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Domestic politics and foreign policy analysis: public opinion, elections, interest groups, and the media.

• Douglas C. Foyle Douglas C. Foyle Department of Government, Wesleyan University
•  and  Douglas Van Belle Douglas Van Belle School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.9
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 20 November 2017

Societal factors such as public opinion, interest groups, and the media can influence foreign policy choices and behavior. To date, the public opinion and foreign policy literature has focused largely on data derived from the US, although this trend has begun to change in recent years. However, while much of the scholarly work suggests that public attitudes on foreign policy are both reasonable and structured, significant controversies exist over the public’s general influence on policy as well as the influence of elections on foreign policy. Meanwhile, the study of interest groups as a domestic source of foreign policy is dominated by two points of emphasis: ethnic groups acting as interest groups and the US case. These are most often considered together. This ethnic interest group literature stands largely apart from the literature on trade interest groups, which takes its inspiration from the economics literature. Finally, two aspects of media are specifically relevant to media and domestic sources of foreign policy. The first is the way the media serve as an arena of domestic political competition within democracies, and the second is the communicative role that media play in the formation of public opinions that are specific to and critical to foreign policy decision making.

• public opinion
• interest groups
• foreign policy
• public attitudes
• ethnic interest groups
• foreign policy decision making

Introduction

This review considers how societal factors influence foreign policy choices and behavior, with a central focus on public opinion, elections, interest groups, and the media. Across all these issues, it points to the need for better integration of this research into the core literatures in international politics as well as greater engagement with the American and comparative politics subfields. Consistent with other recent research that has recognized the centrality of the domestic and international relations link, it suggests that a full understanding of international political behavior requires the integration of concepts and insights from this literature. While much of this literature has understandably focused on the American case given the rich data available, this limitation raises concerns regarding the generalizability of these findings beyond this one case. To rectify the situation, more research of a comparative nature has emerged to evaluate the validity of these central findings. Ironically enough, at the same time, even though much of this work has focused on the United States case, it has failed to integrate effectively much of the literature from the American politics subfield, which opens further avenues for greater insight. In the end, while exciting work continues down many avenues, the field would benefit from a greater integration and interaction with other substantive scholarly traditions in international, comparative, and American politics.

This review considers three central areas. First, in evaluating the public opinion literature, it suggests that while much of the scholarly work now suggests that public attitudes on foreign policy are both reasonable and structured, significant controversies still exist over the public’s general influence on policy as well as the influence of elections on foreign policy. Second, the interest group literature has focused mostly on the American case, with an emphasis on ethnic interest groups. This ethnic interest group literature stands largely apart from the literature on trade interest groups, which takes its inspiration from the economics literature. Third, unlike these previous two areas, the domestic politics of the media appears to be better integrated into the broader international politics literature on communication.

Taken together, the massive literatures that are only briefly summarized here point in numerous directions for further conceptual formulation and greater cross-fertilization across traditional scholarly divides.

Public Opinion

Almond-lippmann consensus.

The question of whether public opinion should guide policy making has engaged philosophers at least since the days of Plato’s Republic . To date, the public opinion and foreign policy literature has focused largely on data derived from the US, although this trend has begun to change in recent years. Despite a large and burgeoning research agenda which can be structured topically (Holsti 2004 ), the overall scholarly literature has developed little in the way of a central conceptual focus (Holsti 2004 ; Baum and Potter 2008 ; Berinsky 2009 ), with scholars attending to different aspects of the public opinion questions and different topics as their interest dictates. Although notable attempts have been made to synthesize a comprehensive public opinion model or model of governance that integrates public opinion into foreign policy making (Rosenau 1961 ; Powlick and Katz 1998 ; Western 2005 ; Baum and Potter 2008 ), no one approach has emerged to dominate the field. Instead, the field is best characterized by a diverse group of scholars focused mainly around a range of discrete issues which do not add up appreciably to a comprehensive intellectual model.

The main arguments within the field have progressed through two main phases, centered generally around what is now known as the Almond-Lippmann consensus: public opinion’s rationality, structure, and policy influence (Holsti 2004 ). The Almond-Lippmann consensus, which portrays a negative view of public opinion, reigned in the field from the 1920s through the early 1970s, and held that on foreign policy matters a largely ignorant public opinion reacted in an emotional, rather than reasonable or rational manner, which in turn led to high volatility in its attitudes (e.g., Almond 1950 ; Lippmann 1955 ). Further, these attitudes remained unstructured and had little relationship with each other (Converse 1964 ). Many proponents of this view, who hailed largely from the realist perspective on foreign policy (Foyle 1999 ), worried little about these fundamental concerns since they concluded that public opinion did not influence foreign policy (Cohen 1973 ), though some realists feared public opinion would affect policy in a negative manner (Lippmann 1955 ).

The Almond-Lippmann Consensus Challenged

The disastrous American intervention in Vietnam and the expansion of data regarding public attitudes with the advancement of survey techniques led to a reevaluation of public opinion which turned the Almond-Lippmann consensus views on their head. An extensive literature developed in the 1970s through the mid-1990s focusing on the questions of the rationality and structure of public attitudes, and it is safe to say that these revisionist views now dominate the field. First, although few scholars would argue that public opinion is infused with knowledge on the foreign policy events of the day, the prevailing view now portrays public opinion as possessing relatively stable attitudes and responding reasonably to foreign affairs information from the environment (Page and Shapiro 1992 ; Jentleson 1992 ; Knopf 1998 ; Herrmann et al. 2001 ; Isernia et al. 2002 ).

Second, an extensive literature developed regarding the question of whether a meaningful structure organized public attitudes. Although scholars disagree over the number of dimensions that characterize public attitudes, or how those attitudes arise or change, most agree that public attitudes do meet the criteria set by Converse ( 1964 ) of both stability and “some form of constraint or functional interdependence.” The most prominent analysis, by Eugene Wittkopf ( 1990 ), describes two dimensions for public opinion (yielding four beliefs system types), with a dimension on cooperative internationalism referring to whether an individual favors or opposes working with other nations to solve global and national challenges, and a militant internationalism indicating whether the person favors forceful action, possibly unilateral in nature, to pursue American interests. These dimensions characterize the views of opinion leaders as well (Holsti and Rosenau 1988 ). Other scholars (Hinckley 1992 ; Chittick et al. 1995 ) point to a third dimension consisting of a unilateralism and multilateralism scale. Hurwitz and Peffley ( 1987 ) provide a distinct hierarchical model that suggests the public’s attitudes descend from general core values eventually to more specific foreign policy attitudes. Despite nuances among these scholars, the virtual consensus points to a convergence around the view of the public with stable and structured beliefs.

The third component of the Almond-Lippmann consensus has experienced the most research attention in recent years, although no consensus exists on whether and under what conditions public opinion influences policy. Although it appeared at first that research into this area would reverse the Almond-Lippmann consensus position again, public opinion’s role in policy making remains the focus of intense controversy. First, some research continues to suggest that public opinion plays a limited role in foreign policy formulation. Most notably, in a statistically sophisticated examination evaluating public opinion’s effect on policy relative to interest groups and policy experts, Jacobs and Page ( 2005 ) found that public opinion’s influence paled in comparison to other policy actors and had little or no statistical influence. Interestingly, this finding is consistent with a growing trend (most notable in studies of US presidential politics) which suggests that presidents use the sophisticated polling techniques available to them to limit public influence. Presidents might use polls to build support for their chosen policies (Heith 2004 ), to construct policies which appear to reflect popular will (while being substantively incongruent with public attitudes), or enable leaders to ensure general popular support despite pursuing unpopular policies (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000 ).

The influence of elites on public opinion has also generated some controversy. For example, Edwards ( 2003 ) suggests presidential efforts at influencing opinion have largely failed despite extensive efforts. Others have suggested that public opinion tracks elite opinion rather than driving policy development (Witko 2003 ).

Second, a common finding in the literature suggests that public opinion constrains the policy options available to government leaders by limiting the range of choices they have available to them (e.g., Russett 1990 ; Hinckley 1992 ; Powlick and Katz 1998 ; Sobel 2001 ; Foyle 2004 ). While public opinion does not cause leaders to select particular policies, this research suggests that it has an important and strong influence on policy.

Third, some research employing statistical analyses finds that public opinion consistently influences policy. By tracking whether policy outputs were consistent with public attitudes (Monroe 1979 ) and whether shifts in opinion more often than not preceded changes in policy (Page and Shapiro 1992 ), some suggest an important relationship between public attitudes and foreign policy. Other scholars have followed up on this broad pattern of responsiveness with quantitative analyses suggesting a strong public role in defense spending (Hartley and Russett 1992 ), congressional voting (Meernik and Oldmixon 2008 ), presidential decisions on the use of force (Ostrom and Job 1986 ), and presidential rhetoric (Rottinghaus 2007 ).

Finally, some scholars have emphasized a range of conditional variables that influence public opinion’s effect on foreign policy, including level of public support for the policy (Graham 1994 ), domestic structure (Risse-Kappen 1991 ), elections (Gaubatz 1999 ), presidential attitudes toward public opinion (Foyle 1999 ), stage of decision making (Knecht 2006 ), and presidential popularity (Canes-Wrone 2006 ).

The role of elections runs throughout much of the public opinion literature and also has a heavy US focus. The first branch of this research addresses the issue of whether foreign policy affects vote choices during elections. The development of this literature tracks the broader trend in the public opinion and foreign policy literature, with earlier accounts suggesting that public opinion had only a limited influence, if any, on voting. Early analyses based on opinions and voting in the 1950s and 1960s suggested that foreign policy remained a secondary factor compared to other items in determining vote choice (Stokes 1966 ). As the bipartisan consensus over foreign policy broke up over Vietnam, foreign policy rose in prominence as a voting issue as partisan differences at the elite level emerged (Aldrich et al. 2006 ). In an article that provided the most important work in the area in the past two decades, Aldrich and his colleagues ( 1989 ) found that attitudes about foreign policy conditionally influenced vote choice. The strongest influence they found occurred when large differences between the candidates existed and the candidates emphasized the foreign policy issues during the campaign. The influence of foreign policy issues dropped to the extent that few differences existed between the candidates or the campaign did not feature foreign policy issues. Recent research employing a different dataset largely confirmed the core insights of this work (Anand and Krosnick 2003 ). Some recent work, emphasizing the effect of the Iraq War on voting, pointed to a continued influence of foreign policy attitudes on voting (Berinsky 2009 ; Gelpi et al. 2009 ).

The second strand examines the influence of elections on foreign policy choices. Unlike the first strand where the consensus suggests that foreign policy attitudes affect voting, a great deal of controversy exists over the influence of elections on foreign policy. Empirically, some scholars have found that approaching elections systematically push leaders to make more peaceful choices (Gaubatz 1999 ; Auerswald 2000 ). Second, others have argued that elections cause increased uses of force as leaders see foreign policy as a chance to either distract the public from unpopular domestic circumstances or artificially enhance public support (the bulk of this approach falls within the diversionary use of force literature discussed in the review entitled “Diversionary Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis” in this compendium). Thirdly, presidents might wish to avoid foreign policy choices of any kind during election years given the inherent risks involved in these decisions (Quandt 1986 ). Fourth, principal–agent models emphasize asymmetric information and potentially divergent goals between actors. Since the public cannot evaluate the quality of the leader’s decisions directly, it has to rely on another measure, such as policy success or failure, in determining whether the leader is “good” or “bad.” This situation then creates an incentive for leaders who are facing difficult elections to seek “successful” conflicts to mimic “good” leaders or to achieve a dramatic success in an ongoing conflict (Richards et al. 1993 ; Downs and Rocke 1994 ). Fifth, some scholars suggest that leaders become highly responsive during election years and pursue whatever policy the public prefers (peaceful, aggressive, etc.) (Geer 1996 ; Manza et al. 2002 , including especially Shapiro and Jacobs; Canes-Wrone 2006 ). Finally, disputing much of these claims are views that portray elections as having no influence on foreign policy decisions (e.g., Ostrom and Job 1986 ; James and Hristoulas 1994 ; Meernik 1994 ; Gowa 1999 ; DeRouen 2001 ; Fordham 2002 ). To this point, this research focused narrowly on the effect of elections on foreign policy has not been well integrated into the larger literature on the democratic peace.

Comparative Public Opinion and the Comparative Politics Subfield

While research moves apace on each of these questions, a newly burgeoning area has been to examine the questions engaged by the American literature in a comparative context (Gerber and Mendelson 2008 ). These efforts follow earlier calls in the literature to consider the applicability of findings from the American case to other political contexts and to consider how varying institutional and social environments might affect public opinion on foreign policy and its influence (Isernia et al. 2002 ; Foyle 2003 ; Holsti 2004 ). Spurred in part by the explosion of available data on public opinion in non-American contexts, this work has targeted each component of the Almond-Lippmann consensus as well as pushing into new frontiers to consider the influence of institutional context. Given the diversity of political variation even in the advanced industrial world (where the data for all these questions remain most available), further exploration will likely prove to be a useful avenue for exploration.

Examinations of the reasonability and stability of public opinion on foreign policy in other nations suggests results largely consonant with the American case. Several studies have considered public opinion’s attitudes in a number of non-American countries (Nacos et al. 2000 ; Isernia et al. 2002 ; Furia and Lucas 2006 ; Foyle 2007 ; Holsti 2008 ), evaluated the origins and structure of public attitudes (Bjereld and Ekengren 1999 ; Jenkins-Smith et al. 2004 ), and the influence of public opinion (Nacos et al. 2000 ; Gerber and Mendelson 2008 ). Some have begun to consider how institutional and political structures influence the opinion–policy process and have suggested that, as one would expect, there are important differences in how opinion affects policy in non-American cases (e.g., Risse-Kappen 1991 ; Nacos et al. 2000 ; Pickering and Kisangani 2005 ; Chan and Safran 2006 ). Given the promising findings from these comparative examinations, greater extension into new countries should yield exciting insights. As this work moves into non-US contexts, a greater presence from scholars and concepts from the comparative politics subfield will be needed to understand the complexities of public opinion in varying institutional and social contexts.

American Politics Subfield

Just as the field could benefit from better engagement with the comparative politics field, a stronger connection between the International Relations (IR) and American politics subfields would provide a mutual benefit to scholars working in both subfields. Although much of the foundation of the public opinion and foreign policy field emerges from core insights in the American politics subfield, too little cross-fertilization has occurred. Although there are notable exceptions, much of the literature cited in this review is written by scholars who would self-identify themselves as primarily within the IR subfield. In addition, much of the literature cited by these articles also refers predominantly to work written for an international politics audience, with much less engagement with the American politics subfield. Ironically, scholars in both international politics and American politics largely address the same questions, though they engage the topics through a different lens. For IR scholars, public opinion is viewed as a subset of how domestic factors (including, but not limited to, elections, interest groups, the media, governmental processes, and individual decision-making variables) influence a state’s international choices and behavior. American politics scholars view foreign policy as a particular substantive policy area in a much broader literature on public opinion and/or presidency studies. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, the opportunity for useful cross-fertilization between the international politics scholars focusing on domestic politics and American politics scholars considering public opinion and the presidency has been missed.

