Multi-party coalitions are an increasingly common type of government across different political regimes and world regions. Since they are the locus of national foreign-policy-making, the dynamics of coalition government have significant implications for International Relations. Despite this growing significance, the foreign-policy-making of coalition governments is only partly understood. This symposium advances the study of coalition foreign policy in three closely related ways. First, it brings together in one place the state of the art in research on coalition foreign policy. Second, the symposium pushes the boundaries of our knowledge on four dimensions that are key to a comprehensive research agenda on coalition foreign policy: the foreign-policy outputs of multi-party coalitions; the process of foreign-policy-making in different types of coalitions; coalition foreign policy in the ‘Global South’; and coalition dynamics in non-democratic settings. Finally, the symposium puts forward promising avenues for further research by emphasising, for instance, the value of theory-guided comparative research that employs multi-method strategies and transcends the space of Western European parliamentary democracies.

This contribution extends research on coalition politics and foreign-policy decision-making to non-democratic settings and, in particular, anocratic regimes. Anocracies have a complex mixture of authoritarian and democratic elements that fragments authority across politically autonomous actors. As in multi-party cabinets in parliamentary democracies, coalition politics thus potentially pervades foreign-policy decision-making. To illustrate this argument, several prominent historical cases of anocracies resorting to war are examined. These well-documented cases provide conceptual and theoretical insights into how coalition decision units and related political considerations can drive and/or distort crisis diplomacy, even at the height of international crisis.

This article surveys the quantitative literature in coalition foreign policy. Tracing its development back to what we call the ‘first generation studies’ in Democratic Peace research, we illustrate that its theoretical and methodological foundations distinguish this literature from its predecessors. We then overview the existing studies along three dimensions: the nature of the dependent variables, the content of the key explanatory variables, and the processes that identify and systematise the institutional factors that influence coalition foreign policy. Our suggestions for future research highlight some of the puzzles motivated by the findings of this literature and the promise of multi-method designs.

This article explores processes of coalition governance in foreign policy. Specifically, it argues that such processes are shaped by two interrelated dimensions of coalition set-up: first, the allocation of the foreign ministry to the senior or a junior coalition partner and, second, the degree of policy discretion which is delegated to that ministry. Bringing these two dimensions together, the article distinguishes four types of coalition arrangement for the making of foreign policy, which are expected to have predictable implications for the process of foreign policy-making and, ultimately, for the foreign policy outputs of multi-party coalitions and their quality.

This article makes two arguments. First, it seeks to warn foreign policy analysis scholars against directly applying models and theories developed in the context of West European countries to other regions such as the Global South. More specifically, we highlight some of the particularities present in cases from the Global South that might limit any direct attempt to apply hypothesised mechanisms derived from the existing coalition foreign-policy literature. Second, we argue that the scholarship on coalition foreign policy needs to more systematically integrate the lessons and insights from coalition experiences from the Global South. We look at the recent Indian experience with coalitions to illustrate some of our arguments about the benefits and limitations of the existing scholarship as well as to explore the need to develop new frameworks.

On 13 January 2016, for the first time in its history, the European Union launched an investigation against one of its full member states, Poland. The dispute is about new Polish laws that allegedly disempower the Constitutional Court and the public media, thus breaching EU democracy standards. The dispute reaches far beyond Poland and questions the further perspectives of integration of the Central Eastern European (CEE) states within the EU. At the same time, it is closely connected with the current multidimensional European crisis. This article argues that the EU-Poland dispute is an outcome of the combination of the specific problems of governance in CEE with a superficial institutionalism of the EU. Poland’s governance controversies show that new attention of the EU to its CEE member states is needed, as they were for many years marginalized because of other concerns such as the economic and financial crises since 2007, the threat of a ‘Brexit’ and currently the refugee crisis. In order to salvage the European integration project, it will be crucial for Europe’s credibility to support the CEE countries to reform their socio-economic systems. At the same time, the case of Poland offers a chance for a debate about how the EU can cooperate more effectively and in extended manners.

There is a consensus in recent literature on electoral research that voter turnout rates are declining significantly. We know less, however, about when this decline started and how significant it is. In this paper, we analyse trends in electoral turnout, as reported in the IDEA dataset for 20 stable democracies over the period between 1950 and 2012, which covers 349 elections. The results show that turnout levels were stable until approximately 1980. A significant linear decline can be observed from 1980 onward. Various institutional elements related to turnout levels – such as the closeness of elections, or the effective number of parties – do not explain this spline or the particular curve of the decline. We close with a number of suggestions for future research that may ascertain this relation in more depth.

The inverted classroom model (ICM) is an active learning approach that reserves class meetings for hands-on exercises while shifting content learning to the preparatory stage. The ICM offers possibilities for pursuing higher-order learning objectives even in large classes. However, there are contradicting reports about students’ reactions to this kind of teaching innovation. With the ICM making inroads in political science teaching, this paper discusses how students evaluate this method. We report results from an application of the ICM to an introductory international relations course. In our course, students’ reactions to the ICM varied greatly. Using a regression analysis of student evaluation scores, we find that students’ preference for collaborative learning best predicted their preference for the ICM over the traditional lecture format.

Studying social narratives is not part of mainstream political science, but, as Shaul Shenhav argues in Analyzing Social Narratives, it ought to be. Narratives are everywhere and are an important factor in human and social life; human beings are essentially homo narrans, and so social science must take narratives seriously. Narratology is just one of many interpretivist methods that are gaining increasing ground within the social sciences. Shenhav provides an introduction to the study of social narratives, while also contributing to the theoretical development of the field himself through notions such as multiplicity (referring to the proliferation of narratives through repetition and variation) and story-listening (referring to the way in which the researcher interacts with stories). In this review symposium, Ronald R. Krebs, Michael D. Jones, Myron J. Aronoff and Shaul Shenhav discuss Shenhav’s book and, beyond that, the advantages of taking social narratives seriously.