Risking Peace: Contesting Foreign Policy

This paper explores the causes of domestic conflict over foreign policy in the context of a dynamic learning model. One state is composed of two political parties that are uncertain about how another state will respond to cooperative and confrontational policies. To resolve this uncertainty, they must implement policies and update on the basis of the observed outcome. While both parties have in interest in learning whether or not mutual cooperation is possible, their constituents have different costs from conflict and hence different willingness to risk the cooperative gestures that are needed to obtain this information. The model shows that parties whose constituents have low costs for conflict are less likely to change their policy preferences in response to external events, while dovish parties have more fluid preferences. It also shows that under conditions of uncertainty, interstate conflict can lead to a polarization of party preferences, rather than consensus. I then explore these implications using data on party positions in Western democracies during the Cold War. The analysis shows that parties of the left were more likely to change their policy preferences over time than were parties of the right, and that periods of high conflict, such as the resumption of Cold War in the 1980s, generated polarization due to the different responses of left and right parties.