Scholars working from the American politics subfield recognize the need for greater integration across these subfields with the recognition that foreign policy, rather than characterizing an exception to the “normal” policy process, progresses much like most domestic issues (Manza et al. 2002 , including especially Shapiro and Jacobs; Druckman and Jacobs 2006 ; Berinsky 2009 ). For IR scholars, conceptions regarding the relationships among elections, agenda setting, legislative–executive relations, and public opinion could inform key questions in the domestic politics literature such as the diversionary use of force, audience costs, and casualty aversion (see Edwards and King 2007 , especially chapters by Jacobson, Jacobs, and Blinder). On public opinion in particular, the edited volume by Manza et al. ( 2002 ) provides a broad range of insightful chapters engaging issues central to this field of study. In addition, a burgeoning literature exists on the origins of presidential polling and what it has to offer regarding leadership motivations to engage or deflect public opinion (Eisinger 2003 ; Heith 2004 ).

Although the IR literature tends to imply a uniform reaction to domestic concerns across leaders, a nuanced literature has developed in studying presidential responsiveness and suggests wide variation both individually and circumstantially. For example, Brandice Canes-Wrone ( 2006 :6–11, 123–8) usefully summarizes the range of perspectives on presidential responsiveness and decision making from American politics, each with potentially useful contributions to existing IR debates, while presenting her theory of conditional presidential responsiveness. She points to several views: (1) dynamic representation (Geer 1996 ; Erikson et al. 2002 ), portraying government leaders as responsive; (2) the need-based popularity perspective, suggesting unpopular presidents seek to align their policies with public opinion when unpopular (Manza et al. 2002 ); (3) a lack of policy responsiveness combined with what might be called public relations efforts (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000 ); (4) systematic reactions to latent public opinion, caring primarily about policy results (Key 1961 ); and (5) the influence of election cycles (Quandt 1986 ). Rather than portraying leaders as uniformly responsive to the same conditions, this research suggests a level of nuance which the existing IR literature would do well to integrate.

Additional Controversies

Several additional lines of research relate to public opinion and foreign policy but do not neatly fit into the central questions guiding this field. Given the diversity in research specialty of the scholars working on these concepts, the degree of integration of the central literature on public opinion and foreign policy into these debates varies considerably.

Rally Effects

The rally effect concept suggests that during times of international crisis or tension an upsurge in popular approval of a nation’s leadership will emerge. Substantive findings on the size of the rally effect vary considerably, as do causal explanations. The literature on this question originates from John Mueller’s definition of the rally as an event that is international, directly involves the president, and is “specific, dramatic, and sharply focused” ( 1973 :209). Four broad explanations have been suggested. First, Mueller ( 1973 ) pointed to an upwelling of patriotism in times of national danger as the motivating factor. Second, in a view seeing the public as reactive to elite messages, some (Brody and Shapiro 1989 ) argue that the silence of opposition elites removes negative news messages regarding the president and causes a positive message bias which then leads to increased public support. Third, crises might create a more generalized positive assessment of all social institutions, including the president (Parker 1995 ). Finally, since rallies must come from opponents shifting to supporters of the president, still other scholars have emphasized the interaction between information and partisanship (Baum 2002 ). Although no consensus exists on the cause of rallies or even that they are real (Baker and Oneal 2001 ; Colaresi 2007 ), the subject continues to draw attention, especially since it relates to important controversies in the field such as the diversionary use of force.

Audience Costs

The audience cost (Fearon 1994 ) concept remains a prominent feature in the international politics literature, yet this literature has failed to engage the main public opinion and foreign policy scholarship (though see Baum 2004 ). The audience costs concept suggests that crises force leaders to take highly visible international positions. If the leader backs down from this position, the public would notice and disapprove of this action, potentially leading to the leader’s removal from power. Given the costly nature domestically of making and then breaking public commitments in these circumstances, signaling by democratic leaders should become more clear and credible, which should allow democracies to achieve more favorable crisis outcomes. The initial insight created a large literature (e.g., Schultz 2001 ; Baum 2004 ; Slantchev 2006 ) and has been extended to non-democratic governments (Weeks 2008 ).

Public Support for the Use of Force and Casualty Aversion

Scholars have devoted considerable effort toward evaluating the factors that influence the public’s approval of the use of force and support for wars (Klarevas 2002 ; Eichenberg 2005 ). How leaders might react to public opinion on the use of force is considered elsewhere in this compendium in the essay on the diversionary theory of war or force. As with previous work in this field, a large portion of this work has focused on the US. Several viewpoints exist. First, some scholars have pointed to whether vital national interests are engaged as an important factor (Kohut and Toth 1995 ). Second, other scholars have concluded that multilateral military operations receive more support than unilateral ones (Kull 2002 ).

Third, Bruce Jentleson ( 1992 ) argued that the military’s mission drives public support, with humanitarian interventions and instances of “foreign policy restraint” (military action against an actor who acted aggressively against American interests) receiving greater public support than interventions in the internal affairs of other countries.

Fourth, still others have emphasized the existence (or lack) of consensus in elite political discourse as cuing public support (or opposition). When consensus reigns, the public supports the intervention. When disagreement emerges, the public divides behind the positions taken by leaders of the political party with which they identify (Larson 1995 ; Powlick and Katz 1998 ).

Fifth, an extensive casualty aversion literature has considered the effect that casualties have on the use of force, with the bulk of the literature suggesting that as casualties go up, support for wars decreases (Mueller 1973 ; Larson 1995 ; Boettcher and Cobb 2006 ) and votes for the leaders in power drop (Karol and Miguel 2007 ).

Finally, still others have suggested that perceptions of whether the use of force is likely to succeed or not has the strongest effect on public support for war (Gelpi et al. 2009 ).

Some have now begun to push beyond the US context and suggest that institutional variation has an important effect on the role that casualties have in affecting public support (Koch and Gartner 2005 ; Gerber and Mendelson 2008 ). Although most scholars in this debate acknowledge that multiple factors determine public support, the most active point of controversy lies between scholars supporting the casualty aversion hypothesis and proponents supporting the success hypothesis.

Demographic Variation

Despite the progress in this field, the influence of demographic characteristics remains an understudied area and has led to calls for greater attention (Berinsky 2009 ). When demographic characteristics have been considered in the past, the research typically concludes that foreign policy attitudes derive from an individual’s ideological and partisan predispositions (Holsti 2004 ). This emphasis has consigned other demographic characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, occupation, economic background, religious beliefs, region, and gender, to a residual category which has received little direct attention. While this inattention is surprising given the emphasis that sociological characteristics have in the American politics subfield on public opinion, political behavior, and voting, nearly every demographic subcategory could use additional attention. Several recent works have provided general demographic analysis regarding foreign policy attitudes (Gartner and Segura 2000 ; Eichenberg 2003 ; Holsti 2004 ; Berinsky 2009 ; Gelpi et al. 2009 ).

Interest Groups and Foreign Policy

The study of interest groups as a domestic source of foreign policy is dominated by two points of emphasis: ethnic groups acting as interest groups and the US case, most often considered together. There are, of course, numerous exceptions to this generalization, but this is one of those instances in which a simple characterization provides a fairly robust foundation for an initial approach to the field of study. Keyword and subject searches of conference paper archives or academic research databases inevitably produce results that are consistent with this generalization. That said, there is at least one significant and substantial area of research – interest groups influencing trade and economic policy – that is clearly relevant to any discussion of interest groups and foreign policy but appears to be largely estranged from most discussions of this topic.

This line of research has a very clear point of origin in Milbrath’s ( 1967 ) “Interest Groups and Foreign Policy” chapter in Rosenau’s edited volume on domestic sources of foreign policy (Rosenau 1967 ). Like most of the other chapters in the Rosenau book, the interest groups chapter is almost entirely devoted to building a foundation for future research by introducing ideas, theories and concepts from other areas of research and discussing how they might be fruitfully applied to the analysis of foreign policy. IR or foreign policy analysis references are almost completely absent from the bibliography of the chapter, but references to the study of communication, Congress, lobbying, and other areas are common.

US Foreign Policy and Ethnic Political Lobbies

While it would be difficult to assert that any study should be considered an iconic or seminal work on the ethnic political lobbies in the US, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Smith 2000 ) and Ethnic Identity Groups and US Foreign Policy (Ambrosio 2002b ) provide useful entry points, with Ethnic Groups and US Foreign Policy (Ahrari 1987 ) offering a valuable historical window on the earlier research. A comprehensive summary of ethnic political lobbying is provided in a separate compendium essay, “Ethnic Lobbying in Foreign Policy,” but two aspects of the subject need to be noted here as a way of explaining why ethnic lobbies are so prominent in the broader literature on interest groups and foreign policy. The first is the salience of ethnic lobbies in the news media and in the political discourse in the US. The second is the curious puzzle presented by the Cuban lobby’s success in influencing US foreign policy.

Israel and the Jewish lobby (i.e. Mearsheimer and Walt 2007 ) and Cuban American lobby groups (i.e. Haney and Vanderbush 2005 ) are both prominent in the literature. Given the historical importance of these two countries in US foreign affairs, this appears to be wholly unsurprising. However, Cuba presents a puzzle because the lobby group’s rise to prominence and much of its success in influencing US foreign policy is recent. The Cuba lobby group really didn’t come into existence until 1980 (Haney and Vanderbush 2005 ) and explaining how this ethnic group has continued to succeed in not just sustaining, but in many ways strengthening the US embargo in spite of the near disappearance of Cuba as a focus of US foreign policy, offers an opportunity to analytically and conceptually separate the mechanisms of domestic political influence from other influences on foreign policy. The success and ongoing effectiveness of the Cuba lobby cannot be explained in terms of high politics or external dynamics such as systemic, strategic, or economic imperatives. It can only be explained in terms of the efforts of the ethnic lobby and domestic political sources of foreign policy. Thus US policy toward Cuba presents a critical case. The isolation of the domestic factors in the case means that any theory, model, or explanation for the dynamics of interest group influence upon foreign policy must be able to account for the Cuba case and any argument against domestic influences upon foreign policy must offer a plausible alternative explanation for this case.

Congress and US Foreign Policy

Unsurprisingly, with ethnic lobbies of the US government as the most common subject of analysis in the study of interest groups and foreign policy, the literature on US congressional politics is usually the predominant theoretical foundation for analysis. Many of the recent studies engage the concept of entrepreneurship (i.e. Carter and Scott 2004 ) and use ethnic foreign policy lobbies to examine the ability or the mechanisms that Congress can utilize to drive the foreign policy agenda independent of, or contrary to, the leadership of the executive branch. This is a point that is particularly salient in the recent examinations of Cuba, but more generally, the dynamic of congressional entrepreneurship increases the “permeability” (Rubenzer 2008 ) of US foreign policy to interest groups. In terms of domestic sources of foreign policy, the US Congress is clearly more than simply a conduit for interest group access. In fact, in many ways it should be considered independently as a domestic source of foreign policy (see the overview offered by Ripley and Lindsay 1993 ). For the most part, examinations of theory, practice, process, and outcome of congressional involvement in US foreign policy, including the ethnic lobby literature, share a largely uncontested theoretical and conceptual core defined by the constitutional legacy of a division of powers between the executive and legislative branches of the US government. For a researcher unfamiliar with this area, a well balanced description of this conceptual core is provided by Carter and Scott ( 2004 ).

The recent research on congressional involvement in US foreign policy can be characterized as a debate over different aspects of the relative balance between the presidency and the legislative branch (Warburg 1989 ; Hersman 2000 ; Scott and Carter 2002 ). Consistent across nearly all of the research is the agreement that an era of presidential dominance in US foreign policy that could be largely attributed to the international political necessities of World War II and the Cold War was brought to an end by the Vietnam War. In the wake of Vietnam, the White House was subject to increasing congressional scrutiny, significant challenges to executive leadership in foreign policy, and far greater congressional assertiveness (Carter and Scott 2004 ). The resulting balance between Congress and the President, the trends in that balance, and questions of which branch does or should lead foreign policy are points that remain contested.

Interest Groups and Trade Policy

One of the more unusual aspects of the domestic sources of foreign policy literature has to be the estrangement of the study of interest groups as a domestic source of foreign policy from the literature on interest groups and trade policy formation. The division between these literatures is most obvious in the bibliographies of the works, where there is little if any overlap of references between the two avenues of research. However, it doesn’t take much of an examination of one of the more recent and more prominent works on interest groups and trade policy (Grossman and Helpman 2002 ) to understand why. Unlike the process and structural focus of the interest groups and foreign policy literature, the core of the trade policy research is built upon an economics and econometric approach to theory and research. Grossman and Helpman ( 2002 ) provide a key text for engaging this field, but even for a scholar with a reasonably extensive background in formal models and econometric analyses this literature presents a challenge.

The theoretical concepts in this economics-based literature on interest groups and trade policy are similar to the game theoretic, spatial approach to international negotiations which, ironically enough for the points made above, originates in the study of Congress (Weingast 1979 ) and is refined or adapted for the study of foreign policy and international negotiations by Hinich and Munger ( 1997 ), Bueno de Mesquita ( 1997 ), Kugler and Feng ( 1997 ), and several others. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying, the general idea pursued by both is to identify “win-sets” or ranges of possible equilibriums defined by overlapping, usually curvilinear, indifference curves. Both involve formal representations of the utilities derived from multilevel games, and actors are usually engaged in multiple, simultaneous interactions. Communication flows, particularly in terms of informational asymmetries, are theoretically significant in both. However, unlike international negotiations where “win sets” need to include all of a small number of actors, the “win sets” in the interest groups and trade studies involve a large number of actors and must be directly integrated with formal models for building winning legislative coalitions.

Media as a Domestic Source of Foreign Policy

As a preface to this brief discussion of media as a domestic source of foreign policy, it is critical to emphasize the word “domestic.” The role of media and communication in international relations figures large in this compendium, and there is an entire essay dedicated to “Foreign Policy and Communication.” This is a brief summary of the elements of that literature that are particularly relevant to a domestic sources of foreign policy perspective.

