Domestic Political Competition Research Articles

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.

Mobilizing Europe in national competition: The case of the French Front National

This study of the uses of Europe by the leaders of the Front National shows how the opening of a new European political space can have indirect effects, supporting political parties at the domestic level and strengthening specific actors within political organizations. The theme of Europe, together with European elections and the European Parliament, are transformed by Front National leaders into material as well as symbolic resources which they mobilize in the national political space at both inter and intra-party level. These uses of Europe reinforce the capacities and resources of the party as well as its legitimacy and visibility. It helps Front National actors to widen their electoral support and allows party presidents to strengthen their position. The article reveals the specificity of the Front National relationship to the European arena and underlines the strong continuity of the practices developed by the new leadership. Finally the study provides a detailed account of the process of Front National Europeanization and advances understanding of the impact of European integration on domestic political competition.

Opposition Politics and International Crises: A Formal Model

Democratic foreign policy choices are a function of expected international outcomes and the preferences, power, and information of domestic actors. Studies of domestic political competition and international crisis bargaining have argued that an opposition's policy positions send credible signals of the government's intentions to adversarial target states. This paper contends that while opposition behavior may send informative signals, it can also directly constrain the policy options of the government. We relax previous assumptions that the opposition cannot directly prevent war or influence the outcomes of war (Schultz 2001). Instead, we assume that the opposition controls some political resources and attempts to influence the government's policy decisions in a way that advances its own partisan interests. To empirically demonstrate the theoretical differences in our model in comparison with previous domestic opposition models, we examine the case of the Quasi-War of 1798 between the United States and France.

Talking Europe, Using Europe: The EU and Parliamentary Competition in Italy and Spain (1986–2006)

The analysis of how the European Union (EU) affects domestic political competition and political parties has mainly been centred on elections, whereas studies on parliaments have focused more on institutional adaptation. However, parliaments also provide forums for debating alternative domestic and EU policies. This study examines how Europe is used in parliamentary competition in Italy and Spain by analysing party discourses in investiture and budget debates. Covering two decades (1986–2006), the study investigates whether or not the EU has gained importance over time in the way parties use European policies, the evolution of party positions towards the EU and, more generally, the consequences of integration for party policies and discourse.

Linkages and the promotion of democracy: the EU's eastern neighbourhood

The EU's eastern neighbourhood with its considerable divergence in regime types is a more challenging testing ground for democracy promotion than Central and Eastern Europe. This article explores the diversity of the international linkages in the eastern neighbours (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) and the role these linkages play in domestic politics. International linkages are filtered and activated by domestic politics. If diverse linkages reinforce domestic political competition, they can contribute to the creation of democratic openings. Conversely, in the absence of domestic political competition, international linkages can insulate a regime from internal pressures for reform, in particular if the linkages are deep and undiversified. This article focuses on one causal mechanism, namely stateness issues acting as a filter for international linkages.

Climate change, national politics and grassroots action: an introduction

There is considerable cross-national variation in the patterns of adoption and implementation of policies designed to mitigate climate change. The sources of this variation are considered. International relations, economic structures, national cultures and domestic political competition are factors, often in interaction one with another. In situations of multilevel governance, sub-national actors may be significant. Grassroots activism from without the formal political process has sometimes been critical in sharpening the focus of formal political actors, and increasing their willingness to act. Climate change is a global issue, but the political action necessary to address it is inevitably local and national as well as international.

Containing the sleeping giant in EU referendums? A comparison of the strategies of confinement of EU issues of the RPR (1992) and the PS (2005)

This article deals with the ways parties depoliticise European matters in EU referendums. Through the two cases of the RPR in the Maastricht Treaty referendum and the PS in the ECT referendum, it investigates how mainstream parties contain the ‘sleeping giant’, how they manage intra-party dissent over EU matters. It reflects on the specific strategies they use to confine the effects of the European cleavage on their party organisations. It relies on a comparative case study analysis based on newspaper archives to reassess the distinct political contexts and the evolving positions of party leaderships over time. Three main findings are outlined. First, it shows that the ‘Europeanisation’ of the discourses of mainstream parties has remained highly strategic, superficial and fluctuating over time. Second, while the politicisation of EU matters has sometimes occurred, Eurosceptic pressures have been actively absorbed by mainstream parties through a whole range of strategies of compartmentalisation. Finally, it illustrates that depoliticisation has constituted a core element in the ways mainstream parties have used EU issues in domestic political competition.

