Foreign policy as public policy?

Promises and pitfalls

Klaus Brummer, Sebastian Harnisch, Kai Oppermann, Diana Panke

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526140715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique comparée

This book examines how foreign policy analysis can be enriched by 'domestic realm' public policy approaches, concepts and theories. Starting out from the observation that foreign policy has in many ways become more similar to (and intertwined with) 'domestic' public policies, it bridges the divide that still persists between the two fields. The book includes chapters by leading experts in their fields on arguably the most important public policy approaches, including, for example, multiple streams, advocacy coalition, punctuated equilibrium and veto player approaches. The chapters explore how the approaches can be adapted and transferred to the study of foreign policy and point to the challenges this entails. By establishing a critical dialogue between approaches in public policy and research on foreign policy, the main contribution of the book is to broaden the available theoretical 'toolkit' in foreign policy analysis.

1

Introduction: foreign policy as public policy

Klaus Brummer, Sebastian Harnisch, Kai Oppermann, and Diana Panke

This introductory chapter outlines the rationale behind the edited volume, defines core concepts, introduces the analytical template along which the individual chapters are structured, and provides brief summaries of the individual chapters.

Foreign policy is “the sum of official external relations conducted by an independent actor (usually but not exclusively a state) in international relations” (Hill 2016: 4). Traditionally, the realm of foreign policy has been treated as a field of scientific inquiry distinct from public policy (Sprout and Sprout 1956; Snyder et al. 1962; Allison 1971; Hudson 2005). While public policy usually concerns policies in the domestic sphere, such as health, labor market, or infrastructure policies, foreign policy is about how a country acts in the international arena, for example vis-à-vis other state or non-state actors or within international organizations (IOs).

The two policy realms are also often seen to differ systematically with regard to the distribution of formal decision-making authority and the policy-making process more broadly. For instance, legislatures are generally considered less significant in foreign policy than in public policy. While parliaments in liberal democracies have the power to pass laws which is the foremost medium in public policy, foreign policy relies much less on formal acts of parliaments and often relegates the legislature to a more passive and reactive role, for example in ratifying international treaties. In contrast, the executive tends to be the foremost actor in foreign policy where it usually has greater authority and discretion than in public policy. This is commonly regarded as a prerequisite for the ability of a country to respond quickly and adequately to international threats and opportunities. In line with this, partisan political conflict in the domestic arena is often seen to be particularly intense in public policy which often has immediate re-distributive or regulatory consequences for a broad range of interests in society. In contrast, foreign policy has been said to have relatively little direct impact on domestic constituents so that there is less scope for domestic contestation around this policy field (Aldrich et al. 1989). Rather, the expectation has usually been that “politics stops at the water’s edge” and that governments can rely on broad domestic support when they seek to further the “national interest” on the international stage, in particular at times of crisis or conflict.

In contrast, the starting point of this volume is that foreign policy has in many ways become more similar to (and intertwined with) “ordinary” public policies. This is true for the actors involved in the policy-making process as well as for the scope of domestic political contestation around policy-making. For once, foreign policy is no longer the more or less exclusive domain of the executive branch of government (if it ever had been). With the increasing participation and/or influence of a range of actors such as parliaments, courts, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), interest groups, etc., national governments no longer monopolize foreign policy and are even struggling to maintain their gatekeeping role. Inside governments, an ever broader range of ministries beyond the core foreign policy executive have become routinely involved in foreign affairs. Foreign policy has also become increasingly politicized in the domestic political arena (Zürn 2014) and is often contested between political parties (Rathbun 2004; Raunio and Wagner 2017), including between partners in coalition governments (Kaarbo 2017). While foreign policy remains on average less salient in the eyes of general publics than some public policies, such as tax or health policy, it still frequently emerges as a salient electoral issue (Oppermann and Viehrig 2009) and can become a significant influence on voting behavior in national elections just as domestic policies (Aldrich et al. 2006).

