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 toward 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 for 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.

中文翻译：

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政治思想与安全政策的模式

摘要

关于政治意识形态的最新研究表明，在外交和安全政策问题上存在党派分歧，这挑战了“政治停在水边”的观念。但是，从整体上看，现存的工作为国内政治之外的政党政治分歧提供了明确混合的证据。本文首先对当事方左右立场与其对和平与安全特派团的一般态度之间的关系进行系统的实证分析，这表明右倾政党往往更支持军事行动。然而，结果还表明，经验模式是曲线的：中间派和中右翼政党对军事任务的支持程度最高，而政治范围两端的政党所表现出的支持则大大减少。我们的分析的第二部分研究了右翼政党对和平与安全特派团的更强有力支持是否转化为右翼政府更大程度地倾向于实际部署部队进行军事行动。令人惊讶的是，我们的结果表明，左倾政府实际上比右倾政府更倾向于参与行动。左翼高管部署军队的意愿更大，是因为他们更愿意参加具有包容性目标的行动。