Presidents, parties, and foreign policy: Domestic institutions and interstate cooperation

This research explores the puzzle of why some South American countries put aside longstanding rivalries to develop cooperative regional partnerships after the mid-1980s, while others failed in parallel attempts. Sweeping international changes during that timeframe, including among others the ending Cold war, increasing globalization, the debt crisis, and the spread of democracy, created incentives for cooperation by linking regional integration with successful economic performance and international leverage. The effects of international changes were not uniform, however. Within countries they produced winners and losers who correspondingly favored or opposed closer regional cooperation. Domestic politics, structured by the institutional arrangements in each country, determined which group's preferences prevailed as foreign policy. The incentives for cooperation focussed most directly on national executives and political parties, institutions accountable to national constituencies for overall national performance. Countries were thus more likely to participate in cooperative regional initiatives where strong presidents, backed by institutionalized party systems, were able to implement their foreign policy preferences.; To test these hypotheses the research integrated quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative component was a time-series, cross-sectional analysis of all ten Latin countries in South America from 1980–1995, while the qualitative compared three critical dyads: Argentina-Chile, Argentina-Brazil, and Ecuador-Peru. While South American countries' exposure to international forces was relatively even during the study's timeframe, they exhibited significant variation in the dependent variable (interstate behavior) and the independent variables (regime-type, and domestic institutional arrangements). The cases were chosen because they demonstrated three alternative combinations of the critical institutional variables. Argentina and Chile had strong presidents and party systems. Brazil had strong presidents in a weak party system, while Ecuador and Peru were weak on both counts.; The statistical analysis and the case studies together confirmed the importance of domestic institutional arrangements for interstate cooperation. Systemic factors were inconclusive, and, while democracy facilitated cooperation in some cases, it was neither necessary nor sufficient cross-nationally. Instead, cooperation developed after the mid-1980s where institutional arrangements empowered executives, the institutional actors with the greatest incentives for cooperation, to implement their preferred foreign policies.