Populism and Foreign Policy
Funding: German Research Foundation (2021-2024)
Project lead: Prof. Dr Sandra Destradi (University of Freiburg) and Dr Johannes Plagemann (German Institute for Global and Area Studies)
What are the international implications of the rise of populist governments all over the world? Prominent recent episodes – from U.S. President Trump’s retreat from the Iran nuclear deal to Brexit – suggest that populists, once they get elected and form governments, overthrow existing commitments to multilateralism and global governance and pursue more aggressive policies than their non-populist predecessors.
Yet, our previous work on the Global South (Plagemann/Destradi 2019a; Destradi/Plagemann 2019) suggests that this is not always the case. In some cases, populists are even more open to multilateralism or more willing to contribute to the provision of global public goods than their non-populist predecessors.
The proposed project aims to make sense of these variations in the impact of populist government formation on foreign policy. Since the study of the international implications of populist government formation is a nascent and still almost untheorized field, the project takes an explorative approach. It aims to assess and theorize the impact of populism on foreign policy. Its main research question is the following: To what extent and why does the formation of populist governments lead to changes in foreign policy?
The project focuses on four broad fields: a) governments’ international conflict behavior; b) their contributions to global governance; c) their support for international institutions; and d) their re-orientation towards populist and/or autocratic international partners. Empirical analyses are based on in-depth case studies of continuity and change in foreign policy after the formation of populist governments in five countries: Bolivia (Morales, 2006-2019), India (Modi, 2014-2020), Turkey (Erdoğan, 2003-2020), Italy (the League-Five Star Movement all-populist coalition government, 2018-2019), and the Philippines (Duterte, 2016-2020). These cases were selected as they display variation in the ‘thick’ ideologies espoused by populists in power as well as on other theoretically relevant dimensions.
The project is structured in two Work Packages (WPs). WP1 takes stock of changes in foreign policy after the formation of populist governments by comparing the foreign policies of each populist government with that of its non-populist predecessor (within-case comparison) across the four fields (a-d). WP1 also addresses shifts in the processes of foreign policy-making in each case. WP2 answers the second part of the research question (‘why?’). It compares foreign policy change after populist government formation across cases. It uses such comparison for theory-building by taking an abductive approach and develops, assesses, and refines theoretical expectations about the mechanisms through which populism impacts foreign policy. The project is designed to combine the search for generalizable patterns across cases with careful attention to context conditions and in-depth knowledge of each case.