Book reviews

657

Legislatures is a novel and thorough work that deserves

attention from anyone with a scholarly interest in money
and politics.

[The views expressed here are those of the author

and not necessarily those of the Congressional Research
Service, Library of Congress or American University.]

Juliet Kaarbo, Coalition politics and cabinet decision making:

A comparative analysis of foreign policy choices. (2012) Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 74.95 (hbk),
xi 340 pp. ISBN 9780472118243.

examined with each case study following an identical structure: a discussion of the context of foreign policy in each
country; an outline of the actors involved in foreign policy
decision-making; an overview of the decision in question; the
parties involved and their position in the policy space; an
assessment of the disagreements and decisions made; and
finally an analysis of the role of coalition politics in the
process.
The multi-method empirical strategy produces some
important results for scholars of foreign policy decisionmaking. The quantitative analysis indicates that coalition
governments take more extreme decisions than singleparty governments. Furthermore, coalitions that contained
a greater number of parties were likely to take more aggressive policy decisions. However, coalitions that contained
rightist junior partners were found to produce more cooperative foreign policy. The case studies largely reinforce these
conclusions and offer more detailed explanations of how
coalition politics affected policy outcomes. Across the
cases, the most common explanatory factors behind policy
decisions were: party disunity, issue divisibility, locus
of authority, political calculations and the consistency of the
junior partners position. For example, the Japanese Socialists failure consistently to argue their opposition to Japans
participation in the 1995 Golan Heights peacekeeping operation meant that the party was unable to constrain its senior
coalition partner in the government. Of some importance is
the further explanation that the case studies offer for the
unexpected finding that governments with rightist junior
partners tend to produce more cooperative foreign policy.
In Japan, the conservative junior partner at the time of the
rice liberalization case advocated greater cooperation by
way of liberalization, though this may simply reflect that the
junior partners preferences coincided with those of the
leading party in the coalition. Another explanation put forward in the book is that rightist junior parties may have
advocated conflicting foreign polices but simply failed to
have any influence, which was the case in each of the Turkish foreign policy decisions examined.
While the quantitative analysis of coalition politics and
foreign policy decision-making represents just a single
chapter, it is also the weakest element of the book. A number
of problems are evident. First, the presentation of the data
and analysis is incomplete. There is a lack of descriptive statistics for the variables included in the regression models,
and the reporting of the results of the analysis is unusual. The
results tables fail to report the coefficients for any of the control variables included in the models and no overall model fit
statistics are reported. Second, the operationalization of the

Reviewed by: Lee Savage, Kings College London, UK

Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making is a welcome addition to the scarce literature on how coalition politics influences foreign policy. While there have been few
direct examinations of the influence of coalition politics
in foreign policy decision-making, the literature has developed a number of theoretical expectations derived from
analyses of the role of institutions, accountability and group
processes. One is that coalitions will develop especially
peaceful foreign policy courtesy of the inherent constraints
of multiparty decision-making (for example, the need to
find a common position). Conversely, others have suggested that coalitions produce more aggressive foreign policy to compensate for a perceived weakness in domestic
politics or that smaller, ideologically extreme coalition
partners can hijack foreign policy if their presence in the
cabinet is crucial to its survival. Further expectations relate
to the quality of decision-making with some claiming that
coalitions produce delayed and fragmented policy while
others propose that multiparty governments deliver more
considered policy outputs as coalition partners act as natural devils advocates.
The book investigates the evidence for these theoretical
expectations using a mixture of quantitative comparative
analysis and case studies of prominent foreign policy decisions in three countries: The Netherlands, Japan and
Turkey. It is these case studies that provide the greater
part of the empirical evidence in this volume. Significantly, the decisions that are examined are not limited
to international conflict situations. Decision-making in
some conflict situations is examined for example, The
Netherlands participation in the Iraq War (2003) but
other general foreign policy situations are also considered, such as the liberalization of rice imports to Japan
(1993) and the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey
(19992002). In selecting these more prosaic matters of
foreign policy for assessment, Kaarbo ensures that the
case studies are not simply those decisions taken during
extraordinary circumstances that may naturally produce more
extreme reactions from within governments or result in the
suppression of intra-government dissent that is common during conflict situations. In total, 12 foreign policy decisions are

