Photo: Ryan Hafey / Unsplash

62nd Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, April 6-9, 2021

At this year’s Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), I had four program appearances. The conference had initially been scheduled to take place in Las Vegas, but the COVID-19 pandemic made a shift to a virtual format necessary.

Together with Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt, Omar Serrano Oswald, and Anna Novoselova, we presented a paper on “Survival and Resilience of the UN Joint Inspection Unit“, based on our DFG research project, in a panel on the “Persistence and Resilience of International Organizations”, chaired and discussed by Orfeo Fioretos. I further contributed to the “Foreign Policy Analysis Methods Café“, chaired by Falk Ostermann, and I took part in the roundtable “Qualitative Comparative Analysis in International Relations“, chaired by Tobias Ide. Finally, I also served as chair and discussant in the panel “Statecraft in the 21st Century” (for details on the panels and roundtables, see below).

Besides these contributions, I also took part in the Business Meeting of ISA’s Foreign Policy Analysis Section and the Editorial Board Meeting of the section’s journal Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford University Press).

Overall, the virtual platform worked seamlessly and many of the panels were incredibly well-attended, with about 45 participants in the Methods Café and 30 participants in the panel on International Organizations. Nonetheless, the in-person interaction is surely missing, so let’s hope that next year’s ISA can take place as planned, in Nashville, Tennessee, March 2022!

Persistence and Resilience of International Organizations

Methods Café: Foreign Policy Analysis - Methods and Approaches

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) in International Relations

Statecraft in the 21st Century

Georgetown University Press has finalized the cover for my forthcoming textbook Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application, to be published later this year. More information about the book can be found here.

Open Access Funding Approved

Our recent Foreign Policy Analysis article “Patterns of Political Ideology and Security Policy” (with Tim Haesebrouck, Ghent University) has been turned into Gold Open Access by Oxford University Press. The PDF can now be freely accessed. We thank the University of Erfurt for approving our funding application.

Abstract: Recent studies on political ideology suggest the existence of partisan divides on matters of foreign and security policy – challenging the notion that “politics stops at the water’s edge”. However, when taken as a whole, extant work provides decidedly mixed evidence of party-political differences outside domestic politics. This article first conducts a systematic empirical analysis of the relationship between parties’ left-right positions and their general attitude towards peace and security missions, which suggests that right-leaning parties tend to be more supportive of military operations. Yet, the results also show that the empirical pattern is curvilinear: centrist and center-right parties witness the highest level of support for military missions, while parties on both ends of the political spectrum show substantially less support. The second part of our analysis examines whether the stronger support of rightist parties for peace and security missions translates into a greater inclination of right-wing governments to actually deploy forces to military operations. Strikingly, our results suggest that leftist governments were actually more inclined to participate in operations than their right-leaning counterparts. The greater willingness of left-wing executives to deploy military forces is the result of their greater inclination to participate in operations with inclusive goals.

Book review published in German Politics

On December 21, 2020, German Politics (Taylor & Francis) published my book review of Entscheidungsträger in der deutschen Außenpolitik: Führungseigenschaften und politische Überzeugungen der Bundeskanzler und Außenminister (Nomos) by Christian Rabini, Katharina Dimmroth, Klaus Brummer, and Mischa Hansel.

From the review: “In sum, this book offers a compelling account of German leaders and their foreign policies, based on meticulous research and a systematic application of leadership profiling. The book’s methods should stimulate wide application in the field of foreign policy analysis, and beyond.”

Article published in Foreign Policy Analysis

The October 2020 issue of Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford University Press) includes the article “Patterns of Political Ideology and Security Policy” by Tim Haesebrouck and me. In the article, we examine the relationship between the ideology of political parties and their general support for military missions.

Empirically, the study confirms a curvilinear relationship: with support peaking among center-right parties and dropping the further one moves to the far-left and far-right. However, when looking at actual military participation the pattern is different. Here, left-of-center parties have deployed to military missions more often than their rightist counterparts.

Founded in 2005, Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) aims to serve “as a source for efforts at theoretical and methodological integration and deepening the conceptual debates throughout this rich and complex research tradition”. The journal is published by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the International Studies Association (ISA).

Abstract: Recent studies on political ideology suggest the existence of partisan divides on matters of foreign and security policy – challenging the notion that “politics stops at the water’s edge”. However, when taken as a whole, extant work provides decidedly mixed evidence of party-political differences outside domestic politics. This article first conducts a systematic empirical analysis of the relationship between parties’ left-right positions and their general attitude towards peace and security missions, which suggests that right-leaning parties tend to be more supportive of military operations. Yet, the results also show that the empirical pattern is curvilinear: centrist and center-right parties witness the highest level of support for military missions, while parties on both ends of the political spectrum show substantially less support. The second part of our analysis examines whether the stronger support of rightist parties for peace and security missions translates into a greater inclination of right-wing governments to actually deploy forces to military operations. Strikingly, our results suggest that leftist governments were actually more inclined to participate in operations than their right-leaning counterparts. The greater willingness of left-wing executives to deploy military forces is the result of their greater inclination to participate in operations with inclusive goals.

Open Access Article Published in EJIS

The February 2020 issue (5:1) of the European Journal of International Security (Cambridge University Press) features the article “Paths towards Coalition Defection: Democracies and Withdrawal from the Iraq War“. The study examines democratic war involvement in Iraq across 51 leaders from 29 countries. The article is the first QCA study that covers the entire period of coalition operations in Iraq, from 2003 until 2010, across all democratic governments that were involved in the multinational coalition.

Among other findings, the article challenges some previous studies’ results on the effects of leadership turnover and electoral incentives (here and here). The set-theoretic analysis documents causal heterogeneity, where multiple paths lead towards coalition defection and leadership turnover only brought about the outcome of coalition withdrawal when combined with specific other conditions. For electoral incentives, contrary to expectations derived from prior studies, it could not be shown that upcoming elections were associated with coalition defection. Finally, the article documents the importance of casualties and prior commitment as factors that had previously been neglected. Replication data is hosted a Harvard Dataverse (R script, data, supplement).

Abstract: Despite widespread public opposition to the Iraq War, numerous democracies joined the US-led multinational force. However, while some stayed until the end of coalition operations, and several increased their deployments over time, others left unilaterally. How to explain this variation?

While some studies suggest that democratic defection from security commitments is primarily motivated by electoral incentives or leadership change, scholars have not reached a consensus on this issue. To account for the complex interplay between causal factors, this article develops an integrative theoretical framework, using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) on original data on the Iraq War involvement of 51 leaders from 29 democracies.

The findings document the existence of multiple paths towards coalition defection. Among others, the results show that: (1) leadership change led to early withdrawal only when combined with leftist partisanship and the absence of upcoming elections; (2) casualties and coalition commitment played a larger role than previously assumed; and (3) coalition defection often occurred under the same leaders who had made the initial decision to deploy to Iraq, and who did not face elections when they made their withdrawal announcements.

Reference:

Mello, Patrick A. (2020) Paths towards Coalition Defection: Democracies and Withdrawal from the Iraq War, European Journal of International Security 5 (1): 45-76 (https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2019.10)