HOW TO STUDY FOREIGN POLITICS: SYSTEMIC CONSTRAINTS vs. DOMESTIC POLITICS and DECISION-MAKING STRUCTURE

Year 2001, Volume: 6 Issue: 4, 0 - 0, 01.12.2001

Binnur Özkeçeci-taner

Abstract

How are foreign policies made? Who makes foreign policies and implements them? How does international or domestic structure influence foreign policymaking? Do preferences of leaders influence foreign policy decisions more than other factors? If yes, to what extent? These are important questions and one can find as many different answers to these questions as the number of people in the field. While some have argued that the systemic factors constrain or facilitate the behaviour of a government, others have maintained that domestic structure frames how a government is going to act in foreign policy matters. Still others have made the claim that leadership ‘matters’ in foreign policymaking and a leader’s orientation suggests how he or she is going to handle his or her state’s foreign policies, regardless of constraints systemic or domestic structures present. The aim of this paper, which is mainly concerned with the problems of systemic-structural analysis of foreign policymaking, is to make a case that domestic factors and decision-making structures should not only be taken into consideration in foreign policy analysis but they should be given a primary place in the literature.

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