Downloaded from ppq.sagepub.com by Alexander Rusero on April 26, 2016

658

Party Politics 20(4)

party leftright positions variable could be improved. It is

difficult to understand why a single source that did not rely
on the authors own coding is not used; for example, the
Manifestos Project Database. The interval data provided
by the Manifestos Project Database would also have allowed
the author to investigate whether the extent of the difference
between coalition partners as opposed to merely being
located left or right of the senior partner had any effect
on policy outcomes. Third, it would have been interesting
to control for the number of veto players in the statistical
models, something that is raised in the case study analyses.
Finally, the book should have addressed whether it is relevant that the quantitative data cover a period from 1966
to 1989 while 10 of the 12 case study decisions took
place after that period. Can the results of the quantitative

analysis be extrapolated to the case studies given that the

events that comprise cases in the former took place during the Cold War while most of the case studies took
place in a very different international environment?
Despite these problems, this book has much to recommend it. It is well written with minimal use of jargon. The
case studies provide valuable insight into coalition
decision-making and the choice of countries and events is
unexpected and interesting. In a field dominated by analyses
of foreign policy decision-making from the perspective of
the major global powers, Coalition Politics and Cabinet
Decision Making stands out and will be an essential text for
scholars and students of international relations. It will also
be of interest to those researching party politics and coalition politics.

Ian Marsh and Raymond Miller, Democratic decline and

democratic renewal: Political change in Britain, Australia and
New Zealand. (2012) Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 60 (hbk); x 383 pp. ISBN 0781107025684.

Marsh and Millers book is organized in five parts. The

first sets out the sophisticated (in former New Zealand
Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmers words) theoretical
framework of analysis. Drawing on Dahl (but more specifically March and Olsen) they ground the work in thick
and thin poles of democratic governance. Accounts of
governance vary between the institutional (thick) and
exchange (thin) versions. The benefit for Marsh and Miller
in using the March and Olsen conceptual framework is that
the study can operate on both normative and analytical
levels. The case studies, therefore, consider institutional
governance in each country and add the exchange or structured choice element. This has the added benefit of
combining an analysis of contemporary institutional governance in stable and mature democracies with a psychological approach to how social choice is structured the
logic of appropriate behaviour. Having established the
framework, Marsh and Miller present four conjectures
(rather than hypotheses) regarding the evolution of democratic governance. Three of these are diagnostic, the fourth
deals with the remedies.
The book then looks in turn at each of the case studies. In
summary, the problem in Britain is dismantling of the state
strategic capacity that underpinned the mass party era the
strategy gap. In Australia the decline of major party organizations has diminished their necessary role as agendasetting and mobilization vehicles the representation gap.
In New Zealand, despite the transition from a two-party to
multiparty system, a decline in citizen mobilization is evident, as is a de-alignment of political parties with citizen
identities.
Having set out the diagnosis, the final part addresses
the possible remedies. The literature on the health (or otherwise) of democratic governance provides a particularly
rich stream of material for scholars. What is often missing
from the academic material is a normative approach to
suggest and recommend remedies to solve this disconnect

Reviewed by: Mark Bennister, Canterbury Christ Church

University, Kent, UK

This book is a timely reminder that all is not well with

the democratic systems in Britain, Australia and New
Zealand. Marsh and Millers comprehensive and illuminating study is predicated on the notion that democratic
practice has contracted in states where democratic provenance is longest and deepest. The flexible nature of
these three mature democracies is characterized by conventions rather than written rules underpinned by a
shared political culture. Yet, as Blyth and Katz among
others concluded, political systems have become disconnected from the public that they nominally serve.
Representation is concentrated in a political elite bound
together by a shared acceptance of the neo-liberal
world-view. Disillusioned voters in Britain, Australia
and New Zealand will recognize this democratic contraction. The September 2013 general election in Australia encapsulated this contraction populist rhetoric
drowned out any serious policy discussion, while institutional fault lines in the electoral systems for both the
House of Representatives and Senate were exposed. The
resultant drop in turnout (even under Australias compulsory voting system) and shift in support to minor and
micro party support is symptomatic of this disconnect.
Similarly, in Britain and New Zealand the mild despotism warned of by Alexis de Tocqueville (and cited in
the introduction), in which the modern variant of a mild,
paternalistic government with limited levels of actual participation, may be evident.

Downloaded from ppq.sagepub.com by Alexander Rusero on April 26, 2016