How do regional parties influence foreign policy? Insights from multilevel coalitional bargaining in India
| Author | Niels Van Willigen,Nicolas Blarel |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120975072 |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120975072
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(2) 478 –500
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120975072
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How do regional parties
influence foreign policy?
Insights from multilevel
coalitional bargaining
in India
Nicolas Blarel and Niels Van Willigen
Leiden University, Netherlands
Abstract
When and how do regional parties influence foreign policy in federal democracies with
multiparty coalition governments? The existing literature has focused on situations of
foreign policy disagreements between subnational parties and the central government
in multinational states. By contrast, we argue that under varying conditions, central
governments either decide to accommodate the preferences of small regional parties
when designing foreign policies, or co-opt these regional parties to push their own
foreign policy agenda. Some scholars looked at the role of decentralization and federal
power arrangements in providing more control to political sub-units over the external
affairs of a state. Other studies showed that certain coalition-building configurations
facilitated the inclusion of the concerns of small parties in the foreign policy debate.
Bridging these two literatures, we argue that both structural and agential conditions
behind regional and national coalition building processes—visible in federal settings—
affect foreign policy-making in different ways, and not necessarily toward disagreement
and obstruction. To illustrate these hypothesized mechanisms, we look at two case
studies in the Indian context: the role of regional parties in the debate over the US–
India nuclear deal of 2008 and the role of regional parties in shaping India’s Sri Lanka
policy from 2009 to 2014.
Keywords
Foreign policy, diplomacy, coalition politics, India, regions, paradiplomacy
Corresponding author:
Nicolas Blarel, Leiden University, Wassenarsweg 53, Leiden, 2312 BC, Netherlands.
Email: n.r.j.b.blarel@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
975072EJT0010.1177/1354066120975072European Journal of International RelationsBlarel and Van Willigen
research-article2020
Article
Blarel and Van Willigen 479
Introduction
Foreign policy-making has increasingly been a contested political space due to the blur-
ring of the boundaries between domestic and foreign policies. Some foreign policy deci-
sions, such as signing trade deals, disproportionately affect particular regions or provinces
(Keating, 1999). For instance, rural regions have concerns about exposing their agricul-
tural sectors to international competition. Even in the context of decisions of military
interventions, some regions and provinces are varyingly affected, for instance, in the
context of disproportionate humane and financial contributions to the war effort
(Trubowitz, 1998). In spite of the recognition of regionalized and localized preferences
in foreign and security policy issues, notably in the liberalism research program (Kaarbo,
2015; Moravcsik, 1997), we still do not know much about how regional constituencies
and their representatives influence the national government’s foreign policy decisions.
Notably, we still do not know when, in which ways, and to what extent regional parties—
which compete mainly in regional legislatures—become involved in the national foreign
policy-making process.
This is an important question to address, as foreign policy-making has long been
assumed to be strongly centralized in order to ensure a cohesive and effective response
to international issues, especially in the domains of international security. In addition,
policy-makers and scholars have also long presumed that there had been a permissive
consensus to the process through which foreign policy was made (Holsti, 2004). The
implication has therefore been that a small elite has exclusive control over foreign policy
to efficiently protect the national interest (Lobell et al., 2016). This leads to another
vexed question within the field of international relations: is there an objective and con-
sensual national interest? This question is even more relevant in contexts of multina-
tional or multicultural societies where the political contestation between national and
regional parties over identity or identities has moved on to foreign policy debates and
decisions (Hill, 2013). Accordingly, over the past decades, Foreign Policy Analysis
(FPA) scholarship has increasingly argued and demonstrated that foreign policy is con-
tested between domestic political actors, especially in democratic settings (Cantir and
Kaarbo, 2016; Kaarbo, 2015). This literature has notably emphasized the role of parti-
sanship, political parties and parliaments in shaping foreign policy (Joly and Dandoy,
2016; Mello and Peters, 2018; Rathbun, 2004; Raunio and Wagner, 2020; Verbeek and
Zaslove, 2015; Wagner, 2018, 2020; Wagner et al., 2016).
In parallel, another strand of scholarship, building on the concept of paradiplomacy or
sub-state diplomacy, has observed how sub-state actors are increasingly involved in inter-
national politics (Aguirre, 1999; Aldecoa and Keating, 1999; Cantir, 2015, 2020; Curtis,
2011). Paradiplomacy is a phenomenon through which subnational actors—such as
regional governments, but also large cities—bypass central governments and promote their
own regional interests directly on the international arena. Their counterparts may be other
cities and regions as well as states. The emergence of paradiplomacy is usually explained
by the direct and indirect consequences of foreign policy decisions for subnational actors.
While not denying the importance of paradiplomacy, our focus is on regional political
parties, that is, parties that do not bypass the national government by developing their
autonomous foreign activities but—on the contrary—influence national foreign policy
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