Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making: A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Policy Choices

353 Pages·2012·1.417 MB·English

by  Juliet Kaarbo

Coalition Politics and
Cabinet Decision Making

Coalition Politics and
Cabinet Decision Making
a comparative analysis of
foreign policy choices
Juliet Kaarbo
The University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2012
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108
of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press),
without written permission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
c Printed on acid-free paper
2015 2014 2013 2012 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kaarbo, Juliet.
Coalition politics and cabinet decision making : a comparative
analysis of foreign policy choices / Juliet Kaarbo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn978-0-472-11824-3 (cloth : alk. paper) —
isbn978-0-472-02834-4 (e-book)
1. International relations—Decision making. 2. International
relations—Decision making—Case studies. 3. Cabinet system—
Decision making. 4. Cabinet system—Decision making—Case
studies. 5. Coalition governments. 6. Coalition governments—Case
studies. I. Title.
jz1305.k33 2012
327.1—dc23
2012000980
For Ryan, Ellie, and Quinn

Contents
Preface ix
1. The Importance of Coalition Politics for Foreign Policy
and International Relations 1
2.Images of Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy 13
3.Assessing Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy: Quantitative
Analyses and the Need for Comparative Case Studies 40
4.Dutch Foreign Policy: Excessive Compromise in
Coalition Politics? 67
5.Japanese Foreign Policy: Paralyzed by Coalition Con›ict? 122
6.Turkish Foreign Policy: Hijacked by Ideological Extremes? 180
7. Challenging and Unpacking Images of Coalition Foreign Policy:
Implications for International Relations and Governance 232
Appendix: Goldstein Con›ict-Cooperation Scale for
WEIS Event Data 247
Notes 249
Bibliography 295
Index 329

Preface
This book grows out of my interest in small groups, disagreement, and de-
cision units. While in graduate school, I worked closely with the develop-
ment of the decision units framework of Peg Hermann, Chuck Hermann,
and Joe Hagan. The small-group unit particularly intrigued me, but I was
less interested in groupthink, the better-known and -researched psycholog-
ical “pathology” that can occur from processes of social in›uence. I wanted
to know more about dissent—its psychological effects, how it was treated
socially, and how it was embedded politically in many countries. This ap-
proach was partly motivated by my interest in any country except the
United States. Our knowledge of foreign policy decision making was and
still is myopically based on the U.S. system. When I looked around the
world, I saw parliamentary systems and coalition cabinets in many impor-
tant states. Theories of U.S. policy-making did not easily apply, but little
theoretical development had occurred to explain coalition foreign policy.
My doctoral dissertation focused on the conditions of junior-party
in›uence in coalition cabinet foreign policy and examined several cases of
German and Israeli foreign policy. Since then, there has been little further
development of our understanding of coalition decision making. Binnur
Özkeçeci-Taner’s book, The Role of Ideas in Coalition Government Foreign Pol-
icymaking: The Case of Turkey between 1991 and 2002,is the notable excep-
tion. As work on the democratic peace developed, bringing back domestic
political variables to “mainstream” international relations research, studies
included coalitions as a variable to unpack the category of democracy. De-
spite these efforts, the question of how a divided cabinet affected foreign
policy and particularly decision making remained largely untouched. Yet
assumptions and normative judgments about coalitions are often made in
scholarly literature, in journalist accounts, and even in popular culture. In
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,the ‹nal book in Stieg Larsson’s tril-
ogy, Swedish investigators are talking to the prime minister about the secret