The Rosenau edited volume on domestic sources of foreign policy ( 1967 ) includes a chapter on mass communication (Cohen 1967 ), but very idea of a point of origin for media as a domestic source of foreign policy is probably inappropriate. Instead a planetary nebula image, or some other analogy that captures the idea of disparate elements coalescing into something almost definable is probably a better way to approach the subject. The process of coalescing into something coherent began somewhere in the mid-1980s, but most of what is now referenced as the more relevant research was included as part of broader works on media’s role in politics, such as Bennett’s News: The Politics of Illusion ( 1983 ). There were several studies specific to foreign policy, such as Cutler’s “Foreign Policy on Deadline” ( 1984 ) and Hallin’s The “Uncensored War” ( 1986 ). It is difficult to say when exactly these elements began to coalesce, but Serfaty ( 1991 ) published an edited volume on the news media in foreign policy in 1991 . In 1993 , what was probably the first, media-centered generalized model of foreign policy decision making was published (Van Belle 1993 ) and by the time the Bennett and Paletz edited volume Taken By Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and US Foreign Policy in the Gulf War was published ( 1994 ), media as part of the domestic side of the foreign policy decision-making process had clearly become something identifiable in the broader literature.

Part of the timing of this coalescence can be attributed to the methodological challenge of engaging the content of the media. When Cohen contributed his chapter to Rosenau’s 1967 edited volume, the content analysis tools to integrate media coverage into the study of foreign policy decision making simply did not exist. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that advances in coding methodologies could be combined with technological advances that made the computing resources for data management and analysis capable of dealing with the huge volumes of media content necessary for empirical study. However, the role of the media in Vietnam, the Sahal drought and the Somalia famine also could be cited as an influence pushing media into the forefront of public debates on world politics and foreign policy, and as such these events are probably just as relevant to the timing of the coalescence.

As should be obvious by the number of essays in the compendium devoted to international communication, media influence IR and foreign policy in a wide variety of ways, culture, surveillance, privacy, commerce, and diplomacy, it can be difficult to find an aspect of international politics where media are not considered a part of modern international politics. Out of all this, two aspects of media are specifically relevant to media and domestic sources of foreign policy. The first is the way the media serve as an arena of domestic political competition within democracies, and the second is the communicative role that media play in the formation of public opinions that are specific to and critical to foreign policy decision making. These two elements do not seem to be separable as all models appear to represent or assume an interactive relationship between democratic political competition and public opinion.

Media as an Arena of Domestic Political Competition

The domestic political imperatives mode of foreign policy decision making (Van Belle 1993 ) explicitly represents the domestic news media as an arena of domestic political competition and argues that they are the defining element of modern democratic foreign policy. It attempts to integrate concepts such as the rally-round-the-flag effect, media, and salience as an indicator of domestic political risks, costs and benefits into a stepwise mode of an iterated foreign policy decision process. The key argument is that the costs, risks and rewards for the foreign policy decision maker arise primarily out of the media-dominated domestic political arena, and the potential outcome of the policy is only relevant in the way it influences the domestic support for the leadership. This provides an explanation for why policies with almost no chance of resolving an international conflict, such as economic sanctions, are so often chosen. Those hopeless actions provide a beneficial image of action on a salient issue but their failure poses little if any risk to the leader’s domestic political support (Van Belle 1993 ).

Two notable lines of research have followed directly from this model. One adds an agency theory perspective to extend the media and domestic imperatives model to bureaucratic foreign policy (described below); the other has used the model to explore the role of the media in dehumanization as a key element in the foreign policy decision making related to violent international conflict.

Press Freedom, Dehumanization, and Getting to War

Ben Hunt ( 1997 ) argued that dehumanization of the enemy in the eyes of the domestic populace is a necessary condition that must be established before a leader can choose to go to war, and he also argued that the mass media was the primary means by which this dehumanization is accomplished. A parallel argument was developed from the domestic imperatives model but with a focus on the democratic peace (Van Belle 1997 ), arguing that press freedom, when it exists in two opposing countries, plays a key role in preventing the use of the mass media to dehumanize an opponent. As a result, shared press freedom prevents either leader from inflicting casualties upon an opponent. Hunt’s analysis examines the content of domestic media in the lead-up to wars and finds clear evidence of dehumanization, and Van Belle ’s analysis clearly demonstrates the precise pattern of behavior expected if the dehumanization as a necessary condition argument is correct and if the interdomestic communication enabled by shared press freedom prevents dehumanization. The series of studies that follow from the Van Belle ( 1997 ) study integrates these two lines of thought and shows that beyond just preventing war between liberal polities, shared press freedom is associated with a complete absence of lethal conflicts (Van Belle 2000 ).

A second wave of studies are just now appearing as variations on the dehumanization arguments and the role of media across the domestic/international divide, and are being applied to other issue areas, such as human rights (Whitten-Woodring 2009 ), but perhaps more interesting in terms of a summary of the broader field of media as a domestic source of foreign policy is the way this line of studies fits as one of many approaches to the concept of transparency in foreign policy decision making.

Transparency

In terms of media as a domestic aspect of foreign policy decision making, the concept of transparency is applied in two ways. First, there is a permeability of the state to external sources of information, which is how the press freedom arguments utilize the concept. The second is about internal transparency, which refers to the openness of a state’s government to media scrutiny. An edited volume on the subject (Lord and Finel 2000 ) provides a valuable entry point into this eclectic literature. In the years since 2000 , technology has grown to become an even more prominent issue.

The CNN Effect

Some readers might be surprised that the CNN effect is not the most prominent aspect of a summary of the news media as a domestic influence upon foreign policy decision making. However, most scholars studying media and foreign policy approach the CNN effect with extreme caution and discussing the reasons for that caution is probably the best way to present it here. Several comprehensive summaries of the literature are available (see Gilboa 2005 ) and need not be replicated here.

From the moment the term was coined, the CNN effect was immediately presumed to have suddenly altered the very nature of foreign policy (Kennan 1993 ; Mathews 1994 ) and global politics. From that starting point, the scientific and academic study of the possibility of a CNN effect was put in an unusual position. Instead of beginning with an idea and slowly building the evidence needed to convince skeptics, academic researchers were presented with the equivalent of a scientific fait accompli and the result was a debate that skipped right past any concerted effort to rigorously explore a proposed relationship and launched directly into debates about how the new media-driven foreign policy environment might usurp democracy, or prevent carefully considered policy choice.

However, even in the cases that might be offered as the most obvious examples, such as Somalia, the claim that leaders had lost control of policy to the whims of media coverage was immediately shown to be dubious (e.g., Livingston and Eachus 1995 ). More generally, even when the narrowest definition of the CNN effect was employed, the degree to which news coverage actually drove Western states to intervene in complex humanitarian emergencies was unclear, and almost certainly overstated (Jakobsen 1996 ; 2000 ; Natsios 1996 ; Strobel 1997 ). At the extreme, the CNN effect has been argued to be limited to the period of policy uncertainty between the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks (Robinson 2005 ), or even an illusion created by a few high-profile cases (Natsios 1996 ; Van Belle 2009 ).

Bureaucratic Responsiveness to the Media

News media coverage and the international response to disasters is an area related to the CNN effect that is likely to expand in both scope and attention in the near future. While the salience of recent disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina are part of the reason for a spike in scholarly attention, the fact that disaster assistance provides a window into the theoretical foundations of the bureaucratic aspects of foreign policy decision making is probably more important than the specific subject of study. This collection of studies combines an agency theory approach to understanding democratic bureaucracies (e.g., Wood and Waterman 1991 ) with the media’s role in domestically driven foreign policy (Van Belle 1993 ). The result is a model that expects foreign policy bureaucracies to try to avoid political punishment by staying in step with public demands for their actions or services. Taking their cues from elected officials, the bureaucrats use domestic news media salience to monitor public demand and respond to it accordingly. The effect is particularly clear in the bureaucratically dominated foreign aid decision (Van Belle et al. 2004 ).

Public Diplomacy

Public diplomacy is largely an applied field, and it largely studies the practice of intentionally using media to influence the domestic public opinion of other nations. From an academic perspective it is particularly interesting in the way it turns the question of media as a domestic source of foreign policy upon its head. Instead of media acting as a connection between the public and the government, or as a proxy measure for domestic public opinion, the media are treated as a tool for influencing publics. This can range from marketing style media and advertising campaigns to alter one public’s image of another country, to the propaganda of the Nazis.

For academics, the prominence of government public diplomacy programs can make it difficult to sort through to the underlying ideas, and the best resource for engaging or exploring the academic side of this literature is probably the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy. It maintains a substantial collection of web-based resources for engaging the extensive literature, including an archive of book reviews. A few of the most recent books that are particularly relevant to the academic include Cull’s ( 2008 ) book on the US Information Agency, Seib’s ( 2008 ) book on Al Jazeera , and the book by Bennett et al. ( 2007 ) on when the media fails to move governments and leaders. However, like the other works mentioned above, these are just entry points for a vast body of research.

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Links to Digital Materials

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. At http://people-press.org/ , accessed Jul. 2009. An independent, nonpartisan public opinion research organization, based in Washington, DC. Among its other activities in the US, the Center periodically fields major surveys on the news media, social issues, and international affairs.

German Marshall Fund of the United States. At www.gmfus.org/template/index.cfm , accessed Jul. 2009. A nonpartisan American public policy and grant-making institution which supports individuals and institutions working on transatlantic issues, convening leaders to discuss the most pressing transatlantic themes, and examining ways in which transatlantic cooperation can address a variety of global policy challenges. It mounts an extensive annual survey regarding foreign policy attitudes in Europe and the United States.

Program on International Policy Attitudes. At http://pipa.org/ , accessed Jul. 2009. Established in 1992 at the University of Maryland, PIPA publishes a wide range of surveys regarding foreign policy attitides from around the world in both developed and developing countries.

Roper Center Public Opinion Archives. At www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/ , accessed Jul. 2009. The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut holds a major archive of surveys of public opinion. The collection includes over 17,000 datasets and ranges from the 1930s to the present. Most of the data are from the US, but over 50 nations are represented.

Chicago Council on Global Affairs. At www.ccfr.org/ , accessed Jul. 2009. Founded in 1922 as the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the Council acts as a forum for the discussion of world affairs and US foreign policy. Every 2 years it undertakes a large-scale public opinion study that compares American public opinion with elite opinion across a range of foreign policy issues.

Eurobarometer. At http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/index_en.htm , accessed Jul. 2009. The website of the Public Opinion Analysis sector of the European Commission gives access to Eurobarometer surveys on a great variety of Europe-wide issues, including climate change, the economy, and defense.

Afrobarometer. At www.afrobarometer.org/index.html , accessed Jul. 2009. An independent, nonpartisan research project that measures the social, political, and economic atmosphere in Africa. Afrobarometer surveys are conducted in more than a dozen African countries and are repeated on a regular cycle. They ask a standard set of questions so that countries can be systematically compared.

Americasbarometer. At http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop , accessed Jul. 2009. The AmericasBarometer is one of the activities of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) hosted at Vanderbilt University. It measures democratic values and behaviors in the Americas using national probability samples of voting-age adults. The latest round of surveys, in 2008, included 23 countries throughout the Americas.

Asia Barometer. At www.asianbarometer.org/ , accessed Jul. 2009. This regional survey network encompasses research teams from 13 East Asian political systems (Japan, Mongolia, South Koreas, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia) and five South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal). The teams share a common framework and methodology to ensure that the data are reliable and comparable on the issues of citizens’ attitudes and values toward politics, power, reform, and democracy in Asia.

Douglas Foyle composed the section on public opinion and foreign policy; Douglas Van Belle composed the section on interest groups and foreign policy and the section on the media as a domestic source of foreign policy.

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Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy

Countries differ in size, socioeconomic development, and political regime. They also vary in their political institutionalization and societal structures, military and economic capabilities, and strategic cultures. In addition, public opinion, national role conceptions, decision making rules and belief systems, and personality traits of political leaders vary from one state to another. These differences directly affect both foreign policymaking process and foreign policy decisions. Whereas the extant literature on foreign policy analysis (FPA) lacks a grand theory as to how domestic factors influence foreign policy and under what conditions these factors become more important, a large body of work shows that a state’s foreign policy relies heavily on unit-level characteristics, and it is not completely shaped by systemic-structural constraints and opportunities based on distribution of power and military capabilities.

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Abstract In the last two decades, far-right populists have formed governments all over the world. However, systematic analyses on how far-right leaders recreate their countries' foreign policy identity are still underdeveloped. In this article, we analyse how far-right populist leaders use their conservative identity-set to align with other right-wing governments and how they use the same conservative repertoire to deal with ideological rivals. More precisely, we argue that these leaders tend to overemphasize a deep conservative identity-set towards other far-right populist governments, something we call ‘thick conservative identity’. This profoundly conservative identity-set is composed of three national role conceptions: anti-globalism, nationalism and anti-foe. However, they do not repeat this identity-set towards ideological rivals, preferring to use a more nuanced and contradictory one, something we call ‘thin conservative identity’. The trigger of such difference is the anticipated mutual expectation of conservatism between Ego and Alter, in which Ego mimics Alter's deep conservatism. We use Jair Bolsonaro's alignment with Donald Trump and Bolsonaro's relationship with China as illustrative cases. We use the main concepts of role theory to understand both how conservative alignments are created and how far-right governments deal with ideological rivals.

National Role Conceptions, Domestic Constraints and the New ‘Normalcy’ in German Foreign Policy: the Eurozone Crisis, Libya and Beyond

Role conceptions, crises, and georgia’s foreign policy.

This article explores the scope conditions of national role conceptions as reference points for foreign policy decision making during crises. It aims to contribute to a refined perspective of the agency of new states undergoing socialization processes in relations with significant others. Drawing on a primary material consisting of interviews with Georgian and US officials, the article analyzes the significance of Georgia’s role conceptions in the country’s relations with the USA in relation to two major crises: the 2007 riots in Tbilisi and the 2008 war with Russia. The article posits that crises provide situational circumstances where the requirements of appropriate behavior associated with role expectations may enter into conflict with the demands of the immediate situation. In order to resolve ensuing role conflicts, actors face the need to both rationalize role expectations, and to compensate for departures from them. In turn, these strategies relate to the possibility for change and stability in role conceptions, and by extension their enactment in foreign policy. The analysis of the Georgian government’s management of the two crises demonstrates actions that implied both rationalization and compensation, aiming to retain the credibility of its existing role conceptions in the eyes of its US counterparts.

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International socialization processes vs. israeli national role conceptions: can role theory integrate ir theory and foreign policy analysis, domestic political regime changes and third world voting realignments in the united nations, 1946–84.

This article presents a cross-national analysis of the relationship between domestic political regime changes and voting realignments of Third World nations in the United Nations (UN). It seeks to move beyond existing research that has assumed that foreign policy is rooted in political and economic structures and changes only when a political revolution occurs. It argues that a wider variety of regime changes—ranging from those involving mainstream political parties to milder ones such as factional shifts in single-party regimes—can also provoke major realignments. Using a new data set on Third World regimes, the article examines the impact of regime changes for eighty-seven nations on their UN voting patterns during the period from 1946 to 1984. Although the findings indicate that revolutions are most likely to provoke major voting realignments, they also show that the more frequent, nonrevolutionary types of regime change are associated with many voting realignments. A major implication of these findings is that foreign policy changes reflect a complex set of domestic regime factors, including leadership belief systems and internal political constraints, as well as aspects of political structure.