Understanding Montenegrin citizenship

This paper maintains that although the citizenship regime of Montenegro was generated amidst domestic political competition, it has also been significantly affected by regional and international political forces. Applying Bellamy's (Bellamy, R., 2004. Introduction: the making of modern citizenship. In: R. Bellamy, D. Castiglione and E. Santoro, eds. Lineages of European citizenship: rights, belonging and participation in eleven nation-states. London: Palgrave, 1–21) concept of the lineages of citizenship to the case of Montenegro, this study explains how citizenship polices were used to manage the fragile political milieu within this weak and unconsolidated post-Yugoslav state. Further explanations for the restrictiveness of Montenegro's citizenship regime are based on the legacies of the different Yugoslav ‘citizenship constellations’. Yet as a consequence of the country's aspirations to join the European Union, the rigid citizenship regime of Montenegro remains permeable to international norms and influence. However, this ostensible normative elasticity does not make Montenegrin citizenship more liberal, as barriers for naturalisation remain high.

The Domestic Politics of Institutional Design: Producer Preferences over Trade Agreement Rules

What explains variation in the design of international institutions? Recent literature shows that providing members with opportunities to shirk their contractual obligations actually promotes agreement formation and durability. Yet, in spite of these benefits, institutions continue to exhibit wide variation in the “flexibility” of their rules. I show that, in the context of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), the benefits of permitting escape are enjoyed unevenly across the market. In particular, import‐competing industries gain from the protection that escape clauses provide while their export‐dependent counterparts bear the costs. This asymmetry creates domestic political competition over agreement design between the two traded sectors of the market. I explore this competition using new data on the design of 330 PTA agreements since 1960.

Political Parties and the Politics of Diversity in the European Public Sphere

This article compares how diversity views affect political parties’ willingness to engage in trans-European deliberation to create trans-European publics. Relying on data collected within the Eurosphere, we investigate the extent to which European diversity frames the issue of integration in the public discourse of political parties in 16 European countries – 14 members of the EU plus Norway and Turkey as non-members. We identify the homogeneity vs. heterogeneity of political party discourses and the consensus or contestation among these discourses. As a result, we find that parties with more inclusive views of diversity are more likely to be active participants in European arenas irrespective of the parties’ government role or ideological background (though limited to mainstream parties). More importantly, the nature of the national public spheres and domestic political competition and cleavages determine whether national publics are willing and able to be more open to transnationalisation efforts.

Domestic Politics and the Formation of International Environmental Agreements

The theory of international environmental agreements overwhelmingly assumes that governments engage as unitary agents. Each government makes choices based on benefits and costs that are simple national aggregates, and similarly on a single set of national-level motivations, together drawing a strong analogy with the behavior of an individual or firm in other strategic contexts. In reality, however, various domestic special interests shape environmental policy, including how national governments cooperate on cross-border issues. Therefore in this paper we introduce to a classic model of international environmental cooperation the phenomenon of domestic political competition, whereby lobby groups seek to influence policy by offering to fund political campaigning. We use the model to establish some general conditions for the effects of lobbying on the stringency of policy and the size of coalitions cooperating to provide an environmental good. Using specific functional forms, we obtain a range of further results, including circumstances in which the omission of lobbying results in environmental protection being underestimated.

Opposition Politics and International Crises: A Formal Model

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.

Force Mineure? The Effects of the EU on Party Politics in a Small Country: The Case of Estonia

Assessing the first four years of EU membership on Estonian party politics indicates that following accession EU perspectives on policies and European policy specialists in small countries may remain sidelined in the decision-making processes within political parties because of the mechanical effects of small numbers of such specialists. At the same time, European parliament elections add an additional event to the electoral calendar and the novel role of MEPs has a potential to affect domestic political competition. However, the constraints posed by common policies may be weakened by the overwhelming domestic concerns of political parties as an analysis of the anatomy of the failure to adopt the single currency shows.

