How do populist politics affect state behaviour? The worldwide resurgence of populism has encompassed electorally successful right-wing and far-right populist leaders such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Recyp Erdogan, and Victor Orbán. In parallel, left-wing populists in Greece or Spain have attracted voters disillusioned with neoliberal economic policies and existing mechanisms of liberal democracy. In the global south, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and Yoweri Museveni have combined populism with ethnocultural and religious-nationalist agendas.
Concomitantly, populism has started to permeate the scholarly agenda of international relations (IR) and foreign policy analysis (FPA). Key journals including International Affairs, the British Journal of Politics and IR, and International Studies Review have now published special issues on populism in IR, adding to an increasing number of articles, books, and edited volumes. Indeed, reviews now encounter considerable difficulty when they try to offer comprehensive overviews.Footnote 1 Still, even recent contributions lay claim to contributing to a ‘nascent’, ‘emerging’ scholarship that remains in its ‘infancy’.Footnote 2 What seems to characterise this literature’s infancy is not so much the amount or quality of existing scholarship, but rather its tendency to focus on (a) patterns of populism, variously conceptualised as ideology, style, discourse, and so onFootnote 3 evident in specific foreign policies, including security, migration, or trade policies, of individual countries, (b) (therefore) its lack of clearly generalisable findings, including on populism’s actual effects on state behaviour, and (c) its overall lack of integration with existing IR theory and concepts to frame (a) and (b).
The need for such integration is apparent: Relevant scholarship has recently begun to question insights mainly derived from single case studies, for example that populist governments consistently confront and disrupt existing practices and institutions of international order. Concurrently, this scholarship has struggled to systematically and theoretically explain the resulting empirical findings. While some populist governments employ confrontational policies (understood as aimed at disrupting, in style and/or behaviour, previous patterns of cooperation and competition, and defying the trappings of supposedly ‘liberal’ international order), others are quite willing to adapt and compromise internationally (i.e., following, in style and/or behaviour, the established rules and demonstrating ‘good citizenship’ in institutions of international order) – even if such compromises are unattractive to their own base. More so, the same populist government may switch seemingly erratically between confrontation and compromise on a case-by-case basis. Solely structural approaches still prevalent in IR, for example, neorealism, have often been discarded out of hand when it comes to analysing populism, and few if any realists have taken up the challenge. However, approaches solely anchored in domestic and/or electoral politics also struggle to account for such inconsistencies. Concurrently, patterns of inconsistent state behaviour are not unique to populist governments, raising the question of whether the phenomenon truly requires sui-generis theorising.
In this article, I draw on neoclassical realism (NCR), a widely used framework in foreign policy analysis, to suggest that state behaviour under populist government is best explained by the interaction of systemic and domestic factors. While the permissiveness and level of threat characterising the state’s international environment drive overall foreign policy, the effect of these constraints is mediated by the degree to which populist politics capture the state. I here conceptualise populism as a set of political ideas also associated with a discursive style, following the mainstream view in populism scholarship. By capture, I mean attempts to reshape the state, its processes, and its institutions to make it difficult for political opponents to contest the populist’s power. I discuss two main pathways for capture often associated with populism: personalisation and centralisation. I argue that the level of capture is dependent on two factors: firstly, the degree of decision-makers’ commitments to populist ideas measured via leader beliefs, and secondly, their ability to do away with checks on their power measured via the transformation of state institutions. Where level of capture is high, foreign policies contrary to state interests are more frequent, and loss of power or influence abroad should be more likely. This article thus makes two key contributions: to the study of populism in IR, it offers a way to systematically order existing variables, explain otherwise confounding patterns in the foreign policy of populist governments, and derive testable claims for further study. To NCR, it introduces the logic of state capture by populist politics, and thus a way to investigate a major contemporary phenomenon.
Populist foreign policy: A phenomenon in search of theory?
Where most prior analyses of populists’ electoral success and leadership have focused ideas and strategies in the domestic political arena, populism has started to permeate IR and foreign policy analysis. Contributions on populism-in-IR now abound but often remain focused on individual case studies of the foreign policy aspirations or outputs of populist parties or leaders either in opposition or in office, such as Andrés Manuel López Obrador,Footnote 4 Boris Johnson and Donald Trump,Footnote 5 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,Footnote 6 Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,Footnote 7 Viktor Orbán,Footnote 8 or Narendra Modi.Footnote 9 Some have noted a focus on right-wing populism, and a conflation of ‘populism’ with all sorts of other ideological positions, including nationalism or racism, which risks both overlooking populism’s emancipatory potential and mainstreaming more radical policies as only populist.Footnote 10 These contributions usually mirror the conceptual distinctions prevalent in populism scholarship, variously understanding the phenomenon as a (‘thin’) ideology,Footnote 11 political strategy,Footnote 12 style or logic,Footnote 13 or discursive frame.Footnote 14 Of course, amidst this developing field there is also considerable theoretical innovation, for example regarding performative aspects,Footnote 15 or conceptual combination with nationalism and illiberalism.Footnote 16
In some ways, these characteristics of populism-in-IR scholarship are unsurprising. Frequently, authors have their disciplinary home in comparative politics or area studies. They may be less inclined, whether because of theoretical persuasion or empirical focus, toward grand theorisation, international practices, or outcomes, and more to mid-level theorising and the measurable effects of populism, however defined, on specific foreign policies.Footnote 17 Still, it means that claims to furthering populism in IR, with notable exceptions, must be viewed with suspicion, as the scholarship in question may often be better characterised as populism in a specific state’s foreign policy.