Making sense of a changing world: foreign policy ideas and Italy’s national role conceptions after 9/11

In a rapidly changing world, middle powers with no obvious role to play on the global stage have the difficult task to read the international environment in order to formulate and implement a coherent and possibly effective foreign policy. In order to do so, decision makers either reproduce old ideas or develop new ones. Considering the ideas put forward in their inaugural speeches by Prime Ministers and Foreign Affairs Ministers in office after 2001, we suggest that Italy’s institutional actors appear to be aware of the changes occurred in the international system after 1989, and in particular after 9/11. The national role conceptions sustaining Italy’s present foreign policy goals reflect such awareness, being quite different with respect to the picture offered by Holsti in his seminal work published in 1970. Ideas expressing foreign policy goals are also reasonably well grounded in ideas on how the world works or linked to operational ideas, yet the country’s foreign policy appears feebly focused, even though focus is explicitly very much sought for. Some explanations for such a lack of focus which makes Italy’s foreign policy design rather ineffective are offered.

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Foreign Policy Belief Systems and Operational Code Analysis

Henry Kissinger once remarked, “As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make.” It is common sense that a state’s foreign policy cannot be explained without reference to the beliefs of such leaders as Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, or Kim Jong Un, to name a few. It is, therefore, ironic that leaders have mattered little for much of the international relations discipline’s history. Structural approaches with foci on the distribution of power, international institutions and domestic politics have been dominant. To be sure, scholarship on belief systems has been present since the 1950s. Early key concepts included the decision maker’s “definition of the situation,” the “ecological environment,” and the “attitudinal prism.” This scholarship laid an important foundation; however, at the time, it did not generate competitive research programs. Agent-centered approaches remained secondary and beliefs were seen as residual variables. They were also seen as “unobservable”—difficult to assess and operationalize. Indeed, rigorous methods that would enable the scientific study of belief systems have long been absent. Over time such challenges were addressed successfully, and these efforts were catalyzed by scholarly advances and also by real-world developments. In the real world, it was mainly the end of the Cold War that illustrated the insufficiency of structural theories. Under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union took a fundamentally new course, and it gave up power. The dominant structural theories did neither predict the ensuing events nor could they explain them. They were “caught flat-footed,” as one scholar wrote. What really mattered, it seemed, was what these theories did not pay much attention to: namely decision makers’ belief-systems. Of particular relevance are decision makers’ operational code beliefs. Along with the general literature on belief systems, the operational code research program began in the 1950s. It gained still more prominence with the work of Alexander George and Ole Holsti in the 1960s and 1970s. A decision maker’s operational code is constituted by his answers to questions such as: What is the essential nature of political life? Is the political universe essentially one of harmony or conflict? What is the fundamental character of one’s political opponents? What is the best approach for selecting goals for political action? The most significant advances in the operational code research program were then made in the 1980s and beyond by Stephen Walker and his students. The progress occurred on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical plane, and through their work the research program has become, (and continues to be) a mainstay in contemporary international relations scholarship.

Environmental Change and Foreign Policy: A Survey of Theory

Acomprehensive understanding of international environmental politics re quires attention to foreign policy. In this essay we describe a wide range of theories and approaches to foreign policy and international relations, with emphasis on how they can help us to better understand foreign policy in the environmental issue area. We organize the theories into three categories: systemic theories, which emphasize the influence of the international system, including the distribution of power within it; societal theories, which focus our attention on domestic politics and culture; and state-centric theories, which find answers to questions about foreign policy within the structure of the state and the individuals who promulgate and implement foreign policies in the name of a given country. Within this presentation of various theories, we highlight the influence of power, interests and ideas.

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• International Security

Realism and Domestic Politics: A Review Essay

• Fareed Zakaria
• The MIT Press
• Volume 17, Number 1, Summer 1992
• pp. 177-198
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Article Contents

Politicization, populism, and foreign policy, case, data, and methods, poland’s domestic political context and politicization dynamics, the politicization of poland’s foreign policy under pis.

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Foreign Policy as the Continuation of Domestic Politics by Other Means: Pathways and Patterns of Populist Politicization

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David Cadier, Foreign Policy as the Continuation of Domestic Politics by Other Means: Pathways and Patterns of Populist Politicization, Foreign Policy Analysis , Volume 20, Issue 1, January 2024, orad035, https://doi.org/10.1093/fpa/orad035

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This article argues that populism in power translates into a greater tendency to politicize foreign policy, in the sense of defining and articulating foreign policy preferences in opposition to political predecessors, using foreign policy as an instrument and ground to battle political opponents, and over-prioritizing domestic incentives and considerations over external ones. Paradoxically, compared to other classical determinants of foreign policy, how populism relates to domestic political competition has received scant attention. Yet, populist actors’ strategies in dealing with political opposition are at the same time distinctive and consequential. This article advances a typological theoretical framework shedding light on the pathways, patterns, and implications of populist politicization, which it illustrates empirically with reference to the case of Poland.

Este artículo argumenta que el populismo en el poder se traduce en una mayor tendencia a politizar la política exterior, en el sentido de definir y articular las preferencias en materia de política exterior en oposición a los predecesores políticos, de utilizar la política exterior como instrumento y terreno para combatir a los oponentes políticos, y de priorizar en exceso los incentivos y las consideraciones internas sobre las externas. Paradójicamente, la forma en que el populismo se relaciona con la competencia política interna ha recibido escasa atención en comparación con otros determinantes clásicos de la política exterior. Sin embargo, las estrategias de los agentes populistas para hacer frente a la oposición política son, al mismo tiempo, distintivas y consecuentes. Este artículo propone un marco teórico tipológico que pretende arrojar luz sobre las vías, patrones e implicaciones de la politización populista, la cual ilustramos empíricamente con referencia al caso de Polonia.

Cet article avance que le populisme au pouvoir se traduit en une propension accrue à la politisation de la politique étrangère, en termes de formulation et d'articulation des préférences de politique étrangère en opposition de celles des gouvernants précédents, d'utilisation de la politique étrangère comme un instrument et une arène pour attaquer les opposants politiques, et de priorisation à l'excès des considérations et motivations de politique intérieure au détriment des dynamiques et finalités internationales. De façon paradoxale, en comparaison des autres déterminants traditionnels de la politique étrangère, la façon dont le populisme se rapporte à la compétition politique nationale n'a reçu que peu d'attention. Pourtant, les stratégies des acteurs populistes à l'égard de l'opposition politique sont à la fois distinctives et portent à conséquence. Cet article propose un cadre théorique typologique qui met en lumière les vecteurs, caractéristiques et implications de la politisation populiste et qui est appliqué empiriquement au cas de la Pologne.

After being elected into office, populist actors seize the reins of their countries’ foreign policy while remaining engaged at the same time in domestic political competition, though now with a view to retain rather than conquer power. The way they engage in the latter is bound to have repercussions on how they conduct the former. Populism is, indeed, defined and characterized by a distinctive manner of “practicing adversarial politics” ( Urbinati 2019 , 38)—that is, of representing, battling, and mobilizing against political opponents. As documented by the scholarship in Foreign Policy Analysis, the type of strategy chosen by governments in dealing with political opposition is in turn a key mediating factor in how and to what extent domestic politics’ affects foreign policy ( Hagan 1995 , 130; Hudson 2014 , 153). The way governing populists relate to their political competitors and predecessors is therefore likely to be an important parameter in how populism influences foreign policy and thus requires analytical attention. How does populism feed the politicization of foreign policy? Of what kind, in what ways, and with what implications?

The foreign policies of populist actors have recently become the focus of a vibrant and fast-expanding scholarly literature (for an overview, see Destradi, Cadier, and Plagemann 2021 ; Chryssogelos et al. 2023 ; Wajner and Giurlando 2023 ). A first, seminal line of research has analyzed how and whether populism translates into specific preferences, dispositions, or orientations in foreign affairs (“populist foreign policy”) ( Chryssogelos 2017 ; Verbeek and Zaslove 2017 ; Plagemann and Destradi 2019 ). Another, more recent line of investigation has examined how populism relates to some traditional determinants of foreign policy, such as leadership traits, operational codes, role conception, political ideology, national identity, or historical memory ( Cadier and Szulecki 2020 ; Özdamar and Ceydilek 2020 ; Wehner and Thies 2021 ; Friedrichs 2022 ; Ostermann and Stahl 2022 ; Thiers and Wehner 2022 ). Yet, in this context, the effects of populist governments’ domestic political strategies—another classic determinant of foreign policy—have, by contrast, received little attention. This is somehow paradoxical considering that, by definition, populism is grounded in and emerges from domestic politics and that populist actors’ tendency to politicize foreign policy once in office is one of the features best documented across cases and regions—from India to the US and from Argentina to Hungary ( Chryssogelos 2017 , 16; Destradi and Plagemann 2019 , 717; Wojczewski 2019 , 296; Visnovitz and Jenne 2021 , 684; Fouquet 2023 , 10). The few FPA works looking into the domestic political strategies of populist actors provide valuable insights but rarely focus on adversarial politics as such. Daniel Wajner (2022 ) has shed light on how governing populists seek internal legitimacy by projecting the “people” transnationally and by identifying enemies abroad, while Stephan Fouquet (2023 ) has shown that the personalistic–plebiscitarian nature of populist mobilization leads populist actors to be guided by political opportunism and the desire to maximize popular support in foreign policy decision-making. I argue, however, that confronting political opponents is precisely at the core of these populists’ legitimation, mobilization, and popularity-maximizing strategies and that it needs, therefore, to be made central in theorizing their effects on foreign policy. 1 Similarly, while there is a near intuitive consensus in the literature that governing populists tend to politicize foreign policy, the patterns, pathways, and implications of this politicization have rarely been specified, let alone theorized or systematically examined empirically. The two notable exceptions in this regard—Angelos Chryssogelos (2019 ) documenting patterns of “nationalist re-politicization” and “societal re-politicizations” in Greece and Sandra Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş (2022 ) contrasting “anti-elitist politicization” and “people-centric” politicization in India and Turkey 2 —have not exhausted the topic as they focus on a specific, issue-oriented, and elite-focused form of politicization. It does not amount to the sole—or, this article argues, necessarily the main—type of populist politicization, and, as such, the latter invites additional theory development ( Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş 2022 , 489; Ostermann and Stahl 2022 , 17).

I argue that populism translates into a greater proclivity to use foreign policy as the continuation of domestic politics by other means. 3 More specifically, the logics of differentiation, mobilization, and salience inherent to populism feed populist actors’ tendency to define their foreign policy preferences and choices in opposition to those of their political predecessors (“counter-step foreign policy”); invest foreign policy as an instrument and as a ground to battle political opponents (“battleground foreign policy”); and over-prioritize domestic political considerations over external ones in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy (“subdued foreign policy”). As such, more than from an ideological or political commitment to move it to the realm of public choice (or “back to the people”), populist politicization proceeds from using foreign policy as a repertoire, terrain, and instrument in dealing with the political opposition.

The article begins by setting forth a framework theorizing three pathways and three corresponding patterns of populist politicization of foreign policy. In doing so, it builds on an action-oriented and opponents-focused conceptualization of politicization borrowed from public policy, on a syncretic approach to populism as a political practice that relies on insights from comparative politics, and on the FPA scholarship on opposition politics and its effects. Combined, these lenses allow reaching a two-step theoretical objective: theorizing (a) governing populists’ distinct ways of relating to political opposition and (b) how it spills over and shapes foreign policy. Subsequently, the data and method employed are presented, as well as some elements of context on the empirical case. Methodologically, the article relies on a building-block approach to typological theorizing ( George and Bennett 2005 , 233–44) and on a case-study analysis of Poland. Central Europe stands out as a region that is often regarded as a “laboratory” of populism in power ( Enyedi 2020 ), yet it has rarely been studied under the prism of populist politicization of foreign policy. Finally, the typological patterns and pathways of populist politicization, and their implications, are illustrated empirically by examining the foreign policy practices of Poland’s populist right-wing government in power from 2015 to 2023. In conclusion, and so as to increase their generalization potential, these frameworks and findings are confronted with other national and regional cases of populist governments, with the help of the available scholarship.

The approach chosen allows the article to make a three-fold contribution. First, it advances the theorization of the relationship between populism and foreign policy by building on a syncretic approach to populism as a representational and mobilizational practice: while most studies rely on the ideational or discursive conceptualizations of populism, this article also builds on insights from the politico-strategic and, to a lesser extent, stylistic approaches. Second, the article contributes to the broader discussion on the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy, one that has been largely dominated by the scholarship on party politics (see, for instance, Raunio and Wagner 2020 ; Hofmann and Martill 2021 ), while by contrasts the strategies of government in dealing with political opposition have received less (recent) attention. Third, the analysis adds to the literature on the politicization of public policy and of foreign policy in particular. It documents patterns of action-oriented and government-initiated politicization, while most studies focus on issue-oriented and non-executive politicization.

Action-Oriented, Government-Initiated and Opponents-Focused Politicization

If a “Sartori Concept Stretching Competition” was to be organized in political science (see Sartori 1970 ), both politicization and populism would be strong contenders. Starting with the first, variegations in scholarly conceptualizations notably stem from differences in terms of level and object of analysis: individual political behavior, national political system, or international institutions such as the EU ( Zürn 2019 ). The few studies available on the populist politicization of foreign policy ( Chryssogelos 2019 ; Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş 2022 ) mainly rely on conceptual approaches developed for the third level, that of regional or international governance. There, politicization is authoritatively defined by Michael Zürn as “the making of collectively binding decisions a matter or an object of public discussions” ( Zürn 2014 , 50) and, elsewhere, as “moving something into the realm of public choice” ( Zürn 2019 , 978). Another seminal definition reasoning at the same level identifies the “expansion of actors and audience” in political decision-making as one of the empirical benchmarks of politicization, along with “salience” and “polarization of opinions” on a given issue or policy domain ( de Wilde, Leupold, and Schmidtke 2016 ).

