Why are some coalition governments able to push through ambitious foreign policy agendas, while others struggle and offer only timid steps? Sibel Oktay’s new book Governing Abroad, building on both quantitative and qualitative scholarship, offers a nuanced yet persuasive answer—coalition governments’ ability to push through ambitious foreign policy depends on whether the government holds a majority (and how big that majority is), whether it is internally divided, and whether it is able to coopt (or buy off) the opposition. Importantly, Oktay’s book demonstrates that having a minority government is not necessarily fatal to foreign policy ambition, and that having a comfortable majority is not a guarantee of decisive action abroad. Ultimately, success in advancing a foreign policy agenda depends on the particular domestic constellation of the government in question.
The primary contribution of Oktay’s book lies in bringing the comparative politics scholarship on coalition politics to the broad field of foreign policy analysis. She develops a theoretically rigorous and nuanced model, which explains variation in foreign policy action by coalition government. This in itself is a major contribution, as coalition governments are ubiquitous in Europe, and have led a majority of European countries for a majority of their post-World War II history. To support her model, Oktay employs advanced quantitative methods and conducts three in-depth qualitative case studies. These case studies offer insight into decisions of the Danish and Dutch governments to join the war in Iraq, and Finland’s decision to join the Eurozone.
The crux of Oktay’s argument builds on two theories—veto player and clarity of responsibility theory. In principle, these theories have contradictory expectations. Whereas veto player theory would predict that coalition governments—especially as they get larger—would have difficulties executing bold foreign policy action because of the large number of veto players; clarity of responsibility theory would predict that larger coalition governments are able to diffuse the responsibility for foreign policy action (particularly if it is unpopular) and are hence able to pursue bold action abroad. Oktay’s answer to this contradiction lies in the ideological distance between the parties in the coalition (the smaller, the easier to pursue action), and the ability of the coalition to logroll the opposition (by offering what rationalist scholars would call “side payments”). The book persuasively shows that smaller government parties often do not pull the plug on the coalition even if they disagree with the proposed foreign policy action because they are interested in being a member of a coalition. By contrast, even large coalition parties might be prevented from pursuing foreign policy action if they try to woo other parties to join the coalition.
While systematic scholarly attention to the domestic sources of foreign policy is one of the major trends and advances in the fields of international relations and foreign policy analysis, even in what has become in recent years a fairly crowded field, Oktay manages to carve out a niche. The systematic look at the coalition size and ideological variation among coalitional parties offers a genuinely new contribution to the scholarship and advances the field of foreign policy analysis further.
Oktay tests this theory using quantitative and qualitative analysis. Both analyses complement one another, and reflect the universe of cases, which are the European coalition governments between 1990 and 2004. The quantitative analysis builds on the analysis of the events data using multilevel modelling based on coalition size and ideological distance, as well as a host of control variables. This analysis shows that in minimum-winning coalitions, the predicted international commitment does not vary as the ideological dispersion increases, showing that minimum-winning coalitions have “dampening effect on commitment behavior” (p. 77). By contrast, oversized coalitions “lose their assertive foreign policy edge at high levels of dispersion” (p. 77). Oktay then proceeds to test these findings on three case studies – Denmark’s minority government’s decision to join the 1990 and 2003 wars in Iraq; the Dutch government’s minimum-winning coalition’s halting attempts to join the 2003 war in Iraq; and Finland’s oversized coalition’s decision to join the Eurozone. These case studies build extensively on newspaper articles, media reports, and secondary literature published in English. They persuasively show that the mechanisms theorized by Oktay are indeed at play.
As with any excellent scholarly work, this book leaves some questions unanswered. The first set of questions is methodological. Why focus on a period only up until 2004, leaving out the decisions that happened in the last twenty years? Although one understands limitations given the availability of particular quantitative data, this chronological framing of the project is still somewhat puzzling. As the politics in Europe (as Oktay admits in the conclusion) have become more polarized and new challenger parties have emerged, one wonders to what degree these new realities confirm the patterns theorized in this book. Similarly, why these cases? Oktay chooses Denmark out of the universe of twenty-five minority coalition governments, and the Netherlands out of the universe of forty-nine minimum-winning coalitions. To be sure, Oktay explains why these are good cases, but not what makes them better than the others one might have chosen.
The second set of questions is empirical. One wonders whether focus on relatively rich, Northern European countries with a tradition of rather consensual politics affects the results found in the case studies. In other words, would the same results be found if Oktay studied Slovakia in 2023? Slovakia’s government (which collapsed around the time of the writing, in May 2023) was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Ukrainian defense against Russian aggression, whereas large parts of the Slovak public and almost a totality of the opposition have been opposed to such activism. Based on Oktay’s theory, the parties in the country’s minimum-winning coalition should have logrolled with one another, but there is not much evidence for that. When the minimum-winning coalition became a minority government pursuing a divisive foreign policy, it should have at least tried to logroll the opposition. But that did not happen either. With a view to the elections in September 2023, one might wonder whether the clarity of responsibility theory’s prediction—that voters are less likely to punish larger coalitions because responsibility for foreign policy is diffused—will hold, too.
Yet, despite these open questions, Oktay’s book deserves to be widely read and cited, as it marks a significant new contribution to foreign policy scholarship. Students and scholars alike will find this book engagingly written and insightful, which will undoubtedly lead to its inclusion in course syllabi as well. Its new, original, and nuanced theory should be engaged with, as it brings new insights into how foreign policy is made in countries with coalition governments.
