UC Irvine

The centrality of domestic coalitions serves as transmission belts between the domestic and international realms. Despite its long lineage in international and comparative political economy and its relevance to the understanding of contemporary responses to globalization, coalitional analysis has been typically neglected when explaining outcomes in international relations. The analytical framework adopted here builds on two “ideal-typical” coalitions—an “inward-nationalist” and an “outward-internationalist” model—each advancing competing models across industrialized and industrializing contexts alike. Several applications illustrate the breadth and scope of this framework, spacious enough to explain economic responses in Europe from the repeal of the Corn Laws to the 20th century; the security implications of economic responses leading to World War I; the impact of internationalization on regional orders in the industrializing world since 1945; the relationship between coalitional approaches to the global economy and nuclear weapons proliferation since 1970; and the relevance of coalitional divides to outcomes regarding Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and beyond.

Coalitional analysis thus (a) offers important insights on wide-ranging empirical phenomena in comparative and international politics that institutional approaches alone fail to explain; (b) provides a unifying framework addressing trans-historical responses to globalization, nationalism, ethno-confessionalism, and their effects on interstate relations; (c) attends to political cleavages in political economy that intersect with security; (d) transcends dated level-of-analysis categories by linking subnational and global processes; (e) is flexible enough to accommodate wide variation in state–society relations and political institutionalization; (f) grounds politics in a dynamic framework able to explain both continuity and change; and (g) clarifies contradictory findings regarding interdependence and war by providing a mechanism explaining why, when, and how economic exchange with the world may or may not inhibit war.