In addition, much of this scholarship runs into an empirical problem that requires further integration with existing IR literature. Until recently, IR scholars adopted a fairly clear-cut view of how populists positioned themselves vis-à-vis ‘liberal’ international order. Populists (re)imagine the international sphere as a source of profound insecurity for the ‘true people’. By transposing domestic cleavages, antagonistic politics, and the ‘people vs. elite’ binary onto the international stage, and in turn politicising international issues through the lens of domestic politics, they seek to profit electorally, often despite considerable difficulties in turning their electoral promises into actionable foreign policy.Footnote 18 They claim to speak for those who have lost faith in the promises of globalisation, who resent unaccountable ‘globalist’ elites and technocratic governance, and who are disillusioned with the transnational, liberal establishment’s policies and ideas. They blame the nation’s decline and crisis on, variously, multilateralism,Footnote 19 trade liberalisation, open borders,Footnote 20 or collective security arrangements and international lawFootnote 21 – in sum, practices and norms associated with the ‘liberal’ international order. From these multiple and multiplying (imagined) crises, populists offer saving, including by remodelling international politics.Footnote 22
Populist incumbents were, by and large, expected to put these ideas into action via a confrontational and transgressive foreign policy – and indeed some have.Footnote 23 This would involve, for example, (threatening) the nationalisation of political control, less international solidarity and cooperation, or even withdrawal of IO or alliance memberships.Footnote 24 It would encompass treating existing partnerships transactionally, bullying or bribing smaller states in the pursuit of short-term gains, and disrupting existing norms and practices of diplomacy.Footnote 25 At the very least, populist incumbents were expected to purport themselves differently given their distinct style. In either case, the common assumption about populists’ foreign policy is that it will be more confrontational compared to that of non-populist governments. And indeed, for example, Rodrigo Duterte called both the Pope and Barack Obama a ‘son of a bitch’ and showed his middle finger in response to the EU’s criticism of his human rights record. Trump burned bridges with allies and foes alike with undiplomatic and at times offensive rhetoric.Footnote 26
However, as populist incumbents face the world, they do not behave consistently and continuously according to their own professed ideas and style. Only rarely do they clearly ‘walk the talk’.Footnote 27 It remains difficult to identify any one (type of) foreign policy as distinctly populist. Of course, populism scholars have long argued that ‘few populists ever gain the necessary power to fully implement the policies they want’.Footnote 28 And yet, populists simply are quite willing to compromise under specific circumstances. For example, there was a notable gap between Donald Trump’s proclaimed ideas and his actual foreign policy. Trump railed against, variously, NATO, the EU, Mexico, and China, and famously sought to change relations with North Korea, but blundered through his first administration without significant change in actual US positioning – with the possible exception of US trade policy vis-à-vis China, though it largely stayed the course on issues such as Taiwan.Footnote 29 Similar conclusions must be drawn regarding a distinct populist style in international politics. While tentatively, ‘populists probably show a more vociferous style than non-populist governments’,Footnote 30 recent scholarship suggests that shifts to populist government do not generally lead to more aggressive foreign policy discourse.Footnote 31 In sum, populist incumbents do not seem to have any clear effects on the conduct or content of foreign policy.Footnote 32
From the perspective of populism scholarship, then, it seems relevant to investigate when populist leaders are able to enact the confrontational policies they presumably prefer, and when they are forced to make compromises.Footnote 33 So far, the limited effect populists have had regarding foreign policy has been explained through, variously and separately, the ‘thick’ ideological differences between different populist leaders or parties,Footnote 34 political survival motives and cost–benefit calculation based on electoral advantage or bureaucratic politics,Footnote 35 and/or leaders’ cognitive constraints.Footnote 36 Destradi and Plagemann suggest the reason may lie in systemic constraints, but focus much of their argument on personalisation.Footnote 37 Elsewhere, relevant scholarship has also begun highlighting structural drivers for differential patterns in populist foreign policy, for example differing degrees of economic dependence in the case of Latin America.Footnote 38
It is here that we return to the relative infancy of populism-in-IR scholarship – while quickly emergent as a body of scholarship, its focus on (often quasi-inductive) single-case studies means it has often foregone theorising the interaction between variables affecting foreign policy across cases, including across cases comparing populist and non-populist incumbents. Its relative ‘infancy’ lies not in the amount or quality of extant publications but rather in the lack of systematic theorisation, which in turn means that it struggles to explain confounding patterns across the foreign policies of different populist governments. This has been noted from within: for example, Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş conclude that the foreign policy of populist governments and resulting outcomes should be more systematically examined.Footnote 39 Chryssogelos et al. suggest that ‘IR scholars must think more about the relationship of populism with the international system’.Footnote 40 This dual challenge requires further integration with existing IR theories.Footnote 41 NCR is well suited to this task because it allows ordering and combining structural and agential, material and ideational variables to explain shifting patterns of confrontation and compromise in populist foreign policy.
