Domestic institutions and foreign policy

Recent international relations research focuses on the linkages between domestic politics states' actions in the international system. Two literatures are especially prominent. The first, democratic peace research, asserts the singular behavior of democratic states and seeks to explain the pacific interactions of democracies based on the structures and norms inherent in democratic polities. The second, diversionary research, claims that adverse domestic conditions drive leaders to seek foreign policies to distract domestic attention from domestic trouble and demonstrate the leader's competence in the foreign policy arena. Both of these research programs generally link either the structure of the state or conditions in the state with foreign policies, often international conflict. However, while the democratic peace literature asserts that democracies are more pacific than other states, the diversionary literature claims democratic leaders are sometimes compelled to seek conflict in order to maintain their elected positions. Moreover, democratic peace research tends to classify states according to their (unchanging) institutional structures rather than by the often-changing control of political institutions. Additionally, diversionary research generally assumes leaders will seek military solutions to domestic problems, effectively ignoring the range of policy options from which troubled leaders choose.; Alternatively, this research argues that institutional character rather than structure, the ease or difficulty with which institutions make policy decisions rather than the formal constraints on the executive, influences foreign policy decisions and makes the diversionary use of force implausible. This dissertation argues that the manner in which political institutions interact influences foreign policy making. Specifically, institutional congruence, the extent to which political institutions share similar or dissimilar preferences, influences a state's conflict propensity and affects the incentive for a leader to seek policy responses to domestic problems other than those based in military conflict. Congruence shapes the policy options from which a leader selects, making policy substitution virtually inevitable. The empirical analyses not only demonstrate the utility of congruence as a concept for refining how scholars think about domestic politics and international relations, but they provide among the first convincing statistical results showing that leaders substitute foreign policies depending on institutional character and domestic conditions.