Abstract
Over the last decade, IR scholarship has increasingly focused on the role of leaders in world politics. Nevertheless, it remains unclear when political leaders matter for foreign policy outcomes. Existent answers propose that prodigious power and great uncertainty elevate the influence of a particular leaders’ individual characteristics. While we accept that power and uncertainty are essential aspects to account for leaders’ influence, we argue that this is too narrow a focus. To improve IR scholarship’s conceptualization of specific leaders’ sway, we propose a novel framework – one that takes into account the various constraints that exist at several levels of political interaction and integrates these constraints into the ideational context of foreign-policy decision-making. Our framework can help point scholarly attention to the kernel of political leadership that truly matters: If a particular leader were replaced, certain foreign policy choices of her state would not be the same. To illustrate our framework, we probe the influence of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Britain’s policy toward German unification during 1989-1990. To this end, we primarily draw upon recently declassified materials we collected from UK and US archives.
Panel: The Domestic Politics of Security and Defense
Cite this presentation
@inproceedings{eiss-2019-not-whether-but-when-the-influence-of-leaders-on-foreign-policy,
author = {Jonas Schneider},
title = {Not Whether but When: The Influence of Leaders on Foreign Policy},
booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2019},
year = {2019},
url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2019-not-whether-but-when-the-influence-of-leaders-on-foreign-policy.html}
}