Description
This paper explores how considerations with domestic political survival shape coalition government decision-making on the use of military force. To this purpose, it extends the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision-making (PHT) to the study of coalition foreign policy in parliamentary democracies. PHT represents one of the leading theoretical efforts at bridging the cognitive-rationalist divide in Foreign Policy Analysis and posits a two-stage model of foreign policy-making: In the first stage, actors rely on a non-compensatory strategy as a cognitive shortcut to eliminate unacceptable alternatives and to reduce the decision-matrix. In the second stage, actors switch to a compensatory mode of information processing and select the remaining alternative which maximises expected utility. While there is broad agreement that the non-compensatory dimension on the first stage of PHT concerns the domestic repercussions of foreign policy, it is less clear how the theory should operationalise the ‘domestic politics’ dimension. The paper contributes to this debate for coalition governments and their decisions for or against the use of military force. Specifically, it suggests that the non-compensatory dimension in coalition foreign policy consists of the expected impact of foreign policy on coalition survival. The paper introduces different types of coalition governments and offers an illustrative case study to exemplify its theoretical argument.
