Research

The politicization of the foreign policy bureaucracy is an understudied yet increasingly consequential phenomenon that international relations (IR) scholars are ill-equipped to explain. Politicization reduces bureaucratic autonomy and authority, despite the expertise and information that bureaucracies provide and the risks leaders incur in confronting them. Existing scholarship attributes such behavior to threats to leaders’ political survival, policy disagreement, or personality. I argue instead that politicization emerges only when two conditions coincide: leaders harbor deep distrust of the bureaucracy rooted in prior ideological and identity-based political conflicts, and they command sufficient political dominance to restructure institutions in their image. Distrust shapes leaders’ willingness to curb bureaucratic influence, while political power determines their capacity to do so. When either condition is absent, leaders pursue alternative organizational strategies, including strategic insulation, tactical circumvention, or integration. I test this argument through structured process tracing of Indira Gandhi in India and Richard Nixon in the United States, pairing within-case over-time variation and cross-case contrast. By examining how democratic leaders recalibrate bureaucratic constraint in two major democracies, this article advances debates on domestic constraints in IR and democratic foreign policymaking in an era of populism and polarization. Working paper available upon request.

Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy carries little weight in electoral politics, yet parties often center international affairs in their mobilization strategies. We argue that variation in party organizations drives some parties to consistently emphasize foreign policy more than others. Programmatic parties with long- time horizons, expansive ideological programs, and robust organizational structures have structural incentives to emphasize foreign policy in their rhetoric even when it makes little electoral sense. We test this argument using India, a multiparty democracy where foreign policy exerts little electoral pull. Using large language model-assisted text classification on a novel corpus of 91 party manifestos spanning 70 years, we show that programmatic parties in India devote significantly more manifesto space to foreign affairs than non-programmatic parties. A case study of the 1964 Communist Party split illustrates that programmatic parties may even allow foreign policy disagreements to drive electorally counterproductive organizational fractures. Our findings suggest that the domestic roots of foreign policy mobilization are organizational as much as electoral, with implications for how scholars understand party brands, leader constraints, and the construction of durable foreign policy worldviews. Working paper available upon request.

Nuclear cooperation agreements (NCAs) vary widely in how much latitude they grant recipients, from agreements prohibiting enrichment and reprocessing entirely to those granting blanket fuel-cycle consent. Existing scholarship asks primarily why supplier states provide assistance that could be diverted to weapons programs, treating recipient-side variation as secondary. We ask instead what explains variation in NCA permissiveness across recipient states. We argue permissiveness is shaped by two variables during negotiations: the supplier’s bargaining position, or how much the supplier needs the deal relative to the recipient, and the alignment of domestic coalitions within the recipient state. Unified domestic actors, such as nuclear bureaucracies, politicians, and civil society, can credibly constrain their own leadership to extract more permissive terms; fragmented coalitions instead produce competing pressures that push agreements toward more restrictive outcomes. Drawing on U.S. 123 Agreements with India and South Korea, we find India’s highly permissive agreement reflects a weak U.S. bargaining position paired with a unified domestic coalition, while South Korea’s more restrictive 2015 agreement reflects a strong supplier position compounded further by a coalition divided between technical/industry interests and local opposition.

Conventional accounts in international relations often portray national security bureaucracies as inherently hawkish, pushing political leaders toward military conflict. This paper challenges that assumption, arguing instead that most defense and foreign policy bureaucracies exhibit a bias toward caution and favor preserving the status quo. Drawing on cases from the United States and India, it explores how leaders with expansionist or aggressive ambitions confront this institutional restraint. I identify three strategic pathways leaders employ to navigate bureaucratic caution: accommodation, exemplified by George H.W. Bush’s responsiveness to military concerns during the First Gulf War; circumvention, as seen in Richard Nixon’s choice of covert action over direct intervention in Chile in the early 1970s; and outright defiance, as in Rajiv Gandhi’s unilateral deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force to Sri Lanka in 1987. These responses reveal the enduring tension between leaders’ political agendas and the bureaucratic imperative for restraint, with significant consequences for the efficacy and legitimacy of foreign policy.