Making, Breaking, and Shaping Foreign Policy

Undergraduate / Graduate

There is no country in the world in which foreign policy is made in a hermetically sealed environment. Leaders make decisions based not only on the national interest, but on their beliefs, political interests, and competing policy priorities. Other actors - the public, advisors, politicians, bureaucrats, and societal interest groups - also constrain or otherwise impact decision-making. Peering inside the state at these numerous domestic actors is critical to understanding why states behave the way they do in international politics. This undergraduate seminar unpacks the influence of various domestic political actors on a country's international behavior. Each week, we will survey a subset of the International Relations (IR) literature on one of these kinds of actors, starting with leaders and the masses and concluding with bureaucracies and interest groups. Throughout the course students will learn about and discuss the implications of this research on longstanding debates in the study of IR, including democratic peace theory and audience cost theory. Due to time constraints, the course will focus on democratic regimes, although we will conclude with one class on domestic political actors in non-democracies.