However, there is little evidence that populist governments seek to meaningfully broaden the public debate about, or involve a greater number of actors in, their foreign policy decisions (for instance, by organizing referenda, public consultations, or meaningful parliamentary debates), except maybe when it comes to migration. On the contrary, populists tend to centralize foreign policymaking, sideline civil society actors and foreign policy administrations, and castigate political opponents as traitors to disqualify their inputs. This invites turning to another conceptualization of politicization, namely, the one developed by the literature in public policy analysis for the national political level, which in fact appears better tailored to FPA’s middle-range theoretical focus. In this article, politicization is thus understood as “the use of public policies by elected representatives as a political resource in the competition to exercise political power” ( Hassenteufel and Surel 2008 , 81; see also Hassenteufel 2011 , 157-186). It remains about “making previously unpolitical matters political” ( Zürn 2019 , 978), but the main entrepreneurs of politicization are governing actors rather than non-governing ones. In addition, in this understanding, politics (or the political) is conceived as an “activity, action or conflict” rather than as a “sphere, system or field” ( Wiesner 2021b , 4). Such action-based (rather than spatially connoted) conception of politics leads to approaching politicization as an active use of contingency in “creating controversy, conflict, contentiousness, or contestation” ( Wiesner 2021a , 268) and allows paying attention to the politicization not just of issues but also of actors ( Déloye and Haegel 2019 ).

In paving the conceptual ground toward theorizing how populism feeds the politicization of foreign policy, it appears useful to briefly reflect on how it can be distinguished from non-populist politicization or even technocratic de-politicization . The opposition with the later dynamic, which amounts to removing an issue from the sphere of political debate (for instance, by invoking its technicality), is rather straightforward. It is interesting to note, though, that technocratic de-politicization and (governing) populist politicization originate at the same level and invites, therefore, the same empirical focus—namely, governments’ actions, documents, practices, and speech acts ( Wiesner 2021a , 271). De-politicization has been identified as the “dominant model of statecraft” ( Flinders and Wood 2014 , 135) in the twenty-first century, not least as it allows reducing decisions costs associated with ideological controversies, and the baseline expectation for contemporary governments should therefore be to de-politicize rather than politicize foreign policy. Populist governments thus seem to stand out as an exception in that sense. To be sure, instances of non-populist politicization of foreign policy exist and have notably been thoroughly documented by the scholarship on diversionary war (for an overview, see Pickering and Kisangani 2005 ). But these insights precisely help distinguishing and delineating patterns of populist politicization in the sense that the latter, as will be demonstrated below, are not of a diversionary nature: Foreign policy is used not to deflect but to re-focus attention on domestic politics. More generally, the difference between non-populist and populist politicization is also situated in the various motivations (building policy coalitions or retaining political power) and strategies (accommodation, insulation, or mobilization) identified by the scholarship on oppositional politics and foreign policy ( Hagan 1993 ). Comparatively, non-populists relate more to the first motivation and make greater use of the first two strategies than populists (see blow).

As made clear by this brief discussion, the difference between populists and non-populists in how or whether they politicize foreign policy has less to do with a strict demarcation (either/or) than with a greater tendency (more/less)—just like the domestic and the foreign have to be thought as two ends of a continuum ( Rosenau 1997 ). This in turn invites conceptualizing populism in terms of degree or, in other words, as a practice (see Chryssogelos et al. 2023 , 15–17).

As populism remains an essentially contested concept and as its relationship to politicization is undertheorized, I chose to combine various conceptual lenses rather than adopting one over the others. This allows casting a wider net in identifying possible patterns and pathways of populist politicization of foreign policy. More crucially, I contend that these various lenses are complementary to the extent that they all have something to say about how populist actors relate to political opposition and, more generally, act in domestic politics, as well as about the implications for their foreign policy. Three distinctive populist logics—pertaining to differentiation, mobilization, and salience—can be identified in particular.

Populist Logic of Differentiation and Counter-Step Foreign Policy

The discursive, stylistic, and ideational approaches to populism all suggest that populism is less about being something than about not being something. First, following Ernesto Laclau, populism can be understood as a logic of political articulation (or discursive practice) by which the identity of the “people” as underdog is constructed in opposition to the “elite” as power ( Laclau 2005 ; Panizza and Stavrakakis 2021 ). The populist discourse constructs a chain of equivalence between unsatisfied social demands and through the “identification of social negativity” ( Laclau 2005 , 38), that is, by castigating the power seen as frustrating these demands in the first place. In that sense, populism very much amounts to an othering discourse: “there is no populism without discursive construction of an enemy—the ancien regime , the oligarchy, the Establishment or whatever” ( Laclau 2005 39). The “power” in opposition to which populists in office discursively construct their political identity can refer to cosmopolitan elites or supranational institutions, but also to previous governments and political opponents, though this has received less attention in the literature.

Foreign policy provides both a repertoire and a terrain for these articulatory practices. On the one hand, populist actors tend to amalgamate the domestic establishment and political opponents with foreign Others as “collaborative ‘enemy of the people’” ( Wojczewski 2019 , 296). On the other hand, they project the structural logic of populist discourse onto the international sphere and represent their non-populist predecessors as having served the interests of the “elite” of, and kept the country down as an “underdog” on, the international scene ( Cadier 2021 ). Both feed a politicization of foreign policy in the sense of articulating foreign policy contents with reference to domestic politics and notably lead populists to define their foreign policy in opposition to that of their predecessors.

The stylistic approach, which also understands populism as a practice but places the emphasis on aesthetic, embodied, and mediatized performances, suggests a similar logic of differentiation and pattern of definition in opposition. Populism’s stylistic transgression is established and affirmed in its antagonistic relationship to “proper” ways of doing politics: Populist actors rely on the sociocultural “low” and on “bad manners” to embody, and appeal to, the “people” against the technocratic “elites” ( Moffitt 2017 ; Ostiguy 2017 ). This populist “plebeian grammar” and antagonistic logic tends to be reproduced at the level of government in the ways of exercising public authority and making decisions ( Ostiguy and Moffitt 2021 , 50–51). Populist governments can thus be expected to use their foreign policy performances to mark a stylistic rupture with the “elites” and to define their foreign policy style in opposition to that of their political predecessors and opponents.

Rather than as practice, the ideational approach conceptualizes populism as a “thin ideology,” that is, as a mental map or logic of political imagination ( Stanley 2008 ; Hawkins et al. 2018 ). Though its explanatory focus is at the cognitive rather than discursive-performative level, its insights confirm populism’s inherent logic of differentiation and how it might feed the politicization of foreign policy. One of the common and defining coordinates of the populist mental map is anti-pluralism: Populists consider that they and they only are the true representatives of the “people” and, as a consequence, they tend to regard any political opposition as fundamentally illegitimate ( Müller 2016 ). Added to its characteristic Manichean logic ( Mudde 2004 , 544), the populist mental map can thus be expected to translate into certain cognitive and psychological dispositions toward perceiving, interpreting, and defining foreign policy with reference to political opponents. Donald Trump’s apparent obsession with vilipending and exiting Barrack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievements—from the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran to the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership—stands out as a paragon of such counter-step foreign policy.

I contend that the logic of differentiation inherent to populist political discourse, style, and imagination means that populist governments have a greater tendency to define their foreign policy identity, posture, and preferences in opposition to those of their political opponents and predecessors. This can be studied in two ways. First, through the content analysis of populist governments’ documents, speeches, and statements and the examination of how often they mention, and emphasize contrast with, their political opponents or predecessors in relation to foreign policy. Second, through within-case comparison and by analyzing existing contrasts with non-populist predecessors in terms of foreign policy outputs, performance, and implementation.

Populist Logic of Mobilization and Battleground Foreign Policy

Populism is not only a distinctive way to represent or perceive political opponents but also to deal with them. Following the politico-strategic approach, populism can be conceptualized as a distinct set of “methods and instruments [for] winning and exercising power” ( Weyland 2001 , 12). In this regard, populist actors exercise political authority based on “direct, unmediated, un-institutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers” ( Weyland 2001 , 14). This means, however, that they need to constantly mobilize their base and renew the loyalty of their supporters—hence populist actors’ tendency to treat “governing as a permanent campaign” ( Müller 2016 , 77). To intensify plebiscitarian and non-institutionalized support, populist actors notably “seek to direct the people toward a heroic mission,” such as “combating dangerous adversaries” at home and abroad ( Weyland 2017 , 58). They notably “declare war on” and “relentlessly attack” the political establishment ( Weyland 2022 , 17, 20). In other words, the castigation and de-legitimizing of political opponents is central to the populist logic of mobilization and self-legitimation. Foreign policy provides a privileged terrain for such tactics, for it offers a platform to project heroism and offers a cast of external villains or dangers that can be linked to domestic adversaries.

Though not concerned with populism as such, the work of Joe Hagan allows specifying further the various types of strategies available to governments in dealing with the political opposition, the conditions in which they are activated, and the repercussions they might have on foreign policy. He distinguishes between three such strategies: accommodation (bargaining, compromising, or avoiding controversies with the opposition), insulation (ignoring, overriding, or suppressing political opposition), and mobilization (confronting the opposition to mobilize support for, and assert the legitimacy of, the regime and its policies) ( Hagan 1993, 6–8; 1995 , 128–32). 4 As transpires clearly from the preceding discussion, populism firmly corresponds to the latter type, whereby governments “emphasize foreign threats in a way that also discredit domestic opponents” ( Hagan 1993 , 7). By contrast, it appears antithetic to the first two strategies' tendencies to, respectively, “avoid domestically controversial actions” or “insulate foreign policy issues from domestic politics” ( Hagan 1995 , 128, 131). Interestingly, in his cross-national comparative analysis, Hagan finds that the mobilization strategy is more commonly activated in autocratic regimes than in democratic ones. The fact that, though operating in democratic settings, populist actors rely on such strategy speaks to their distinctiveness in how they politicize foreign policy. Furthermore, Hagan shows that the choice of strategies is generally contingent on the location, strength, and intensity of the political opposition. In situations where the opposition is “distrusted” and “unlikely to be accommodated”—as is structurally the case for populism as explained above—“foreign policy is correspondingly a viable means for unifying the public and discrediting domestic adversaries” ( Hagan 1995 , 130). In other words, the legitimization logic and mobilization imperatives inherent to populism feed the politicization of foreign policy in the sense of putting the latter at the service of confronting domestic adversaries (battleground foreign policy). More concretely, this can translate into two patterns. On the one hand, populist governments are likely to use foreign policy issues to attempt to make their political opponents look “bad” (i.e., dangerous, treacherous and incompetent). On the other hand, populist governments can be expected to hunt down and root out from existing foreign policy structures their political adversaries and their affiliates. Several populist governments have in fact engaged in a systematic and large-scale personnel overhaul of their foreign ministries to disempower career diplomats but also to replace those seen as close to the previous government with political loyalists ( Lequesne 2021; Taş 2022a ; Müller and Gazsi 2023 ).

In sum, I contend that the logic of mobilization inherent to populism means that populist actors have a greater tendency to use foreign policy as a terrain and instrument to battle their domestic political opponents. This can be studied and operationalized in two ways. First, through qualitative content analysis and the examination of how often foreign policy is invoked in relation to attacking, discrediting, or delegitimizing political opponents or predecessors. Second, by investigating the extent to which foreign policy decisions and implementation are aimed at weakening the latter.

Populism and the Over-Prioritization of Domestic Politics over Foreign Policy

Populist actors’ drive to define and use foreign policy in opposition to their opponents or predecessors is complemented by, and reinforces, a proclivity to treat this realm as subjugated to their domestic political objectives.

By essence, foreign policy boils down to “mediating the two-way flow between internal and external dynamics” ( Hill 2015 , 28). Stated differently, it entails arbitrating between domestic and external considerations in formulating and implementing foreign policy. In analyzing the parameters and determinants of this arbitration, some scholars have emphasized the role of structural factors. Gerry Alons (2007 )argues, for instance, that, in middle power liberal democracies, external and internal polarity will determine whether domestic or international incentives take precedence in preference formation. According to her model, however, the high level of internal polarity prevailing in Poland (i.e., a state-dominated domestic structure where the government has the ability to pursue policies against the will of societal actors) ( Gerry Alons 2007 , 216) should have led the PiS government to prioritize external interests and objectives, contrary to what has been the case, as is detailed below. This suggests that populism might be a factor in this context. Other scholars, instead, place the emphasis on agent-level factors and shed light on how decision-makers’ cognitive dispositions, heuristics, and political strategies affect how they integrate domestic political considerations into their foreign policy calculations. Faced with “countless political issues that compete for their attention at any point in time,” governing actors will indeed “concentrate their cognitive capacity [and the aforementioned arbitration] primarily on issues which are amongst their uppermost concerns, that is, which they consider most salient” ( Oppermann and Spencer 2013 , 42). In particular, Alex Mintz (1993 ) suggests that decision-making in foreign policy is characterized by a sequential process, whereby leaders begin with eliminating the option that would heavily damage their domestic political prospects (non-compensatory phase) before selecting remaining options based on their utility in other substantive dimensions (e.g., strategic, diplomatic, economic, social, etc.) (compensatory phase). On his part, Fen Osler Hampson (1984 ) showed that decision-making elites will have a greater tendency to privilege domestic political considerations in defining and acting upon foreign policy crises when they feel vulnerable politically at home. In light of the analytical angle adopted in this article, I focus here on these agent-level factors in investigating how populism influences the arbitration between domestic and external incentives.

The inherent logic of populism—whether conceptualized as a political strategy, discourse, or thin ideology—leads populist governing actors to regard and treat domestic political considerations as more salient. First, the volatility and precariousness of plebiscitarian and non-institutionalized support make populists especially vulnerable, which leads them in turn to over-prioritize the domestic political realm and the structural imperative of permanent mobilization. As documented by Fouquet (2023 , 6), populism “foreshortens time horizons on the quickly moving indicators of domestic politics” and incites to “use policies as instrument for scoring immediate political points”: Populists do not move beyond the political and non-compensatory phase of foreign policy decision-making. Similarly, as a logic of articulation, populism seeks above all to “hegemonize the [domestic] public sphere” ( Panizza and Stavrakakis 2021 , 22), that is, to impose an ideal, universal, and exclusive representation of the social. Relatedly, in their foreign policy discourse, populist actors tend to place the emphasis on societal security more than on other components (e.g., military, economic, environmental, etc.) ( Löfflmann 2022 ). Finally, as a logic of political imagination, populism is above all concerned with defending the sovereignty of the “people” and its “heartland” ( Taggart 2000 ), which mainly evokes the national or domestic realm. For populists, the priority is often more to preserve the state from external influences than to transform its external environment —hence their relative disinterest in foreign policy and international affairs.

I contend that populist actors have a greater tendency to over-prioritize domestic political incentives and considerations over external ones in the formulation and conduct of foreign policy. This can be studied and operationalized in two ways. First, through process-tracing and by examining the respective influence of domestic political and external factors in explaining a concrete foreign policy decision. Second, through qualitative content analysis and by tracing possible discrepancies between populist actors’ stated foreign policy objectives and actual foreign policy outputs.

