Don’t Stop at the Water’s Edge. Exploring the Role of Political Parties in Foreign Policy

Abstract

Comparative politics and international relations (IR) have generally devoted limited attention to political parties in foreign and security policy. However, more recently, several authors have examined how coalition politics affects foreign and defense policy-making. Rising qualitative and qualitative analyses have also scrutinized the relationship between partisanship and foreign policy, focusing on the left/right cleavage, and also on the so-called “GAL-TAN” cleavage. In line with this growing literature, the aim of the panel is to bring together scholars from comparative politics and international relations to explore the role of political parties in foreign policy. The ECPR General Conference represents the ideal context for such attempt. The panel, which combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, collects papers that provide evidence of the role played by political parties in affecting foreign and security policies, especially concerning: • Partisanship and foreign policy; • Party positions and/or coalitions in various foreign and security policy issues; • Transnational party cooperation in European Security and Defence; • Political parties contestation of the EU’s engagement in neighborhood; • Populist parties and foreign policy, in Europe and beyond. The panel, which combines different approaches as well as junior and senior scholars, investigates how security issues have been contested in liberal democracies and to what extent that levels of contestation in parliament differ significantly across countries. The papers present brand data on political parties and foreign and security issues. A comparative perspective allows investigating variations across countries, including also non-Western European democracies.