Forschungsprojekt ::

Populist Leadership and Foreign Policy Decision-Making

Projektbeschreibung

The research agenda on the international impact of populism has overall focused more on preference formation and issue politicization than executive decision-making in self-proclaimed ‘people-versus-elite’ conflicts. This project sheds light on the latter aspect of the policy making cycle, in which populist-led governments often transit through successions of confrontation and compromise—or vice versa. Focusing on international economic issues, the study adopts a political-strategic concept of populism, which complements discursive and ideational perspectives by spotlighting how populist leaders make decisions through power personalization and mass mobilization. It is assumed that these factors at the leader and domestic political levels of analysis interact with situational economic pushback and contextual structural positions. This conjecture is tested in a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of 30 phases of populist leaders’ confrontation or compromise in politicized cross-border economic issues. The sample includes decisions on free trade, external conditionality, oil and gas nationalization, sovereign debt management, and monetary integration made by populist leaders from Latin America, the European Union, Turkey, and the United States. The results suggest various conjunctures of conditions for confrontation and two configurations behind compromise. In all paths to confrontation or compromise, at least one of the constituent components of populist leadership is a crucial difference maker.