Populist politicization of foreign policy (action-based and actor-oriented)

The paper builds on a case study analysis of Poland, where the populist radical right party Law and Justice ( Prawo i Sprawiedliwość— PiS) has been in power from 2015 to 2023. This case is relevant to the empirical and theoretical analysis of populist politicization in several ways. First, Poland can be regarded as a “most-likely” case when it comes to the influence of populism on foreign policy because the PiS has been in control of executive power (government and presidency) for eight continuous years. Second, the case of Poland allows disentangling the dynamics of politicization and personalization—which often find themselves associated in the literature—as PiS’ all-powerful leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, has not been holding any executive functions during that time (except between October 2020 and June 2021). Third, the Polish case provides an opportunity to illustrate the specific, action-oriented understanding of politicization adopted in this article, as well as to unpack the sequential links between technocratic de-politicization and populist re-politicization.

In terms of empirical data, the article builds on a qualitative content analysis of official documents, speeches, and public statements from PiS leaders and policymakers, as well as on semi-structured interviews with Polish diplomats, governmental advisers, and experts (including some affiliated with PiS). In the selection of texts, the emphasis has been placed in particular on declarations to the domestic press, as this is where politicizing practices can be expected to be more apparent.

When it comes to methods, the paper adopts a “building-block” approach to typological theorizing and relies on within-case congruence. Typological theories “identify recurring conjunctions of mechanisms and provide hypotheses on the pathways through which they produce effects” ( Bennett 2001 , 1517). In this context, pathways are understood as “analogous to syndromes in pathology” ( George and Bennett 2005 , 235). Typological theorizing allows “making complex phenomenon manageable by dividing it into variants or types” ( George and Bennett 238) and, as such, appears well suited for emerging research programs and theory development ( Elman 2005 , 298). Typological theorizing is, indeed, open to the possibility that the same outcome (in our case: politicization) can manifest itself in different variants (in our case: foreign policy patterns) and can arise through different pathways or values from the same variable (in our case: populism and its various inherent logics). As such, this approach allows working through the logical implications of the theory while integrating the multidimensionality of both patterns and pathways of politicization and studying them in conjunction. Congruence and a case-study analysis of Poland are used to illustrate and test the (typological) theoretical expectations set forth.

By definition, any analysis of politicization dynamics and adversarial politics ought to be a situated one. Three specific features of the Polish domestic political context have been conducive to the politicization of foreign policy by the PiS government and therefore deserve mention.

The first contextual characteristic takes roots in the post-communist transition and its interpretation and representation by PiS. As explained by Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley (2020 , 379), the transition “raised higher-order questions about the very legitimacy of political actors” and “their lack of resolution is one of the major causes of the fundamental cleavage in Polish party politics.” More than the “regime divide” (opposing former communists and dissidents), it is the “transition divide” (opposing various factions of the opposition who had ideological divergences and competing for influence) that has had a lasting structuring effect on Polish politics ( Bill and Stanley 2020 , 383). The PiS considers that the conservative, religious, and patriotic wing of the opposition has been unduly sidelined to the profit of the “liberals” and the “left.” Since the 1990s, Kaczyński has in fact repeatedly suggested that a secret deal had been struck between the communist apparatchiks and the liberal opposition in the context of the Roundtable discussion, whereby the former would have agreed to relinquish their political power in exchange for retaining their economic assets in the new regime. 5 The narrative about the transition has become a cornerstone of the party’s political mythology and has tainted the way it relates to its political opponents. As noted by Alex Kazharski (2022, 118 ), the “real or imagined links of the “liberals” or the “left” to the ancien regime are used to stigmatize and delegitimize political rivals and their political agendas.” The party constantly denounces them as illegitimate and seems obsessed with, not so much “elites” in general, but more specifically the liberal elites that emerged from the transition—and in particular those that came to compose the Civic Platform Party ( Platforma Obywatelska [PO]) and the governments it led between 2007 and 2015. This is confirmed empirically by a region-wide analysis: In comparison to other Polish, Czech, or Slovak populist parties, “attacks on the homogenous ‘elite’ played a smaller role than other core elements of populism” in PiS political rhetoric, which has “focused on a specific rival rather than employing a general anti-establishment campaign” ( Engler, Pytlas, and Deegan-Krause 2019 , 1323).

Relatedly, a second feature pertains to the mode of governance of the previous PO government (2007–2015). Bill and Stanley (2020 , 381, 379) characterize it as grounded in the “meta-politics of moderation” and as “benignly neglectful monism”: a technocratic and conflict-avoiding managerialism that denied the legitimacy and credibility of alternatives to neoliberalism. PiS denounced this mode of governance as removing a number of political, economic, and cultural questions from the public sphere—and sought to change this state of affairs once in power. In this sense, in Poland as in other European countries, populist politicization amounts at least partly to a re-politicization ( Chryssogelos 2019 ). More generally, as explained again by Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley (2020 , 382),

the de-politicization of the public sphere as a result of tranquil, efficient technocratic governance […]has moved contestation to the meta-political sphere, where political battles are still fought not only over who has the best ideas, but over who has the right to have ideas at all

Hence, added to the afore-described “transition divide,” the succession of technocratic de-politicization and populist re-politicization has fed the polarization of Polish politics, both in its traditional sense of “conflict” over the “fundamentals” of politics ( Sartori 1970 , 14) and of “political intolerance” ( Schedler 2023 ). 6

The third and final domestic political characteristic that ought to be taken into account is, as suggested by Hagan, the location and strength of the opposition. During the first mandate of the PiS government (2015–2019), Donald Tusk, the head of the previous government and most powerful PO politician, held the function of President of the European Council. Their political archenemy's leading and personifying one of the EU institutions certainly fed the PiS government’s politicization of Poland’s European and foreign policy. This was only reinforced by the fact that Donald Tusk himself did not refrain from using his position and influence in Brussels to occasionally weigh in on the Polish domestic political game. As we will see, the PiS government’s uncompromising attitude in EU politics has thus proceeded not just from “populist euroscepticism” ( Csehi and Zgut 2021 ), but also from the desire to mark a rupture with, and carry forward the battle against, the PO government and its still-active leader.

This brief contextualization endeavor has led to identifying three opportunity structures for the politicization of foreign policy in Poland: polarization of domestic politics, preceding de-politicization, and the strength of the opposition. This paves the way for the empirical analysis of how the PiS populist government has seized upon them, but these opportunity structures can also be regarded as mediating conditions when applying the proposed theoretical framework to other national contexts.

In analyzing the politicization of foreign policy in Poland, I focus on the PiS government’s actions and declarations with regard to a number of key policy areas: the EU, Germany, Russia, and the United States. The objective is to discern the various patterns of politicization and foreign policy types theorized above (counter-step, battleground, and subdued) and see how they are linked to the corresponding pathways and populist logics (differentiation, legitimization, and prioritization).

PiS Counter-Step Foreign Policy on the EU and Germany

The policy areas where change has been most salient under the PiS government—namely, the attitude toward European integration, the strategy inside the EU, and the relationship with Germany ( Cadier 2021 )—are precisely those where the previous PO government (2007–2015) had built its distinctive foreign policy brand. As it was regarding the EU’s structural funds and internal market as a crucial vector for its domestic agenda of economic modernization, the PO government had made of installing Poland in the EU core its cardinal foreign policy objective (see, for instance, Sikorski 2012 ). To this end, it cultivated a close bilateral partnership with Germany—more than any previous Polish government—and amended the representation of that country in Polish official discourse, from over-powerful historical neighbor to indispensable leader of Europe. Though to a lesser extent, it also sought to upgrade its ties with France by signing a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Paris and a contract to buy fifty military helicopters from Airbus (while Warsaw had generally been opting for American manufacturers when it comes to armaments). Finally, the PO government invested in the instruments of EU external action (such as European Defense or the European Neighborhood Policy) and depicted, more generally, Poland’s anchoring and activism in the bloc as a way to further its national security ( Cianciara 2022 ).

When it suceeded the PO in power, the PiS government constantly, methodically, and explicitly sought to reverse these policy directions and initiatives. Not only was there an almost symmetric contrast in the European and German policies of the two governments, but PiS foreign policy actors also explicitly emphasized and claimed this contrast when articulating their foreign policy preferences and justifying their foreign policy choices.

Rather than as a power-maximizing opportunity for Poland, the PiS foreign policy executive tended to represent the EU as a liability or threat. Prime Minister Szydło castigated the “folly of Brussels elite”; foreign minister Waszczykowski called on the necessity to “radically reduce the level of trust” and “introduce a negative policy” toward the EU; and President Duda likened EU membership to Poland’s nineteenth-century occupation by foreign powers. 7 The negative characterizations of the EU in yearly programmatic speeches by PiS foreign ministers, more than under any other Polish government since 1989 ( Zuba 2021 ), also provide evidence in that sense.

When it comes to its strategy inside the EU, rather than installing Poland in the first circle of EU powers, the PiS government sought to “withdraw from the EU mainstream” ( Zwolski 2017 , 175) and build an alternative core around initiatives such as the Bucharest Nine or the Three Seas Initiative. A PiS foreign policy adviser justified this position by opposing it to that of the previous government: The latter’s “desire to fit with the EU mainstream” and conviction that “Poland should speak with one voice with other member states” were, in his view, wrongly conveying the image of a country “not able to act by itself.” 8 More concretely, the PiS government overturned several of the aforementioned decisions taken by the previous executive: It backtracked on European defense projects such as Eurocorps and pulled the plug on the helicopter deal with Airbus.

Most crucially, the PiS government downgraded Germany as a foreign policy partner. To the contrary, it relentlessly denounced Berlin’s political, economic, and cultural influence in the EU and re-emphasized Germany as a historical other . Rather than using it as a vector to increase Poland's influence in Europe, the PiS government largely defined its European policy in opposition to Germany and sought to build a counterweight to its power ( Balcer et al. 2017 , 3–4). To the PO foreign minister famously quipping in 2011 that he was now “fearing German inaction more than Germans in action” ( Sikorski 2011 ), the PiS foreign minister opposed a quasi-symmetric denunciation of German “imperialism” in Europe and an insistence that “the EU needs not German leadership, but German self-restraint.” 9 More generally, PiS affiliates have often articulated their government’s policies toward Germany as a necessary corrective of those pursued by the previous executive (see, for instance, Grajewski 2015 ). The party largely built its political brand around the rejection of the quotas decided at the European level during the 2015 refugee crisis, which it depicted as imposed on Poland by Germany with the help of the PO government. Similarly, the measures aimed at “re-polonizing” the national media landscape targeted German-owned companies above all and were presented as made necessary by the fact that the Tusk government had acted as a “Fifth column” of German interests in these and other sectors. 10 Finally, though not directly pertaining to foreign policy as such, the PiS government’s “counter-step” attitude was also particularly salient when it comes to its historical policy and its stated objective of overturning the “pedagogy of shame” purportedly promoted by the PO executive ( Cadier and Szulecki 2020 ). 11 For instance, after his government took over and ostentatiously reformatted the Gdansk World War II Museum created by the PO executive, the PiS Deputy Minister of Culture argued that “changes were necessary because the original exhibition purportedly adopted a German point of view” (cited in Siddi and Gaweda 2019 , 10). The PiS leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, was even blunter: He claimed that the museum was “Tusk’s gift to Angela Merkel” (cited in Jaskułowski and Majewski 2023 ).

In sum, on the EU and on Germany, the PiS government clearly and explicitly sought to take the counter-step to its predecessor: It often articulated its foreign policy preferences and choices in opposition to those of the PO government, and it presented its own policies as a corrective. In other words, in line with the populist logic of differentiation, it used its foreign policy communication and actions to mark a contrast with its political adversaries. This contrast is salient not just in terms of rhetoric but also in actual policy decisions, and, in this sense, the theoretical approach proposed complements the available scholarship on the PiS government’s foreign policy by accounting for why policy change was most salient in relation to the EU and Germany in particular.

Foreign Policy as a Ground to Battle PiS Political Opponents: Denigration by Foreign Association and Political Purging at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The PiS government regularly used foreign policy as a terrain and instrument to attack, discredit, and weaken its political opponents. In particular, it made a point of representing these opponents as dangerous, treacherous, and self-serving, and of rooting out their affiliates from foreign policy structures.

In light of its role in Poland’s security imaginary, Russia stands out as an all-designated topic for denigration by foreign association. While in the opposition, PiS had constantly accused the PO government of being guilty of negligence, if not complicity, in the crash of the Polish presidential plane in Smolensk in 2010, 12 which the party and Jarosław Kaczyński in particular publicly attribute to Russia. Once in power, even though a previous independent investigation had concluded to an accident, the PiS government re-opened the case and tasked the controversial and conspiracy theory-prone former Minister of Defense, Antoni Macierewicz, to conduct a new assessment on the topic ( Koschalka 2020 ). More generally, PiS policymakers and advisers have often depicted the PO government as being “soft” on Russia and as exposing, thereby, Poland to the Russian threat. A PiS adviser described Donald Tusk’s exit from national politics to take the helm of the European Council in 2014—the year of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Eastern Ukraine—as a “desertion in times of threat.” 13 The PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński more explicitly associated Tusk with Moscow by claiming that his “point of view often coincides with Russian propaganda” and that he has often been on the “wrong side” when it comes to confronting Russia. 14 The efforts at suggesting a collusion between the PO government and Russia re-doubled in the perspective of the legislative elections of Fall 2023. The public television TVP, which the PiS turned into a mouthpiece for its political communication, aired in the summer of that year a multi-episode documentary (“Reset”) serving that narrative. The PiS government pushed, and the PiS-controlled lower chamber adopted, a bill on countering Russian influence in Poland, which would have allowed banning from public office individuals suspected of being under such influence ( Tilles 2023 ). This legislative act was soon renamed “Lex Tusk” by national and international commentators, as it was clear that it was targeting first and foremost the PO leader, and in fact the EU launched a legal probe into it ( Foy 2023 ). Finally, less than a month before the election, the PiS Minister of Defense Mariusz Błaszczak released and used classified documents dating from 2011 to attack the (then in office) PO government and accuse it of being ready to “give up half of Poland” in the event of an invasion by Russia. 15 Several Polish military experts criticized this politically motivated move for its divulgation of secret information on the country’s defense plans, posture, and doctrine.

These attempts at delegitimization by foreign association especially stand out when it comes to Russia, because in terms of policy substance, there was little difference between the policies of the PO and PiS governments and because Poland is, more generally, the European country where the political class is probably most cohesive in its hostility toward Russia. Beyond Russia, the PiS leadership has accused its political opponents of serving the interests of other foreign groups or external powers, be they global cosmopolitan elites or other historical foes such as Germany. This was put most bluntly by Jarosław Kaczyński when, in Parliament, he addressed PO representatives in these terms:

You are the external party today, you are compromising Poland, you are against Poland. You are and have always been. 16

The Rule of Law infringement procedure launched by the EU Commission was also articulated in these terms by the PiS leadership: Kaczyński suggested that the EU Commission and the domestic opposition were working together in “attacking” Poland, 17 while President Duda warned that “liberal-left elites” were trying to remove Poland’s government by using people trained by the communist secret services and support from Western Europe ( Tilles 2020 ).

