Domestic politics

Abstract

Domestic politics matters in foreign, security, and defence policies, and helps explain national orientations towards NATO. This chapter looks first at domestic actors and processes. Actors and processes are usually studied separately under the rubric of ‘organizational’ and ‘party politics’ approaches. These two approaches can be applied to both big and small allies in order to understand their preferences and behaviour within NATO. The chapter then turns to the different institutional constraints that can moderate both bureaucratic and party actors’ preferences at different times during the multilateral policy-making process. This demonstrates how organizational and party politics approaches can be fruitfully combined. We then show how NATO affects the politics of its members. Through the lens of domestic politics, we can highlight whether and how NATO has become more politicized domestically. Debates over populism and democracy illustrate the relationship between NATO and its members’ domestic politics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of new avenues for research.