Neoclassical realism and the analysis of populist foreign policy
Neoclassical realists seek to explicitly analyse the translation of systemic conditions into state behaviour. This is possible because they have a less strict understanding (compared to neorealism) of the constraints systemic conditions impose on state behaviour.Footnote 42 These conditions are neither obvious nor specific enough to guide decision-makers to one clear course of action: decision-makers lack information, experience uncertainty, and are limited in their choice by domestic politics.Footnote 43 These limitations in the perception, interpretation, and translation of conditions into state behaviour provide the rationale for neoclassical realists to employ different intervening variables, loosely clustered around (1) the ideational make-up of decision-makers, and (2) the institutional, political, and societal environment they operate in.Footnote 44 Collectively, neoclassical realists have suggested these intervening variables can help better explain three distinct phenomena: foreign policy mistakes, general patterns of state behaviour, and systemic outcomes (so-called types I, II, and III NCR respectively). This breadth, and the seemingly ad-hoc way in which intervening variables were added to complement systemic conditions, has led to charges of degenerative theorising and an unclear commitment to realist assumptions.Footnote 45
Rather than relitigate these charges,Footnote 46 I focus on how NCR can help systematise existing populism-in-IR scholarship and produce testable claims on the interaction between systemic conditions and the state’s ideational and institutional make-up as influenced by populist leadership. While populist government has attracted much research, IR realists have remained absent from it. NCR is one of the most mainstream and widely used frameworks for the study of foreign policy, but neoclassical realists have resisted joining the wave of populism studies now flooding the field. I have found one NCR analysis drawing on populism studies;Footnote 47 others using NCR to study foreign policies of, for example, the Philippines or Australia, note populism in passing.Footnote 48 Chryssogelos finds this absence unsurprising: many populists’ ‘emotionally charged discourses and meddling with the institutions and bureaucracies of the state (…) challenge central assumptions and predictions of IR realism’.Footnote 49
By contrast, this precise reason should encourage more realists to tackle populism. Populist foreign policy falls squarely within the scope conditions of what a neoclassical realist may, and perhaps should, analyse. Firstly, it is of great empirical importance to contemporary international security and great power politics given populists have been and/or have a reasonable chance to be in power in key states including the United States, the UK, or France, but also Brazil, India, and Turkey. In theoretical terms, should populist leaders fundamentally change how states behave, this would suggest the causal primacy of domestic politics in the making of foreign policy – and thus clearly delimit, if not disprove, NCR’s analytical utility. It would be grist for the mill of those claiming that realist approaches cannot account for new challenges in a changing world.
Secondly, neoclassical realists can rely on a wealth of classical realist scholarship that considers the effects of (right-wing and nationalist) populism on foreign policy. Schuett suggests that Morgenthau, E. H. Carr, Niebuhr, John Herz, George Kennan, and others aim to save political liberalism against the backdrop of their experiences of populism, authoritarianism, and fascism.Footnote 50 Morgenthau was deeply concerned with populism and its threat to democracy.Footnote 51 He thought of ‘the people’ as essentially pluralist, and a common will as only approximated through ‘the ever temporary balancing of interests and the ever precarious settlement of conflicts’.Footnote 52 Politicians need to have the intellectual and moral skill to facilitate and enact these public compromises, which implies an ethics of responsibility in leadership:Footnote 53 for Morgenthau, politicians should have the capacity to ‘make decisions that at least endeavor for a common good, consider all interests at stake, and are not openly informed by individual interests’.Footnote 54 Morgenthau’s realism is thus part of his wider political philosophy aimed at countering authoritarianism.Footnote 55 Carr was similarly concerned with a moral crisis of liberal modernity that enabled the far-right populist movements of his day.Footnote 56 Ashworth finds Niebuhr’s writings pertinent to contemporary right-wing populism.Footnote 57 It is in these works that neoclassical realists may find a rich tradition of thought about populist ideas and how they capture the state and its institutions.
Thirdly, neoclassical realists already have conceptual tools at their disposal to interrogate foreign policy continuity and change in ways that usefully complement populism studies. Populism may in principle affect or be channelled through multiple of the major intervening variables neoclassical realists have identified. Concurrently, a focus on populism can help neoclassical realists show connections and hierarchies between these variables and thus address charges of ad-hoc theorising and eclecticism. For example, below, I suggest that populist ideas affect both leader beliefs and state capacity in particular ways to produce distinctly populist foreign policy.
