Political parties play an important role in democratic politics. They aggregate citizens’ interests and formulate coherent programs, recruit political personnel, and nominate candidates for public office. In short, they are a, if not the, most important link connecting state and society. In spite of that, foreign policy researchers have until recently devoted little systematic attention to political parties. Wolfgang Wagner’s most recent book The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions (2020) sets out to begin to close that gap by systematically exploring to what extent foreign policy is affected by party politics, based on an extensive mixed-methods analysis of roll-call votes, party manifestos, and parliamentary debates on military deployments.
The book provides overwhelming evidence for the impact of party politics on foreign and security policy. Specifically, it shows that foreign policy is, in fact, regularly subject to party political contestation and that this contestation is not purely instrumental, but is structured along the left–right axis. In doing so, his book significantly advances our understanding of the conflict behavior of democracies and foreign policy more generally.
Following a brief introduction, chapter 2 locates the book within the democratic peace/democratic distinctiveness literature and research on government ideologies and foreign policy. Chapter 3 analyzes roll-call votes to ascertain the salience and level of contestation in the United States (1789–2014), Germany (1949–2013), and the Netherlands (1995–2015). It then zeroes in on deployment votes more specifically, combining a long-term view on the United States since the war of 1812 with a comparative analysis of post–Cold War deployment votes in 11 countries. The chapter clearly demonstrates that foreign policy is by no means exempt from party-political contestation, although levels of contestation are lower than on domestic issues. Chapter 4 triangulates the analysis of party manifestos with expert surveys and voting behavior to figure out to what extent party political contestation is structured or instrumental (e.g., driven by a party’s being in or out of government). The analysis shows that contestation is “structured along the left/right axis” (p. 66), with support for military interventions (1) stronger in the center than on the far ends of the spectrum and (2) weaker on the Left than on the Right. Chapter 5 complements the findings of the previous chapters with a content analysis of parliamentarians’ arguments in favor of or against military operations in Afghanistan and against Daesh. It finds further support for systematic differences between Left and Right. For instance, leftist parties tend to view human suffering in cosmopolitan terms and international conflict mainly as a result of misperception, stressing empathy as a central means to resolve conflicts. Parties on the Right view their community more in national terms, have a stronger tendency to create enemy images, and rely on a deterrence model of international conflict.
All in all, Wagner’s book makes a convincing case for the impact of party politics on foreign and security policy. It provides an important missing piece of the puzzle for understanding what distinguishes the conflict behavior of democracies compared to nondemocracies. More generally, the book demonstrates that ignoring political parties means excluding an important chunk of the politics involved in foreign policy making. Wagner’s findings are particularly relevant in the context of the growing IR literature on so-called populism. By and large, IR scholars have treated “populism” more or less as a monolith, expecting left- and right-wing “populists” to have a relatively uniform (and mostly negative) effect on foreign policy and international phenomena, such as the liberal international order. In contrast, Wagner’s book suggests (quite similarly to most of populism research in comparative politics, I might add) that the common populist element might be much less influential than the left- or right-wing “host ideology” with which it is combined (Luke March, “Left and Right Populism Compared: The British Case,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19[2], 2017). That puts the whole idea of a (uniform) “populist” foreign policy or threat in doubt. In that sense, the book provides an antidote against the all-too-present risk of jumping to conclusions.
Having said that, the downside of the book’s highly methodical approach is that it has to make compromises in analytical breadth and depth. Thus, it touches on a whole range of fascinating issues, such as the causes of parties’ differences, the disconnect between elites and the public, or parties’ changing positions over time, without exploring them in depth. In particular, qualitatively inclined readers might feel more than just a pinch of regret at the fascinating details that a broader and deeper content analysis of parliamentary debates could have provided. However, because Wagner is concerned with the bigger picture, he is forced to move on just when he has piqued our curiosity with some really juicy detail. Most importantly, and not entirely without irony for a book on The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions, the study spends little time actually analyzing politics in a narrow sense: the “pulling and hauling” between different actors (Graham T. Allison and Morton H. Halperin, “Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications,” World Politics, 24[1], 1972, p. 43). That is, the book does not analyze interactions between different political actors. To be fair, this is not so much a flaw as the result of the pragmatic decision to favor robustness over breadth and depth, and it does not reduce the book’s significant contribution. Indeed, Wagner himself points out that understanding individual cases will require that voting data be “supplemented by more in-depth case studies” (p. 153).
That brings me to the one point of criticism that warrants some more in-depth discussion; namely, the complete absence of meaning-making (i.e., processes of social [or discursive] construction) as a relevant factor. A significant part of this is due to Wagner’s focus on party politics and the fact that no study can achieve everything. Moreover, it is no small challenge to bridge the gap between rationalist/neopositivist approaches and (broadly) constructivist ones without exposing oneself to the charge of either metatheoretical incoherence or not taking the social construction of reality seriously; for instance, by simply adding “ideational variables”—yikes! Having said that, it is somewhat strange to observe that more than 20 years after the publication of Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (1999) we are still debating the “effects” or “influence” of the international “environment” or “system” (pp. 142, 143) as if social reality acted on decision makers in some quasi-mechanical fashion.
Beyond this general critique two aspects stand out. First, there is a methodological argument to be made for more transparency and reflexivity. Much of the “data” the book presents are the result of interpretive practices by either the author himself or others. This is most obvious in the content analysis, which involves coding, but it also applies to, for instance, the MARPOR manifesto data. The methodological question here would be whether and to what extent the researcher’s own presence in terms of interpretive choices and the like needs to be made transparent. Obviously, neopositivist and qualitative/interpretive researchers would give quite different answers to this question.
The second aspect concerns the role of social construction in the party politics of interventions itself, which probably is significantly more important than the book would lead one to expect. One does not have to be a dyed-in-the-wool poststructuralist to acknowledge that party ideologies are socially constructed, and any meaningful analysis of, say, parties’ changing position would have to acknowledge this. But even if one brackets dynamics of ideational change, the in-depth case studies Wagner rightly calls for to understand individual cases will not get far without taking meaning into account. My own research on one of Wagner’s cases, Germany, demonstrates that parties’ differences stem not only from conflicting ideological commitments, but also often occur because they lack a common view on reality; for instance, regarding the extent to which certain issues are a threat or the perceived utility of military deployments as an instrument of foreign policy. For example, many greens during the 1990s and members of Die Linke today consider military deployments ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Similarly, much of the transatlantic crisis surrounding the 2003 intervention in Iraq was based on different views on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaida; that is, different constructions of reality. Ignoring meaning in favor of a purely rationalist approach means to ignore an important source of party-political differences.
This admittedly more general critique of rationalist foreign policy research notwithstanding, The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions does make an important contribution to the literature by showing that parties (at least in “Western” countries) do systematically differ across national and historical contexts. The book will prove to be a very valuable resource for anyone interested not just in party politics and foreign policy but also the nexus between domestic politics and IR more generally.
