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Leadership turnover, winning coalition size and foreign policy realignment

Li, Andrew X.
; 
Zha, Wen
Title / Series / Name
Asian Review of Political Economy
Publication Volume
3
Publication Issue
1
Pages
Author
Li, Andrew X.
Zha, Wen
Editors
Keywords
China
Foreign policy
Leadership turnover
Selectorate theory
Winning coalition size
Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous)
Political Science and International Relations
Geography, Planning and Development
Development
Business and International Management
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Li-Andrew1_2024.pdf
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URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/27716
Abstract
Why do states realign their foreign policies toward a major power? Conventional wisdom holds that change in political leadership tends to result in less drastic foreign policy realignment in countries with large winning coalitions. The current study capitalizes on this conventional wisdom by invoking a key insight of the selectorate theory, the non-linear welfare function. Since the welfare of coalition members falls before it rises as the size of winning coalition becomes larger, one should expect the stabilizing effects of winning coalitions to be the weakest for low-to-medium sized winning coalitions. Thus, leadership turnover in countries with middle-sized winning coalitions is expected to result in greater foreign policy realignment than in countries with very large or very small coalitions. We test this theoretical proposition by studying the foreign policies of 154 countries towards China from 1972 to 2015. With newly constructed measures of leadership turnover and winning coalitions size, the evidence supports a non-linear relationship between change in leadership and foreign policy realignment along the continuum of winning coalition size.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2024-12
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1007/s44216-024-00022-8
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International Relations
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