How Contentious Domestic Politics Shape Foreign Policy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Many contemporary threats to nation-states arise not from external actors but rather from their own contentious domestic politics. This panel assesses how contentious yet non-violent domestic politics—ranging from nationalist protests to extreme partisan polarization—affect foreign policy outcomes across a variety of contemporary contexts.

First, McCulloch demonstrates how transnational ethnic ties shape foreign policy by mobilizing domestic groups to lobby elites. Second, Jeong illustrates the effects of domestic protest activity on a state’s leverage in international negotiations. Third, Ma draws on evidence from contemporary anti-China protests in Vietnam to show how nationalist protests affect crisis bargaining. Finally, Myrick explores the causes of partisan polarization over attitudes towards major U.S. adversaries in the post-Cold War era and assesses the consequences for U.S. national security policy.

The authors employ a diverse set of methods, including quantitative analyses of original data, formal modeling, elite interviews, survey experiments, and computational text analysis. Collectively, these papers show that domestic political processes that are contentious but not conflictual can have major downstream consequences for how states behave in international politics.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 20: Foreign Policy

Individual Presentations

• The Enemy of My Enemy: Partisan Polarization and U.S. Relations with Adversaries - Rachel Maureen Myrick, Stanford University

• Negotiation in the Street: Domestic Protests and International Bargaining - Sangmi Jeong, University of Arizona

• Watching the Waltz: Interstate Group Ties and Foreign Policy Protests - Caitlin McCulloch, University of Maryland

Chair

• Brett Ashley Leeds Rice University

Discussant

• Elizabeth Nathan Saunders Georgetown University