Neoclassical realists have previously highlighted the intersection of systemic factors and domestic ideas.Footnote 58 They have started to consider if ideas can capture the state to make it behave consistently contrary to systemic conditions,Footnote 59 and what ‘systemic punishment’ might look like in such a case.Footnote 60 They have begun to theorise how NCR allows conceptualising change and recurrence in different contexts in time and space.Footnote 61 Probing the ‘paradigmatic’ boundaries especially between realism and constructivism in this way is not only theoretically possible but also potentially productive of new theoretical and analytical insights, for example in terms of decision-making dynamics, the social construction of power, or the production of international order.Footnote 62 We may thus formulate a NCR model of populist foreign policy that hinges on the degree to which populist ideas permeate leader beliefs and state institutions (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. A neoclassical realist model of populist foreign policy.
Systemic conditions
Neoclassical realists share the assumption that state behaviour is ultimately a product of ‘environmental compulsion’.Footnote 63 The interplay between units within an anarchic structure provides at the very least a baseline interest in survival, and likely interests in security, power, welfare, prestige, and so forth, that is, ‘the things a state must secure if it is to maintain its place in the balance-of-power’.Footnote 64 Populist governments, like all governments, thus find themselves placed in a geopolitical environment not of their own making, which they need to assess and navigate to further their own and the nation’s interests. A state’s interests, and the opportunities and threats it faces, are primarily derived from material reality, that is, the relative power among units in an anarchical system.
Like all governments, populist governments may seek to shape and even contravene the pressures from this environment – though should they not heed its constraints, they risk punishment: at the electoral booth but also in terms of state security and even survival. The transformational potential of confrontational populist agency is therefore mitigated by the straitjacket of systemic forces: ‘[t]he material distribution of military power, geopolitical pressures, and economic capabilities affect the way populist leaderships formulate, plan, and implement their foreign policies’.Footnote 65 This holds also, for example, for states dependent on foreign investment or financial aid.Footnote 66 Such dependencies are aplenty in a global economy shaped by both close integration as well as heightened great power politics and increasingly diverse foreign policy linkages.Footnote 67
Depending on the state’s position in the system, the international environment varies – for example via different forms of polarity, the clarity and directness of threats, or the leeway provided to states favourably positioned in terms of their geography and/or capabilities.Footnote 68 Consider how populist governments tend to relate to the United States, Russia, and China: Giurlando and Wajner note that populists in the global south, no matter whether in power, have generally (though not exclusively) been more critical of US-led institutional establishments than their global north counterparts.Footnote 69 Concurrently, closer ties with Russia and/or China are often portrayed as a way to rebalance against and weaken supposed international and domestic adversaries, including by populists in the global north.Footnote 70 Both Erdogan and Duterte suggested they might coordinate more closely with Russia and China respectively, and populist leaders across Western Europe have courted Vladimir Putin and/or Xi Jinping.Footnote 71 For Erdogan, the decline of the United States provided a suitable opportunity to further Turkey’s influence and shape it into a leader of the Muslim world in a series of geopolitical moves since often associated with ‘Neo-Ottomanism’.Footnote 72
Especially by weaker states, populism may then be seen as a strategy to increase and use geopolitical leeway, break away from traditional foreign policy, and identify new options and patrons.Footnote 73 These opportunities for realignment are strengthened by increasingly influential global networks championing illiberal ideas. Concurrently, the resulting foreign policy is not strictly determined by the system: consider how Trump’s electoral victory has changed the populist calculus in the global south without concomitant changes in polarity or levels of threat. For example, Bolsonaro’s Brazil aligned with rather than confronted the United States once it felt the two governments were ideologically congruent in terms of their opposition against the ‘liberal’ trappings of international order. This changed again once Joseph Biden entered office – though given the importance of the United States for Brazil’s foreign policy, the Bolsonaro government could not afford to more fundamentally disrupt ties.Footnote 74 This suggests that not simply ideational commitment but also (perceived) systemic position and hierarchy deeply affect populist politics.
Systemic constraints affect not only what populists say but also what populist governments can and cannot do internationally, and how sizeable the impact even of small confrontations may be. For governments with greater leeway, even a strategy of continuous confrontation may only turn out costly later down the line as the state’s considerable power resources are slowly depleted, allies turn away, and adversaries grasp their opportunity to seduce or fill the gap left behind by transgression and upheaval. For regional great powers such as India or Turkey, a strategy of assertive confrontation might yield great benefits, but also considerable risk as relations with existing partners or increasingly wary neighbours decline. For smaller nations more immediately dependent for their security or welfare on the goodwill of others, confrontation can be costly quickly and drastically – for Hungary, it could mean closing EU coffers, for Venezuela or Bolivia, international isolation, for Serbia, the prospect of renewed violence.
