Contestation and Politicization of Security and Defence Policy
Votes in parliament reveal the degree to which foreign affairs are contested and politicized. Data from the US Congress since its first session in 1789 confirm the established narrative that foreign affairs have become politicized since the Vietnam War but also qualify the politicization narrative by showing that post-Vietnam levels of contestation are far from unusual if compared to the first 150 years of Congressional voting. While levels of contestation vary, foreign affairs have never been fully exempted from democratic politics. An analysis of voting behaviour in the German and the Dutch parliament confirm that democratic politics does indeed not stop at the water’s edge. A new dataset of deployment votes in eleven countries shows that dissent is also common in votes on military interventions but also highlights differences across countries. In many countries, the government is successful in building a broad coalition in support of the military intervention in question. The rising numbers of deployment votes indicate that military interventions have gained in saliency since the end of the Cold War.