU’s and Russia’s soft influence on political governance in Ukraine. It maintains that through shaping the domestic understandings of legitimate political authority and reinforcing the domestic political competition, the EU and Russia have both left a durable imprint on Ukraine’s uneven political path.

Domestic political competition and pro‐cyclical import protection

AbstractGovernments, especially in developing countries, routinely practice binding overhang (i.e. setting applied tariffs below binding WTO commitments) and frequently move applied tariffs for given products up and down over the business cycle. Moreover, applied tariffs are pro‐cyclical in developing countries. We explain this phenomenon using a dynamic theory of lobbying between domestic interest groups. Applied tariffs are pro‐cyclical when high‐tariff interests (e.g. import‐competing industries) capture the government: these groups concede lower tariffs to low‐tariff interest groups (e.g. exporting firms or firms using imported intermediate inputs) during recessions because recessions lower the opportunity cost of lobbying and thereby generate a stronger lobbying threat.