Moreover, particular configurations of geopolitical environments, for example very loose or extremely tight systemic conditions and the presence/absence of direct threats (or those situations that can be made to look very threatening), may affect the electoral success of populist leaders or parties in the first place. Were this so, it could satisfy Vasileiadis’ transitivity requirement for NCR.Footnote 75 While most populist scholarship has highlighted domestic roots of populist electoral success, the role of systemic drivers in the success of populist politics is often underappreciated. This is surprising given the considerable amount of literature highlighting the role of real or imagined crisis to populist electoral success. Where such literature delves into contextual factors facilitating populist politics, it overwhelmingly highlights economic conditions, disregarding both the multifaceted nature of crisis (narratives) amidst a wider process of state transformation and the diversity of populist-led responses in terms of foreign policy.Footnote 76
An international environment that poses a low level of direct and clear threat to the people’s security (rather than/in addition to its welfare), but sufficient amounts of indirect and/or unclear, interwoven threats (e.g., from refugee movements or climate change), may be amenable to populist crisis narratives and/or productive of levels of lingering anxiety, humiliation, fear, or anger that populists seek to exploit.Footnote 77 In turn, unthreatening international environments as well as very clearly and directly threatening environments lend themselves less to populist and more to mainstream or rally-round-the-flag unity politics. Alternatively, populist foreign policy may also be understood as a response to what is perceived as tight geopolitical leeway (not just the presence/absence of threat)Footnote 78 – as already highlighted above, populist governments could, in this version, allow a state to break out of established rules, patterns, alliances, and so on, and reorient toward new opportunities, for example bandwagon with revisionist powers. Populist politics are then national expressions of a changing global order and the advent of multipolarity, or at least the end of unipolarity.Footnote 79 This coincides with and is reinforced by increasing global illiberalism and sophisticated transnational populist networks.Footnote 80 Populist calls for rebalancing and redirecting foreign policy towards revisionist powers are reflective of wider systemic changes and the crises they produced, which created the political space domestically for populist narratives to hold water in the first place.Footnote 81
Foreign policy outcomes
Systemic conditions and geopolitical leeway condition the degree to which a state can afford a strategy of confrontation or compromise in its foreign policy. By confrontation I mean the consistent taking of antagonistic, unyielding stances and conflictual choices, and in order to ‘push through [the populists’] proclaimed ‘will of the people’ against ‘elite’ pushback’.Footnote 82 Populist confrontation is likely, though not necessarily, directed against the ‘liberal’ trappings of international order, and/or deliberately in opposition to policies by mainstream predecessors.Footnote 83 When governments accept compromises (or outright fail to deliver any promised change), they offer acquiescent concessions and make cautious, conciliatory, or consensus-seeking decisions vis-à-vis the elites and institutions of international order.Footnote 84 Switching between these strategies can happen in both directions. Sometimes, there is relatively abrupt change within a few weeks; in other cases, a transition becomes only apparent over years.Footnote 85
All governments are assumed to try to maximise, fail though they sometimes might, their nation’s interests (and by extension their own, as chances at the voting booth are connected, at least to some degree, to success or failure abroad). To that end, they sometimes confront others, and sometimes compromise depending on the international environment they find themselves in, and the interests perceived to be at stake. This pattern holds for populist and non-populist governments alike: populist governments sometimes compromise, and evidently non-populist governments can be confrontational where it seems to suit their interests.Footnote 86 However, non-populist governments do not hold the same ‘people-vs-elite’ ideas and are usually assumed to be less likely to consistently choose confrontational policies.Footnote 87 Indeed, populism and compromise are inimical positions precisely because for populists, compromise with the corrupt elite is undesirable, and political power must always express the ‘true people’s’ unitary will.Footnote 88
Notably, populism-in-IR scholarship suggests not only that populist governments seek to confront rather than compromise more so than non-populist governments, but that they may try to do so even against their own state’s interests. This is because their foreign policy is primarily about electoral politics at home, not beneficial outcomes abroad.Footnote 89 And there is some evidence for this despite the mixed overall evidence for any distinctly populist foreign policy. For example, Duterte threatened to abandon the Philippines’s alignment with the United States and realign with China, all the while the latter posed a considerable threat to the Philippines’ economic and territorial security.Footnote 90 Had full realignment happened, this could have played into the hands of an increasingly assertive China and would have left the Philippines without a key ally, for example around the Spratly Islands issue. Similarly, had Mexico’s Obrador actually enacted policy to match his electoral rhetoric vis-à-vis the Trump administration, Mexico’s security and economy would likely have suffered – but he did not, instead supporting the ratification of renewed NAFTA negotiations and limiting northbound migration.Footnote 91 While Modi’s populist agenda has not consistently translated into a changed Indian foreign policy, India has behaved aggressively vis-à-vis both Pakistan and China near-simultaneously in 2019 and 2020 – moves that, while domestically attractive, constituted considerable risk given both of these adversaries have nuclear weapons.Footnote 92 Indonesia’s Jokowi set out to more assertively confront Indonesia’s neighbours, including China, and downplayed the importance of regional forums previously central to Indonesian foreign policy, like ASEAN – only to return to more compromising policies later in his first term.Footnote 93
For neoclassical realists, state leaders (deliberately or accidentally) misjudging invariant elements of material reality should result in some form of systemic punishment. This is because the anarchical structure of the international system is assumed to impose inescapable constraints upon states. These constraints are not strictly determinative, in that they leave space for domestic politics to intervene towards foreign policy outcomes, but they are not therefore weak or unimportant.Footnote 94 States that consistently fail to adhere to them because of domestic political distractions should find themselves at a mounting disadvantage that may, over the longer term, threaten their power position and even survival: the punishment will ‘fit the crime’.Footnote 95 For example, the first Trump presidency, though not dramatically consequential in terms of actual foreign policy output, may well have contributed to further US decline – in terms of prestige, welfare, and security, as allies grow weary and adversaries feel emboldened. The task is then not simply to demonstrate that populists produce distinct foreign policy outputs, but how these incur systemic effects (in terms of punishment) and systemic outcomes (in terms of accelerating change, e.g., away from US hegemony) over time.
