Peripheral Institution, Peripheral Travels? The significance of Weak Presidents’ Foreign Visits

Scholarly attention to world leaders’ visits abroad first received serious empirical treatment in studies that used these foreign travels to operationalize and systematically analyze the strength of relationships, power differentials, and presence of common regional identity between States in certain regions of the world. This was notably the case of studies of inter-State relations in the Communist bloc by Modelki (1968) and Hughes and Volgy (1970), of Middle Eastern identity (Thompson, 1970; 1981), or regional integration in Southeast Asia (Kegley and Howell, 1975). Since the publication of these pioneering works, a radical shift in the study of state visits has taken place. Geographically, the prevalent terrain of investigation has followed the evolution of the world order, and has consequently turned first towards the United States (Goldstein, 2008; Goldsmith and Horiuchi, 2009), and more recently on China (Wand and Stone, 2023). The literature also engaged in a methodological reorientation. Reorientation in that while the original scholarship analyzed state visits to explore the cohesiveness or balance of power within regional units or globally, most scholars now treat foreign travels as an object of study in themselves. Trade partnerships, security crises, domestic concerns (like popularity, executive-legislative relations, level of unemployment), or global influence are common factors cited to explain why and how often a particular world leader would decide to travel abroad. But reorientation also as studies have become more and more sophisticated in their quantitative treatment of data and have sometimes relied on formal models to do so (Mesquita and Chien, 2021; Malis and Smith, 2021, 2024). Despite its diversity in its loci of attention, methodological approach, or causal mechanism invoked, one commonality among these studies is the assumption that foreign travels can either reveal something about the countries or the international system in which they take place or are the result of goal oriented political actors who seek personal or national benefits in their state visits. Thinking of foreign visits as random is never seriously considered because of the underlying assumption that those who conduct them have the power and agency to make these travels significant. While this assumption can be readily accepted in most cases, it is much more demanding in situations in which the leadership’s level of power and agency is questionable. This is the case for presidents who, despite being popularly elected, have little more than ceremonial functions. Using a dataset of presidential foreign visits in European countries with weak presidents in Austria, Slovakia, or Croatia, this study examines whether travels by so-called weak presidents reveal goal-oriented personal or national incentives. In doing so, it engages in the more general discussion of the purpose of directly elected presidents in parliamentary systems, and offers a new angle to study the vexing question of formal vs. informal presidential powers.