Populism and Foreign Policy

Since the project breaks new ground, it chooses an explorative and comparative approach. It examines four broad foreign policy themes: a) governments' willingness to engage in conflict; b) their contributions to the provision of global public goods; c) their engagement with international institutions; and d) their relationship with populist-ruled and authoritarian states. The qualitative empirical analysis examines continuity and change in the foreign policies of five countries after the formation of populist governments: Bolivia (Morales, 2006-2019), India (Modi, 2014-2019), Turkey (Erdoğan, 2003-2019), Italy (the coalition government of Lega and Five Star Movement, 2018-2019) and the Philippines (Duterte, 2016-2019). The cases were chosen because they show variance in the 'thick' ideology with which populism is combined, as well as on a number of other theoretically relevant dimensions.

The project consists of two Work Packages (WPs). WP1 serves to take stock of continuity and change in foreign policy in the four fields (a-d) as well as in foreign policy decision-making processes; to this end, we compare each of the five populist governments with the respective non-populist predecessor government. WP2 answers the second part of the research question ('why?') and has a theory-building effect. It develops, verifies and refines statements about the mechanisms and conditions through which populism affects foreign policy by comparing foreign policy change in the five cases in an abductive research process. In this way, the project combines the search for generalisable statements with the in-depth and context-sensitive analysis of the case studies.