More broadly, the increasing interdependence and the greater role of transnational processes in world politics have begun to obscure the distinction between the external and the internal in policy-making (Risse 2013; Zürn 2013). Over the last decades, the integration of statehood in some world regions, in particular in Europe, and the erosion of statehood in other areas of the world have shifted the gravitational pull between hierarchy as the ordering principle in the domestic realm and anarchy in the international sphere. In addition to the plurality of actors that now characterizes foreign policy, allegedly “domestic” fields of public policy increasingly have external implications, particularly in a highly integrated region like Europe (Daugbjerg 2014). The transnational diffusion of ideas, norms, and practice shapes “domestic” as well as “foreign” policy making (Gilardi 2013). Similarly, a country’s “external” relations have become more consequential for an ever broader range of “domestic” policies and actors, thereby changing the role of national (foreign) ministries and a diverse set of sub-national actors (Hocking 1999; Jönsson 2016). While certain policy areas still remain more or less insulated from their international environment, such as social security, other fields are particularly internationalized, for example finance. In any case, binary distinctions between the “external” and the “internal” or between the “domestic” and the “international” have become ever less useful categories in analyzing policy-making processes and their outcomes.

Despite the blurring of real-world boundaries between the international and the domestic, and hence between foreign policy and public policy, a divide still persists regarding the analysis of policy-making processes and substantive policies in foreign affairs on the one hand and virtually all other public policies on the other hand (Lentner 2006). Although foreign policy analysts have started to address these shifts in various ways, for instance by examining intermestic politics in foreign trade policy (Manning 1977; Russo and Haney 2012; Langhelle 2014), the consequences of this phenomenon for foreign policy studies have not yet been considered systematically. Foreign policy is still predominantly analyzed through the lens of analytical approaches developed in the field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) (Carlsnaes 1992; Neack et al. 1995; Kaarbo 2015), focusing on individual decision-makers, policy-making processes inside the executive, or the effects of international structural factors, in particular anarchy, norms, and institutions, as well as the interactions between these forces (Hudson 2014). In contrast, analyses of all other public policy realms employ a range of “theories of the policy process” (Sabatier and Weible 2014) which involve a broad array of heuristics and concepts (Howlett et al. 2009; Dunn 2016) to make sense of the main drivers and constraints of policy-making. The possible contribution of such approaches to the analysis of foreign policy, however, has yet to be fully explored (see Caporaso 1997).

This lacuna is all the more surprising since calls for theoretical dialogue between the fields of FPA and Public Policy (PP) have long been voiced by key proponents from both fields (Sabatier 2007; Hudson 2014). According to Sabatier (2007: 328), one of the challenges for policy theories “is to develop a much more explicit and coherent model (or models) of the individual.” FPA, in turn, puts individuals front and center since it starts from the very “assumption that human decision makers acting singly and in groups are the ground of all that happens” (Hudson 2005: 2). Clearly, there should be something in the toolbox of public policy theory that can contribute to theory development in FPA, and vice versa. Similarly, Weible (2014: 393) points to possible benefits of applying public policy theories “outside their typical scope,” in particular for the further development of those theories and the delineation of their scope.

Such calls complement nicely the core goal of this volume, in the sense of getting to better understandings of policy-making processes and outcomes in the realm of foreign policy through applications of domestic-level public policy theories. Indeed, owing partly to differences in the classification of materials for national security reasons, public policy theories might be able to draw on more nuanced understandings of the policy process and, as a result, offer more sophisticated models of the policy process than those to be found in FPA. A systematic exploration of this claim extends beyond the scope of this introduction (or the edited volume in general). However, if true, this alone would represent a good reason to explore the application of public policy theories to the realm of foreign policy.