Finally, PiS policymakers and advisors voiced accusations of covetousness against the previous government in relation to EU institutions and foreign actors. They suggested, for instance, that the PO government’s pro-European policy was largely motivated by the desire to secure prominent positions in Brussels for two of its leading figures, Tusk and Sikorski ( Grajewski 2015 , 74). More generally, Kaczyński suggested that the opposition was “was working under foreign orders” and “cynically counting on fortunes that they will earn by enslaving Poland.” 18

The transposition of populist oppositional politics to foreign policy did not only manifest itself in rhetorical attacks, but also translated into endeavors to dislodge from, or sideline in, foreign policy structures the civil servants that were deemed close to the previous government. On the one hand, several such diplomats were relegated to minor or dead-end positions within the Ministry, with some even having to leave the career. 19 In addition, the PiS government published a list of about sixty-six diplomats accused of having collaborated with the secret police during the communist regime, leading to the dismissal of fifty-one of them. 20 On the other hand, the PiS government introduced a structural reform of the diplomatic service that facilitated the appointment of political loyalists in the foreign ministry.

In sum, the PiS government largely moved the battle against its political opponents to the realms of foreign policy topics and institutions. The populist logic of legitimization and mobilization led it to seek to build support for its policies and assert its own legitimacy by attacking its political predecessors and adversaries with reference to foreign policy, notably by associating them with foreign powers. This led, in turn, to anchoring certain representations of foreign policy themes and actors on the basis of their domestic political utility rather than substantive features.

Poland’s Foreign Policy and PiS Over-Prioritization of Domestic Political Goals

In running and implementing Poland’s foreign policy, the PiS government clearly prioritized internal considerations over external ones.

First, it is noteworthy that the topics on which the PiS government adopted an “uncompromising” or even “confrontational” posture at the EU level ( Balcer et al. 2017 , 31) mainly related to its domestic political, rather than foreign policy, agenda. For instance, it vetoed several EU external action texts on the ground that it took issue with the definition of “gender equality,” which is linked to its domestic conservative agenda. 21 By contrast, in spite of its strong Atlanticist orientation and active courting by the Trump administration, the PiS government did not break ranks with other EU member states on issues such as trade or Iran.

Second and most crucially, in several instances, the PiS government adopted positions that served its domestic political strategy while being detrimental to the country’s foreign policy interests—or even to the PiS government’s own foreign policy preferences. In particular, the PiS government did not hesitate to jeopardize Poland’s position and image in the EU for the sake of battling its political opponents. After the PiS government failed to rally any member state (not even Orban’s Hungary) in preventing the re-election of Donald Tusk at the helm of the European Council, the then PiS foreign minister denounced the election process as “rigged.” 22 This amounted to casting a shadow on the legitimacy of the EU’s highest intergovernmental setting, where Poland is itself a deciding member.

The precedence given to expected domestic political gains over foreign policy costs was salient even on topics that ranked high among the PiS government’s foreign policy priorities. For instance, some of the PiS governments’ domestic initiatives led to strained relations with their highest valued foreign policy partner, the United States. This is true of the closure of the liberal channel TVN24 (owned by the American group Discovery) or of the so-called “Holocaust Law,” which prompted Washington to impose a temporary ban on presidential-level visits (see Cadier and Szulecki 2020 ). Finally and interestingly, an analyst who had served as foreign policy advisor to both the PiS and PO governments noted that, on Germany, the former was harsh in public rhetoric but rather accommodating in private negotiations, while the opposite was true for the latter. 23 This suggests that the PiS government used foreign policy first and foremost for its signaling and mobilizing potential in domestic politics, and then tried to compensate for this through backchannel diplomatic exchanges.

In sum, the populist logic of salience provides a theoretical explanation to Polish analysts and practitioners’ concurring view that the PiS government treated foreign policy as “secondary” or “subordinated” to its domestic political objectives ( Balcer 2016 ; Kuźniar 2016 ) and that Kaczyński in particular was “not interested in foreign policy” but saw it instead mainly as a domestic instrument. 24

Once in power, populist actors tend to approach the two-level game of international politics in a distinctive manner. They are more likely to prioritize—and go “all-in”—at the domestic table, even at the risk of weakening their hand at the international table. In addition, they tend to carry forward the domestic game at the international table, investing the latter to attack their domestic political opponents or mark a difference with their predecessors. In other words, populist actors tend to politicize foreign policy in the sense of using it as the continuation of domestic politics by other means.

This article has set forth a theoretical framework accounting for this tendency and has tested and illustrated it empirically through a case-study analysis of Poland. More specifically, relying on typological theorizing, it has conceptualized several pathways and patterns of this politicization, with the former referring to certain logics inherent to populist practice and the latter to certain ways of conducting foreign policy. The logic of differentiation leads populist actors to define and articulate their foreign policy in opposition to that of their political predecessors ( counter-step foreign policy ). The logic of mobilization entices populist actors to use foreign policy as a terrain and instrument for attacking and denigrating their domestic political opponents ( battleground foreign policy ). Finally, the logic of salience makes populist governments or leaders over-prioritize domestic considerations in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy ( subdued foreign policy ).

While this article has focused on the case of Poland, insights from the available scholarship suggest that these patterns of foreign policy politicization have been present in several other countries and regions where populists have been in power. For instance, the logic of differentiation and counter-step foreign policy are salient in how Trump made of re-negotiating the “bad deals” consented by its predecessors and of ending the “long nightmare of America’s economic surrender” one of its key foreign objective ( Löfflmann 2022 , 549), as well as in how Turkey’s AKP articulated its activism toward the Middle East as a corrective of Kemalists’ alleged negligence of the region ( Taş 2022b , 2879). These two cases also very much exhibit patterns of battleground foreign policy fed by the logic of mobilization: Trump withheld the US aid to Ukraine to arm twist its government into opening an investigation on the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son ( Löfflmann 2019 , 122), while Recep Tayyip Erdogan has equated the political opposition to supporters of Turkish terrorism and Western imperialism ( Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş 2022 , 484). In Hungary, personal re-shuffles at the MFA were largely motivated by FIDESZ’s distrust of the agents having served under the previous leadership and desire to fill positions with political loyalists ( Visnovitz and Jenne 2021 , 691; Müller and Gazsi 2023 ), while in Italy, the fact that the populists’ Lega and M5S have been targeting Mateo Renzi much more than Mario Draghi in their rhetorical attack suggests they are more set on denigrating political opponents than representatives of technocratic elites. Even more so, the logic of salience and populist actors’ over-prioritization of domestic political considerations appear to be shared across the board. Belém Lopes, Carvalho, and Santos (2022 , 12) show that Brazil’s Jahir Bolsonaro approached foreign policy “always [as] a matter of catering to his constituencies” and left “topics that were not fungible in terms of votes in the hands of career diplomats.” Such tendencies are also reflected in Italy’s M5S and Czechia’s Andrej Babis marked disinterest in foreign affairs, even after they made it to government ( Coticchia 2021 ; Weiss 2021 ). It should be noted, however, that in these latter cases, the first two patterns of politicization appear by contrast less salient: Babis did not, for instance, seek to root out political adversaries from foreign policy structures and rarely used foreign policy themes to attack the opposition. Similarly, in their analysis of Narendra Modi’s speech, Destradi et al. (2022 ) find that the Indian leader has rarely politicized foreign policy in the sense of contesting the policies of previous governments and political opponents. In that sense, this article’s theoretical framework would gain from being refined further by being applied to other country cases. Future research could notably test whether the mediating conditions identified in Poland as conducive to populist politicization—namely, polarization in domestic politics, preceding de-politicization, and the strength of the opposition—help explain variations across national contexts.

This brief comparative perspective also allows qualifying the argument set forth in this article. It is not that populists always, or that only populists, politicize foreign policy in the sense of using it as the continuation of domestic politics by other means, but that they have a greater tendency to do so due to populism’s inherent logics in relating to domestic politics and opposition. From one populist leader or government to another, one or another patterns of politicization might be more or less pronounced, because the different logics feeding them might be more or less acute. Understanding populism as a practice permits to conceive it is a matter of degree: Populism is not something that populists are, but something that they do, and that they can do more or less depending on the occasion, context, or issue area. Variations can be exhibited not only within but also across logics: They are not automatically linked, and, as we saw, populist executives might mobilize one more than the other.

Populist governments’ strategies in dealing with their political competitors have been a blind spot in the thriving scholarship on the relationship between populism and foreign policy. The focus on what populist actors say, do, or believe about the “people” and the “elite” has obfuscated the way they relate, more prosaically, to their political opponents and predecessors. Yet, not only does it appear hardly satisfactory to have our analytical categories defined by the actors we study, but in addition, as this article has shown, the influence of populist oppositional politics on foreign policy tends to be at the same time distinctive and consequential. In that sense, this analytical angle has a lot to contribute to the study of populism in international relations as well as to the FPA literature on domestic politics more generally.

Both of the aforementioned authors acknowledge in fact that populists seek to generate legitimacy over and popular support against political opponents ( Wajner 2022 , 421; Fouquet 2023 , 8), but they do not retain this aspect in analyzing side-effects for foreign policy.

Angelos Chryssogelos (2019 , 608–9) defines “nationalist re-politicization” as “opposing specific policies under the pressure of internationalization” and “societal re-politicizations” as “challenging the legitimacy of internationalized state elites,” noting that the latter corresponds to and flows from populist practice. On their part, Sandra Destradi, Johannes Plagemann and Hakki Tas (2022 , 480) define “anti-elitist politicization” as “generating awareness and mobilizing followership [. . .] by resorting to a narrative of oppression at the hands of elite” and “people-centric politicization” as “highlight the virtues of the ‘true people’ [. . .] and focus on emotions of hope and aspirations to global standing.”

This expression, itself paraphrasing Clausewitz, is borrowed from Valerie Hudson (2014 , 141).

In the same vein, Valerie Hudson (2014 , 149–53) distinguishes between four types of strategies in dealing with the political opposition: ignoring, compromise, direct tactics, and indirect tactics. She notes that the latter, which notably include outpersuading the opposition, forming internal alliance against it, or deflecting the nation’s attention, have the greatest impact on foreign policy ( Hudson 2014 , 154).

This narrative is, for instance, forcefully articulated in his memoirs ( Kaczyński 2016 ).

On the links between populism, anti-populism, and polarization, see Stavrakakis (2018 ) and  Roberts (2022 ).

“Mocne słowa Szydło w Sejmie: Nie będziemy uczestniczyć w szaleństwie brukselskich elit,” DoRzeczy , May 12, 2017, https://dorzeczy.pl/kraj/30477/mocne-slowa-szydlo-w-sejmie.html ; “Waszczykowski: ‘Musimy drastycznie obniżyć poziom zaufania wobec Unii’,” wPolityce , March 12, 2017, https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/331123-podwojne-standardy-w-ue-waszczykowski-musimy-drastycznie-obnizyc-poziom-zaufania-wobec-unii-zaczac-prowadzic-takze-polityke-negatywna; “Polish president likens EU to past occupations,” Deutschewelle (DW) , March 15, 2018.

Interview with an adviser to the Polish Foreign Minister, Warsaw, October 2017.

“Zbigniew Rau: Rosyjska agresja na Ukrainę stała się dla Europy momentem przebudzenia,” Rzeczpospolita , August 22, 2022, https://www.rp.pl/publicystyka/art36907821-zbigniew-rau-rosyjska-agresja-na-ukraine-stala-sie-dla-europy-momentem-przebudzenia .

See, for instance, “Kaczyński aims to ‘repolonize’ foreign-owned media but admits ‘international reaction’ a problem,” Notes from Poland , 20 July 2020, https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/07/20/kaczynski-calls-for-repolonisation-of-media-but-admits-international-reaction-makes-it-difficult/ .

The PiS government had elevated early on historical policy as a core component and priority of its international diplomacy (see Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland 2017 ).

The crash of the presidential plane in April 2010 led to the deaths of the then-Polish President Lech Kaczyński and ninety-five other high-ranking officials. In a cruel historical parallel, the trip was organized to commemorate the 1940 Katyn massacre, where thousands of members of the Polish elite were assassinated by the Red Army.

“Kaczyński: Gdy w grę wchodzi żywotny interes Polski, Tusk jest przeciw,” Gazeta Prawna , June 12, 2022, https://www.gazetaprawna.pl/wiadomosci/kraj/artykuly/8452528,kaczynski-tusk-przeciw-zywotny-interes-polski.html .

“Opposition accuse defence minister of ‘treason’ for declassifying military plans from their time in power,” Notes from Poland , September 18, 2023, https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/09/18/opposition-accuse-defence-minister-of-treason-for-declassifying-military-plans-from-their-time-in-power/ . The minister was instrumentalizing and misrepresenting contingency plans, stating that in the event of an invasion from the East, the enemy’s progression could not be immediately stopped and the country could only be defended through a counter-attack. NATO defence plans for the equally flat Baltic States are said to operate along the same line.

“Kaczyński do PO: ‘Jestes ́ cie partia ̨ zewne ̨ trzna’,” Gazeta Prawna , March 9, 2017, http://www.gazetaprawna.pl/artykuly/1026095,kaczynski-do-po-partia-zewnetrzna-pis.html .

“European Court of Justice ‘supports the Polish opposition’, says Kaczyński,” Notes from Poland , February 27, 2020, https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/02/27/european-court-of-justice-supports-the-polish-opposition-says-kaczynski/ .

“Jarosław Kaczyński w tygodniku Sieci: Dalej nie możemy się cofnąć,” wPolityce , August 7, 2022, https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/609598-kaczynski-w-tygodniku-sieci-dalej-nie-mozemy-sie-cofnac .

Multiple interviews with Polish diplomats, Warsaw, September 2017.

Interview with a Polish diplomat, Warsaw, October 2017; “‘De-communisation’ leads to Foreign Ministry dismissals,” Telewizja Polska (TVP), May 23, 2019, https://polandin.com/42757884/decommunisation-leads-to-foreign-ministry-dismissals .

“Poland rejects Presidency conclusions on Artificial Intelligence, rights,” Euractiv , October 26, 2020.

“Poland fumes at ‘cheating’ EU for keeping Donald Tusk in top post,” The Guardian , March 13, 2017.

Interview with a Polish expert, Warsaw, May 2017.

Interview with a Polish diplomat, Warsaw, October 2017.