Finally, just as particular configurations of the international environment may facilitate populist politics, populist foreign policies may in turn produce systemic outcomes. Electorally successful populists contributed to and accelerated systemic trends away from US hegemony and the liberal international order, including notably in the United States themselves. Though many of the states governed by populist leaders in the last decades were arguably too small to have much of a systemic effect individually, different states’ populist foreign policies combined to cement a wider challenge to international order.Footnote 96 Were populists incumbents to consistently behave more confrontationally, focusing on zero-sum transactions, viewing allies and adversaries alike with suspicion, or highlighting military instead of diplomatic solutions to conflict, they might reproduce (as well as be a product of) an anarchical system. This introduces a temporal dimension (systemic conditions at t0 produce foreign policies that modify systemic conditions at t1) akin to so-called ‘type III’ NCR, which remains a promising but theoretically challenging extension.Footnote 97
Populist ideas
The degree to which populist-led states choose more confrontation and less compromise depends on the degree to which populist ideas capture the minds of leaders and state institutions. This is consistent with how neoclassical realists have employed ‘ideas’ in previous analysis – causally speaking, leader and collective ideas may get in the way of a correct appraisal of what is a knowable though indeterminate international environment, and the deduction of appropriate foreign policies.Footnote 98 Populist ideas are an intriguing subset of political ideas, however, because they do not only affect the content of foreign policy. On the one hand, they may work like political ideas in other NCR frameworks – they guide decision-makers to some perceptions, not others. This is then about foreign policy content or output. On the other, they are also about how foreign policy should be made, and about remodelling the decision-making process in the populist image. In this way, populist ideas affect other variables often employed in NCR, such as state–society relations or bureaucratic capacity, over time.
Different authors disagree whether populism is best understood as ideology,Footnote 99 political strategy,Footnote 100 style,Footnote 101 or discourse.Footnote 102 Despite these differences, scholars usually identify shared features – that is, that populism is a combination of specific political ideas with a particular type of rhetoric.Footnote 103 The core ideational commitment of populism hinges on the Manichean divide between a ‘true people’, on whose behalf populists claim to speak, and ‘corrupt elites’, who have compromised the people’s security and welfare. The ‘true people’s’ will constitutes the only legitimate ground of decision-making, and therefore, mediated, representative democracy must be reformed as it has curtailed popular sovereignty.Footnote 104 Populists thus challenge the dominant order and promise a new one that resonates with the longings of the ‘people’.Footnote 105 To do so, they use a rhetorical style that allows them to portray themselves as authentic outsiders, and that is often transgressive, direct, emotional, and indelicate.
Populist ideas overlap and intersect with illiberalism in two key ways:Footnote 106 one, more broadly, that the populist leader acts as the singular representative and voice of the ‘true people’s’ common will (otherwise unheard in mainstream politics) fundamentally contradicts mediated democracy, democratic principles of pluralism, compromise, and consensus,Footnote 107 and justifies the vilification of political opponents.Footnote 108 Here, populism tends towards authoritarianism. Two, populists tend to attack those artefacts, practices, rules, and norms conventionally associated with political liberalism both domestically and internationally, with the aim of ‘reducing diversity within society, sustaining an adversarial politics, and undermining the institutions designed to constrain power’.Footnote 109 Translated to the international sphere, populists tend to equate the trappings of the ‘liberal’ international order, that is, alliances, international organisations, technocratic governance of global issues, international law, and so on, with elitist and ultimately corrupt mainstream politics, which threatens and exploits the ‘true’ people. They target policies and organisations whose ‘inherent multilateralism and internationalism populist anti-globalists reject in the name of reclaiming national sovereignty and popular authority’.Footnote 110 Domestic elites may be in cahoots with adversarial foreign players, and/or part of a ‘global cabal’.Footnote 111
Note also that populist ideas may be viewed as ‘folk realist’ given their superficial correspondence with some claims of IR realists: a (rhetorical) focus on the nation state, self-interested and transactional behaviour, military power, as well as prevalent uncertainty, mistrust, and deception in international politics.Footnote 112 Indeed, populists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of realism given their focus on the national interest and the necessary maximisation of power in a zero-sum, competitive world. At best, populists here reference a crude version of Mearsheimerian offensive realism. However, they are distinct in their vocal and specific opposition to what they view as the elitist characteristics of international order (connoted with ‘liberalism’ on the populist right, and ‘neoliberalism’ on the populist left), which determine the parameters of who to confront and which rules to transgress, and in their exclusive focus on the ‘true people’ rather than the state.