To drive home the value added by such an exercise, the public policy theories have to compete on the “home ground” of foreign policy theories by addressing “classical” topics such as decisions on the use of force, bilateral conflict, or the imposition of sanctions. If public policy theories hold explanatory power in such traditional areas of high politics, they should be similarly useful (if not even more) in accounting for decision-making in other, more “intermestic” domains of foreign policy, like foreign trade or homeland security, as well as for decision-making in highly integrated regional environments. Taking up recent calls for strengthening the conversation between different sub-disciplines of political science, the edited volume contributes to bridging the analytical divide between FPA and PP (and thus Comparative Politics more generally). Specifically, the chapters explore primarily how “domestic realm” theories and concepts developed in PP can enrich the analysis of foreign policy as well as, albeit to a lesser extent, how these theories and concepts benefit from engaging with foreign policy. The volume thus aims at establishing a theoretical dialogue that creates possibilities for analytical integration and innovation across sub-disciplinary boundaries, thereby enhancing our understanding of policy-making across issue areas.

To that end, the volume follows the dominant pattern in FPA to focus on “inside out” explanations of foreign policy which foreground the influence of domestic politics or individual leaders on foreign policy decision-making. Similar to most FPA works, it does thus not take into account in a systematic fashion how systemic pressures are translated into domestic decision-making processes. The arguably most notable exception to this is neoclassical realism which, at least in a particular version of it, seeks to bridge the different levels of analysis in an effort of developing a theory of foreign policy (Ripsman et al. 2016). Still, such attempts at bridging the different “images” (Waltz 1959) of international politics remain relatively uncommon in FPA. While this lopsidedness may be deplored, it is beyond the scope of this volume to remedy this as our main goal is to build bridges between different sub-disciplines of political science in order to get a better understanding of the processes and outcomes of foreign policy decision-making by individual states.

The promise of cross-disciplinary policy research

The main contention of the book is that FPA has much to benefit from more systematically taking on board scholarship in PP. This allows it to broaden the conceptual toolbox for the analysis of state policies toward external events and topics, and to capture the real-world shifts and developments in the domestic and international environment of foreign policy. More broadly, this book seeks to contribute toward re-integrating policy research across disciplinary boundaries, as the latter has increasingly hampered our capacity to understand policy processes in a globalized world. The objective of the volume is to show that a dialogue across disciplinary boundaries is necessary and to exemplify how such a dialogue can be implemented in empirical policy research. While the book focuses on bringing together public policy research and the analysis of foreign policy, the argument is a larger one: sub-disciplinary specialization is good but it should be complemented with cross-disciplinary dialogue to reap the benefits of a comprehensive policy science perspective.

Traditionally, scholars have worked on an understanding that there is a clear line to be drawn between public policy and foreign policy. In this perspective, the agents, processes, and structures in the two fields are distinct and therefore demand separate approaches and oftentimes also methods. An extension of this is the tendency in the two fields to either disregard research and advances in the respective “other” discipline or to unsystematically “misappropriate” bits and pieces of approaches from that discipline without reflecting upon their core tenets. However, this book is based on the notion that an incomplete representation of those approaches which are available in the policy science “toolbox” broadly defined seriously hampers the scientific understanding of foreign policy. Thus, the book contends that the cross-disciplinary dialogue can and should be pursued in many different ways, including, but not limited to, the application of public policy approaches to foreign policy problems. Furthermore, the book shows that even if the respective approaches have limitations, there is much to learn by reflecting about context variables, scope conditions, and theoretical or methodological constraints.

While the question of how international politics and national politics connect has been discussed for a long time (Keohane and Nye 1977), this debate has generally not been informed by public policy approaches about how policy-making in the domestic arena can be understood. This is the case, for example, for scholarship on two-level games (Putnam 1988; Moravcsik 1993) which argues that foreign policy is simultaneously shaped by international and domestic incentives and constraints, but which has little to say about how the domestic dynamics and processes of policy-making should be conceptualized. The same goes for liberal “bottom up” approaches in FPA that understand foreign policy as the aggregation of powerful interests in domestic society (Moravcsik 1997). Apart from a broadly pluralist conception of the domestic pol...