While most scholars agree that domestic politics somehow ‘matters’ in foreign and security policy, questions remain about the specific effects of institutions and actor constellations on policy outcomes. Under which conditions do democratic institutions constrain or enable government use of force? To what extent does partisanship matter in military deployment decisions? Finally, how do organizational frameworks influence participation in armed conflict? This paper seeks to address these questions through a comparative analysis of consolidated democracies’ participation in specific military operations in the post-Cold War timeframe. The theoretical focus rests on domestic factors, particularly partisan configurations, executive-legislative relations, and constitutional constraints on military operations. Findings indicate that distinct pathways towards participation and non-participation exist, based on the organizational framework of an operation and the configuration of domestic factors. It is shown, for instance, that low parliamentary involvement in security policy and right-of-center executives are components of a sufficient condition for democracies’ participation in ad hoc coalitions. In other organizational frameworks, however, power-based and contextual factors hold more sway. In terms of method, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA) and case studies are combined to allow for systematic cross-country comparisons. The approach accounts for equifinality and causal heterogeneity, assumptions that are held to be more suitable to the study of foreign and security policy than commonly used linear frequentist models. In addition, fuzzy sets enable qualitative conceptual distinctions and introduce measures to gauge the robustness of the analytical results.