Leader beliefs
Leader beliefs, and the depth of commitment to populist ideas (in conjunction with but also distinct from right-wing or left-wing ideas they may espouse otherwise), may have direct and indirect effects on populist foreign policy: direct effects concern, for example, the relative unwillingness to compromise with international actors perceived to be part of a corrupt elite. More indirect effects concern how leader beliefs shape the foreign policy process. This might concern their leadership style, operational codes, or role conceptions, but also the willingness to mould the state or its institutions to their political agenda (see below). The use of leader beliefs as an intervening variable is fairly standard in NCR,Footnote 113 though different authors apply differing conceptual variants encompassing, for example, worldviews, causal, or strategic beliefs. They generally share in approaching leader beliefs as individual, cognitive devices, which help to order and simplify complex situations.Footnote 114 They guide decision-makers in their perception and interpretation of the international environment by helping them fill gaps of knowledge.Footnote 115
Populist leaders do not seem to straightforwardly converge to a common profile of beliefs or character traits beyond high self-confidence and general distrust of others,Footnote 116 which makes them disinclined to accept advice or expert-guided decision-making.Footnote 117 Not only do populist leaders not necessarily share in the same beliefs, they also differ in the degree of commitment to the ideas they espouse.Footnote 118 Some may deeply believe in an international order dominated by corrupt elites, for example. Their private and public identities become deeply intertwined with ‘people vs. elite’ attitudes to the extent that they judge ‘their own self-worth as moral authentic leaders against the yardstick of their determination to push through “the will of the people” at any cost’.Footnote 119 Others may view this commitment as merely tactical and aimed at domestic electoral success, and thus be more willing to compromise abroad if they can sell it at home. For example, while Jair Bolsonaro opted for confrontation regarding human rights and especially climate change regimes, he also showed considerable willingness to engage with China and continued cooperation in MERCOSUR, despite being critical of both during his electoral campaign.Footnote 120 While there are similarities in populist leader belief systems and personalities that are argued to act as drivers of their non-cooperative behaviour,Footnote 121 they also differ in the degree to which they are willing to instrumentally compromise. Far-right populists may have more conflictual worldviews compared to non-populists but employ instrumental approaches similarly (though only one of their examples is a populist incumbent).Footnote 122
It seems likely that there is considerable variation in the willingness of populist leaders to confront or compromise on any given international issue depending on how deeply they are committed to the populist ideas they espouse.Footnote 123 More committed leaders seek more confrontational strategies, while more pragmatic leaders show more willingness to compromise – the former are thus more likely to set the state on a path of confrontation even in the absence of a geopolitical environment that incentivises such an action. Notably, investigating leader beliefs and ideological commitment empirically can be difficult because of the ‘other-mind problem’: another’s beliefs cannot be studied directly, but must be extrapolated from what they say or do. Extant literature offers three standard routes to address this methodological problem: operational code analysis, leadership trait analysis, and proxying leader beliefs through rhetoric. The former often suffer from limited access to sufficient, comparable data. The latter can run into methodological issues, not least because populist leaders are often assumed to routinely engage in deceptive communication.
State and institutional capture
Depending on the degree to which populist ideas capture and transform state institutions, we may see less or more confrontational policies. Once in power, populists are often assumed to seek to undermine other groups’ or institutions’ capacity to contest their political control, that is, engage in ‘populist autocratisation'.Footnote 124 Despite differences in ideology, views of democracy, and the role of minorities therein, this authoritarian impulse may hold for not only right-wing but also left-wing populists (as evidenced by leaders usually associated with the political left, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or Slovakia’s Robert Fico). Institutional transformation and capture by populists can play out in different ways: for example, Tepe distinguishes direct, indirect, and insidious institutional capture.Footnote 125 Direct capture means the explicit, often large-scale ‘reconfiguration of institutions’, which creates an uneven playing field and circumvents checks-and-balances.Footnote 126 Direct capture may also involve merging multiple different institutions into one,Footnote 127 or inventing new institutions that compete with existing ones. Indirect capture refers to constraining existing institutions’ autonomy and ability to independently challenge the government. Insidious capture refers to ‘elusive’ and often unnoticed processes that gradually transform existing institutions into partisan ones.Footnote 128
As key pathways of institutional capture, personalisation and centralisation of political power in the populist leader’s hands have been argued to reshape foreign policy.Footnote 129 Personalisation conventionally means that the leader’s personal position within an institution (e.g., government) is enhanced.Footnote 130 To overwhelm any barriers to personalisation, the populist relies on unmediated mass support among the ‘true people’. This is a key difference to mainstream democratic politics, which mediates mass support via elites. This mirrors, on the one hand, the central role of the leader in many populist movements, as the one person channelling the will of the ‘true people’. On the other hand, it corresponds to the populist’s propensity to personalise and centralise all state institutions in order to eliminate obstacles to their transgressive agency.Footnote 131
While personalisation is a political trend that precedes and transcends populism, populist personalisation has specific consequences for foreign policy. Populists distrust career diplomats seen as representative of the old elite and prefer to take diplomacy into their own hands.Footnote 132 Populist personalisation thus leads to, for example, a preference toward summitry (rather than everyday diplomacy), meetings addressing problems (rather than prepared treaty work), and personal relationships. Populist personalisation also involves seeking direct ways to communicate with other actors, followers, and voters, for example via social media.Footnote 133 Finally, populists often try to talk like the imagined ‘true people’ would, which involves a more aggressive rhetorical style and undiplomatic conduct. Personalisation should therefore lead to a higher rate of confrontational policies and reduce the likelihood of successfully negotiated agreements,Footnote 134 provided leaders are sufficiently ideationally committed: as the foreign policy process becomes tied to the individual person of the leader, it increases the chances that the leader gets what they want in foreign policy.