Political Groups, Leader Change, and the Pattern of International Cooperation

Nations are politically heterogeneous and which group is in political ascendency shapes the nature of interstate cooperation through two mechanisms. First, groups differ in the benefits they receive from cooperation. This affects which groups can commit to cooperate. Second, a nation may selectively withhold cooperation from one group to influence the domestic political competition between groups in another nation. By integrating political competition between leaders of different groups under different institutional rules into a prisoner’s dilemma model of international cooperation, the theory generates hypotheses relating leader turnover, group membership, and patterns of cooperation.

The Politics of Risking Peace: Do Hawks or Doves Deliver the Olive Branch?

This article explores the politics of risking international cooperation with a distrusted adversary. It develops a model in which two states attempt to learn over the course of two periods whether or not mutual cooperation is possible given their (initially unknown) preferences. In one of the states, the government is engaged in domestic political competition with an opposition party. One party is known to have more hawkish preferences than the other, on average, and voters must decide which party to elect after observing the international interaction in the first period. The model shows that, when trust is low but continued conflict is costly, cooperation is most likely to be initiated by a moderate hawk—a leader with moderate preferences from the more hawkish party. Moreover, while dovish leaders are better at eliciting cooperation in the short run, mutual cooperation is most likely to endure if it was initiated by a hawk. Some empirical implications and illustrations of the model are discussed.I gratefully acknowledge thoughtful comments received from Andrew Kydd, James Morrow, Brett Ashley Leeds, T. Clifton Morgan, Kenneth Scheve, Deborah Larson, Bruce Russett, Alex Mintz, and the anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 43rd annual meeting of the International Studies Association, March 2002.

Great Expectations: The EU and Domestic Political Competition in East Central Europe

Great Expectations: The EU and Domestic Political Competition in East Central Europe

Domestic Opposition and Signaling in International Crises

This article explores the effect of domestic political competition on the escalation of international crises. It combines an incomplete information model of crisis bargaining with a simple model of two-party electoral choice. One state has two strategic actors—a government and an opposition party—both of which declare openly whether they support the use of force to alter the status quo. The rival state updates its beliefs and selects its strategy in response to both signals. The parties' payoffs depend upon a retrospective evaluation by the domestic electorate. The model shows that the inclusion of a strategic opposition party decreases the ex ante probability of war by helping to reveal information about the state's preferences. This finding has important implications for research on democracy and international conflict, since it suggests a mechanism through which democratic states can overcome informational asymmetries, which have been identified as a central obstacle to negotiation.

Political conflict and foreign policy in the United States

Since the early 1970s, America's leaders have experienced great difficulty in mobilizing broad national support for their foreign policies. Deep and persistent conflict has been the norm, hampering national leaders' capacity to advance coherent and programmatic foreign policy. Most analysts identify ideological or institutional cleavages at the national level as the source of domestic political competition and conflict over foreign policy. This study offers an alternative, geographically-based interpretation. An analysis of voting in the Congress reveals that conflicts over the ends and means of American power have split the nation along regional lines, pitting the Northeast against the South. It is argued that these conflicts have revolved around the uneven costs and benefits of policies that were associated with the Pax Americana of the Cold War era. Like other periods in American history when there was little consensus over ‘the national interest’, today's conflicts are grounded in inter-regional struggles for political and economic advantage.

Policy Uncertainty in Two-Level Games: Examples of Correlated Equilibria

Recent research on two-level game models emphasizes the close interaction between the domestic and foreign policies of states, but these states are usually interpreted as unitary rational actors and these two policy arenas are generally kept separate. We develop integrated models of multi-level policy games in which the locus of strategic action remains at the individual (or group) level. Social choice theory identifies fundamental dilemmas associated with assuming that states have consistent preferences, yet empirical observation reveals that domestic political competition results in regularized patterns of behavior at the state and international levels. In our models the expectations of individual Bayesian policy actors converge to a “correlated equilibrium” that defines a probability distribution over domestic and foreign policy outcomes. We compare examples of correlated equilibria in a Chicken game between two unitary rational states, a voting game among three domestic groups, and a two-level game in which each state's foreign policy is determined by this voting game. By focusing on the collective consequences of the strategic interactions of Bayesian rational individuals, this synthesis of game, social choice, and Bayesian decision theories highlights fundamental linkages among the regularities observed in domestic politics, foreign policy, and international relations.