Search

When and how do regional parties influence foreign policy in federal democracies with multiparty coalition governments? The existing literature has focused on situations of foreign policy disagreements between subnational parties and the central government in multinational states. By contrast, we argue that under varying conditions, central governments either decide to accommodate the preferences of small regional parties when designing foreign policies, or co-opt these regional parties to push their own foreign policy agenda. Some scholars looked at the role of decentralization and federal power arrangements in providing more control to political sub-units over the external affairs of a state. Other studies showed that certain coalition-building configurations facilitated the inclusion of the concerns of small parties in the foreign policy debate. Bridging these two literatures, we argue that both structural and agential conditions behind regional and national coalition building processes—visible in federal settings—affect foreign policy-making in different ways, and not necessarily toward disagreement and obstruction. To illustrate these hypothesized mechanisms, we look at two case studies in the Indian context: the role of regional parties in the debate over the US–India nuclear deal of 2008 and the role of regional parties in shaping India's Sri Lanka policy from 2009 to 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do Indian regional parties influence foreign policy and under which conditions? Some foreign policy studies have shown that certain coalition-building configurations have facilitated the inclusion of the concerns of small parties in the foreign policy debate. Other works have looked at the role of decentralization and federal power-arrangement in providing more control to political sub-units over the external affairs of a state. Those separate scholarships provide interesting insights to account for the multi-level nature of coalition-building in a federal and pluralistic polity like India. Bridging these two literatures, I argue that the interdependence of regional and national coalition building processes (visible in federal settings) create locked-in alliances between national parties and regional parties which affect foreign policymaking. In these contexts, India's national parties have to, under certain conditions, take into account the preferences of regional parties when designing foreign policies. This article looks at the hypothesized causal mechanisms and expectations through two illustrative case studies of India's foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes two arguments. First, it seeks to warn foreign policy analysis scholars against directly applying models and theories developed in the context of West European countries to other regions such as the Global South. More specifically, we highlight some of the particularities present in cases from the Global South that might limit any direct attempt to apply hypothesised mechanisms derived from the existing coalition foreign-policy literature. Second, we argue that the scholarship on coalition foreign policy needs to more systematically integrate the lessons and insights from coalition experiences from the Global South. We look at the recent Indian experience with coalitions to illustrate some of our arguments about the benefits and limitations of the existing scholarship as well as to explore the need to develop new frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]