Author Biography

David Cadier is an Assistant of Professor of International Relations at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and an Associate Researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre for International Studies (CERI) in Paris. His research interests lie with the foreign policies of the EU and its member states, EU-Russia relations, Central Europe, and populism in international politics.

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 9th EISA European Workshop in International Studies organized in Thessaloniki in July 2022 and at the workshop “How to study the international effects of populism” organized at the University of Freiburg in July 2023. The author is grateful for the precious feedback received on these occasions, as well as for those of the two anonymous reviewers.

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• / American History

Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy

By: Yan   •  Essay  •  258 Words  •  November 11, 2009  •  1,933 Views

Essay title: Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy

Although the aspirations and goals of states are often motivated by external political pressures, analysis of recent foreign policy decisions demonstrates how internal political forces can play equally crucial roles in the pursuit and execution of these objectives. Thus, it would be invalid to claim that domestic politics and the nature of regimes play minor roles in either the goals a state pursues or the means it employs to reach them. By understanding how the diffusion of power in governments affect policy decisions, one can develop increased awareness of the linkages that exist between the internal pressures of domestic politics and the external forces of foreign politics.

Before discussing the impact of domestic politics on foreign policy objectives and their execution, one must first understand the different types of policies that states pursue. The foreign policy of states can be directed toward the protection and enhancement of valued possessions (“possession goals”) or intended to improve

Argument: What Does America Want in Ukraine?

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What Does America Want in Ukraine?

Washington’s current approach is a strategic cop-out—and risks making another forever war..

• United States
• Emma Ashford

Russia’s War in Ukraine

Understanding the conflict two years on.

More on this topic

Congress has finally approved around $61 billion in new aid to Ukraine, and something strange has happened: Talk of Ukrainian victory has returned to Washington. It’s a jarring turnabout. For the last few months, the White House and others issued dire warnings that if left unaided, Ukrainian lines might collapse and Russian troops might again roll on Kyiv. But with the worst averted, sights are setting higher. The Biden administration is now working to build up the Ukrainian Armed Forces over a 10-year period, at a likely cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan suggested that Ukraine would mount another counteroffensive in 2025.

This optimism is misplaced. The new bill may well represent the last big package that the United States will send to Ukraine. As the geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer  noted , “America continuing to send Ukraine [$]60 billion in support year after year [is] unrealistic no matter who wins the presidency.” Current aid will mostly help to put Ukraine in a better position for future negotiations. It will ameliorate shortfalls in ammunition and weaponry, making it less likely that Ukrainian forces will lose more ground in coming months. Yet Ukraine still faces other challenges: insufficient fortifications , a yawning manpower shortage , and a surprisingly resilient Russian army . On the whole, Ukraine remains the weaker party; Western assistance has not altered that reality.

The White House presented the supplemental as an all-or-nothing choice : Approve billions in funding or watch Ukraine go under. Such rhetoric contains eerie echoes of wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, where the United States kept pouring resources into lost causes at least in part because no U.S. leader wanted to be held responsible at the final moment of failure. Throughout the Ukraine aid debate, key questions were left entirely unanswered: What is the United States trying to achieve in Ukraine given that total victory is not feasible? What is it willing to risk and spend to get there? The supplemental punts these uncomfortable questions down the road. But if Washington doesn’t confront them, it may end up back in the same position next year—or worse.

The matter of an endgame in Ukraine has always been fraught. Political scientists have frequently noted that any end to this war will include diplomatic negotiation. Some draw the conclusion that if negotiation is inevitable, talks should begin sooner rather than later. Others argue that Ukraine must improve its battlefield position before negotiating. The government in Kyiv maintains that Russia must be driven completely out of Ukraine, including Crimea, before talks can begin. Some even argue that regime change in Moscow is a precondition for peace.

The squishy middle of the Washington debate, which seems to include senior members of the Biden administration, falls somewhere between these extremes: hoping for major Ukrainian advances, while avoiding escalation and acknowledging privately or anonymously that the math is not in Kyiv’s favor. The White House is correct that aid should be designed to put the Ukrainians in a strong negotiating position. But this raises further questions: How should one determine when the moment for negotiations has arrived? If Ukraine keeps fighting without talking, will its bargaining power improve or diminish?

The calculation is also complicated by confusion about what the United States is trying to achieve in Ukraine. Some emphasize broad, universal principles such as defending democracy or protecting the international order. These are laudable goals, but they could plausibly produce opposite conclusions: either that universal principles have already been adequately defended—the steep price Russia has paid could dissuade future aggressors—or alternately that Ukraine must score a definitive victory.

More hard-nosed analysts instead argue that America’s primary goal in arming Ukraine is to bleed Russia. Keeping up the flow of Western weapons, they argue, allows the West to diminish Russia’s military capabilities at a reasonable cost. As an objective, however, weakening Russia offers no endgame, and implies a long-term, semipermanent commitment to war. Given Russia’s ability to reconstitute its forces , it is not even clear the West is succeeding on this front.

A final group offers more concrete goals: enabling Ukraine to retake specific chunks of territory so as to protect its economic viability as a sovereign state, or to prevent Russia from seizing Odesa and other valuable places. But although these are more specific objectives, there is no consensus on them in Western capitals and little willingness to push for peace negotiations once they are achieved.

This is perhaps why White House officials return so often to the formulation that Western aid is simply intended to put Ukraine in the best possible position at the bargaining table. Saying this requires no difficult decisions about the territory Ukraine needs to retake and no consideration of how long Western aid should continue. It also evades the question of Ukraine’s future orientation—will it join the EU or NATO?—which may need to be resolved in order to end the war.

In short, the current approach is a strategic cop-out. Its primary benefit is to paper over differences among Ukraine’s supporters. The risk is that the war will join the ranks of forever wars and end in one of three ways: in defeat, on worse terms than could have been obtained earlier, or on the same terms at a higher human and financial toll.

“Forever war” became a slogan over the past decade-plus, used by activists to describe the seemingly endless American deployments overseas in complex wars from Afghanistan to Syria and Niger. Like all slogans, the term was imprecise, but it crisply conveyed the problem of waging open-ended conflicts aimed at absolute, unachievable victory.

The conflict in Ukraine should not be directly compared to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: No U.S. troops are engaged in combat, and the government of Ukraine is fighting an illegal invasion. Still, there are parallels. Once the Afghanistan surge failed, the debate pitted those who argued that the conflict could not be won against those who argued that it could be sustained at a low enough cost indefinitely. Today’s Ukraine debates have begun to trend in that direction. Sen. Mitch McConnell , among others , has argued that aiding Ukraine is a bargain in defense terms and pumps money back into the U.S. economy.

The common link between Ukraine and past forever wars is thus the way genuine strategic debate gets evaded or stigmatized. Lawmakers and policymakers find it easier to sustain the war effort by presenting a succession of all-or-nothing choices than to look ahead and weigh realistic alternatives.

Proponents of either disengagement or escalation fill the vacuum left by ill-defined or unattainable goals. The former proved surprisingly successful in holding up U.S. assistance for six-plus months. The latter camp, meanwhile, is ascending. After all, if the present trajectory is unfavorable and adopting more limited aims is ruled out, policymakers will seek the other logical solution: that of expanding involvement in the conflict.

The West has gradually escalated over the past two years, as has Russia. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine and its Western supporters have pushed for ever more advanced weapons. From support vehicles to tanks, tube artillery to ATACMS, the cycle was consistent: As soon as the White House approved one system, pressure would mount to supply the next. A similar trend played out in Europe. Yet with the third year of the conflict underway, technological exhaustion is imposing an upper limit on this trend. In many areas, there is now no “next system” to send.

This dynamic helps explain the recent discussion of more intensive forms of involvement. Just last week, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron told reporters that Ukraine could use British-provided weapons to strike targets inside Russia . French President Emmanuel Macron renewed his recent suggestion that he might send troops to Ukraine to serve in behind-the-lines roles. Each of these was a distinctly escalatory proposal that even six months ago would not have happened. On Monday, citing the British and French statements, Russia announced it would hold drills to practice the battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Another proposal, which the Department of Defense is reportedly considering in some form, is to send greater numbers of U.S. military advisors to Ukraine to provide maintenance support, training, and tactical advice. This is likewise portrayed as a middle step between the status quo and entering the conflict directly. But it’s also dangerous, creating the potential for direct conflict with Russian forces should advisors be killed or wounded. Russia, for its part, may view the measure as a precursor to greater Western involvement and escalate in turn. The experience of the Vietnam war—where advisors proved to be steppingstones to full combat—ought to serve as a warning.

Of course, the intent of recent calls for intensified Western involvement is to improve the balance of power between Ukraine and Russia. But if a vast infusion of Western technology over the last two years has not resolved Ukraine’s weakness vis-à-vis Russia, then neither advisors nor behind-the-lines support would likely change this dynamic.

For all the effort the Biden administration has put into delivering aid to Ukraine, it has also set U.S. strategy on autopilot. There appears to be no plan other than to try to keep the money flowing—the new aid could last as little as six months or as long as 18 months—which will work until it doesn’t.

Instead, the administration should publicly acknowledge that Ukrainian and American interests are not identical and that Kyiv’s stated aim of liberating every inch of Ukrainian territory is not realistically achievable. America’s most important interests are to safeguard Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign state and to avoid direct conflict with Russia. Each of these should take priority over the further liberation of territory.

Accordingly, U.S. leaders should encourage and incentivize Ukraine to prioritize defense over offense, a process that is already beginning. The last two years have demonstrated the ability of defenders to hold off motivated and more numerous attackers; both sides have experienced slow advances and limited gains when facing dug-in opponents. Washington should channel its assistance into ensuring Ukraine can protect itself, which means more basics like ammunition and fortifications and fewer high-tech offensive systems like ATACMS. It should also help Ukraine to rebuild its military-industrial base.

No less important, the time has come to encourage negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. If Ukrainian forces, buoyed by new aid deliveries, can stabilize the front line, then the summer of 2024 may prove to be a favorable negotiating window. Up to this point, the Biden administration has been wary of pushing Ukraine to negotiate for fear of appearing to signal a lack of U.S. commitment. In addition, negotiations can be slow, and Russia may not yet be willing to participate in earnest. But the proposition has not been tested, and it is worth trying, particularly because punting the decision to Kyiv, while supplying it with arms, has the perverse effect of discouraging Ukraine from talking. Neither side can truly gauge what it could obtain until it starts talking to the other, and recent revelations about prior negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow suggest that a settlement is not impossible.

Finally, Washington should lean on its European allies to spend the money and place the orders to equip Ukraine. America’s commitments may falter, whether because of popular dissatisfaction, a new president, or crises elsewhere in the world. Moscow, too, may eschew talks, reasoning that Ukraine’s position is only getting weaker. To mitigate these possibilities, Washington should shift more of the burden to European countries whose proximity to Russia give them a strong interest in Ukraine’s success. These states have already begun to step up; the Czech Republic, for example, has spearheaded an innovative ammunition initiative. But Europe can do much more: increase national funding for ammunition and rocket production , authorize emergency funds and improve cross-continent defense procurement through the European Union, and take over the organizational burden of coordinating aid.

This time, Congress eventually delivered. Next time, it might not. On both sides of the Atlantic, governments should prepare for U.S. aid to dry up and work to place Ukraine on a more strategic and durable footing. After all, current levels of support have not sufficed to put the worst outcomes—whether a Russian breakthrough, a destructive forever conflict, or an expanded war—out of view. Averting those outcomes requires opening the space to weigh difficult trade-offs now. You can take only so many all-or-nothing gambles until you end up with nothing.

Emma Ashford is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University, and the author of Oil, the State, and War. Twitter:  @EmmaMAshford

Joshua Shifrinson is an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is the author of Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts and a co-editor of Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War .

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of  Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy . Twitter:  @stephenwertheim

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Hims & Hers Welcomes Anja Manuel, Foreign Policy Expert, Domestic Regulations Advisor, and Former Diplomat to its Board of Directors

Manuel joins Hims & Hers board of directors to help the company further innovate and increase access to healthcare for millions within the personalized health and wellness space

Hims & Hers Health, Inc. (“Hims & Hers”, NYSE: HIMS), the leading health and wellness platform, today announced the appointment of Anja Manuel to the company’s Board of Directors. Ms. Manuel is a co-founder and principal in Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, a strategic consulting firm founded in 2009 that helps U.S. companies navigate international markets and regulatory issues, and a former U.S. government official.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240516913614/en/

Manuel joins Hims & Hers board of directors to help the company further innovate and increase access to healthcare for millions within the personalized health and wellness space. (Photo: Business Wire)

“Anja is a remarkable leader and visionary who brings extensive experience to our board working in the areas of government relations, foreign policy, technology policy, international markets, and governance matters. Her knowledge and background, combined with that of our current directors, will further accelerate our mission to help the world feel great through the power of better health,” said Andrew Dudum, CEO and co-founder of Hims & Hers. “As we continue to improve our access to more personalized care in the U.S. and pursue our ambitions of global expansion in the coming years, Anja’s expertise in regulation and international policy will be invaluable in our next phase of growth.”

“Hims & Hers is making a tremendous impact on the U.S. healthcare industry by improving personalized care for conditions that affect millions,” said Anja Manuel. "I look forward to helping build on the already strong foundation of this company and helping to guide how the team approaches international opportunities in the future."

In addition to co-leading RHGM LLC, Ms. Manuel is an experienced board member. She currently serves on the board of Ripple Labs, Inc., a privately held leading blockchain payments company, since 2017. She served as a director of Overseas Shipping Group, Inc., a NYSE-listed transportation company, from June 2017 to June 2023, and is a member of several advisory boards of private companies, foundations and governmental entities.

Ms. Manuel is also the Executive Director of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum, a premier bi-partisan forum on foreign policy in the U.S. Additionally, she previously served as a diplomat in the U.S. State Department, as an attorney at WilmerHale, and as an investment banker at Salomon Brothers. Ms. Manuel is the author of the critically acclaimed This Brave New World: India, China and the United States , published by Simon and Schuster, and numerous articles and papers. She also lectured and was a research affiliate at Stanford University from 2009-2019, teaching courses on U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia and Technology Policy. Ms. Manuel received a B.A and M.A. in International Relations with distinction from Stanford University and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.

About Hims & Hers Health, Inc

Hims & Hers is the leading health and wellness platform on a mission to help the world feel great through the power of better health. We believe how you feel in your body and mind transforms how you show up in life. That’s why we’re building a future where nothing stands in the way of harnessing this power. Hims & Hers normalizes health & wellness challenges—and innovates on their solutions—to make feeling happy and healthy easy to achieve. No two people are the same, so the company provides access to personalized care designed for results. For more information, please visit www.hims.com and www.forhers.com .

Jen Treadwell [email protected]

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240516913614/en/

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