Centralisation refers to the process by which political authority is focused in a single executive office or leader (and/or a core group of advisers), and decisional autonomy of other parts of the existing institutional structure is reduced. Such institutional restructuring usually involves simultaneous bureaucratic retrenchment, for example sidelining existing diplomats, limiting the ministry of foreign affairs’ independence, or firing foreign policy bureaucrats, as well as bureaucratic expansion, for example creating new, parallel foreign policy institutions that can be filled with loyalists.Footnote 135 In Russia and Turkey, centralisation has meant that key foreign policy portfolios have been brought directly under the control of the populist leader and their closest associates, often with links to military and intelligence services.Footnote 136
As the populist leader personally decides all important policy matters, infighting between advisers and bureaucracies is less evident, so that decision-making may appear more efficient. Consequently, however, it is more prone to erratic behaviour as more depends on the beliefs, whims, and personality of the leader and a small circle of advisers.Footnote 137 The procedure associated with centralised populist leadership, that is, spontaneous choices focused on short-term payoffs, increases the likelihood of policy failure.Footnote 138 For example, Duterte’s threat of realignment with China was likely the emotional outburst of a populist leader rather than a carefully developed foreign policy – consequently, the president’s statements never found their way into any formal strategy.Footnote 139
Populist personalisation and centralisation are not always easy. For one, foreign policy alone (even disregarding other important areas of government) spans too many facets and is too complex to be driven or decided by a single leader. Populists in coalition governments have to contend with more ‘mainstream’ partners. Even populist leaders in presidential systems, illiberal democracies, or competitive autocracies must rely on ministers, deputies, and so on who may not share in the same populist ideas.Footnote 140 For example, during his first administration, Trump encountered resistance from not only Congress and the public but also the so-called adults in the room and the wider foreign policy bureaucracy, and repeatedly tried to fill key roles with individuals more aligned to his agenda.
Personalising and centralising the foreign policy process usually takes considerable time and effort, and may well fail. This is for two reasons: firstly, institutionalised democracy provides checks-and-balances that are difficult to undermine in general. Where strong, this poses considerable barriers to power concentration or anti-democratic reforms. Where brittle, this exposes even populist leaders to considerable risks in terms of losing office early.Footnote 141 For example, populist leaders have found it difficult to navigate ever-changing coalitions in Greece, Spain, or Italy. The relative strength of institutional barriers against populist centralisation in turn may depend on the external environment, for example the presence of international actors willing to sanction moves to undermine democracy. For example, the EU has sought to guard against Orbán-esque centralisation by more tightly monitoring, and threatening legal or financial repercussions against, PiS in Poland or Fico in Slovakia. In Spain, despite a clear focus on trade politics in their populist appeal, left-wing Podemos has found it difficult to enact much actual change, whether through or against the EU.Footnote 142
Secondly, as populists mobilise against elites and bureaucrats for domestic political gain, they polarise and fragment those bureaucracies necessary to extract resources as well as prepare and implement policies. For example, extant research has detailed how foreign ministries and diplomatic staff adapt to but also resist populist attempts to reformulate diplomatic discourse, protocol, and training in India.Footnote 143 The ‘deep state’, to the extent it exists in the thousands of state employees tasked with government policy, may be incentivised to undermine the populist agenda. If populist leaders seek instead to hire new personnel, they may find that the elites needed for these jobs have better things to do than work for those who cast them as corrupt and evil. Populist leaders may thus inadvertently provoke counter-attacks from establishment actors that resist political capture.Footnote 144 This leads to short-term fragmentation of the government apparatus, and longer-term counter-mobilisation and intra-governmental resistance.
Often this means instead that high-level staff are picked for loyalty rather than experience – or even for their inexperience, untouched by the presumed corruption of a career in politics. Training new staff takes time; diminished expertise among those newly hired or promoted may lead to mistakes. Trump had the tendency to surround himself with inexperienced foreign policy advisers.Footnote 145 Inexperience results in unclear and less competent policy planning and direction, making it hard for bureaucrats to correctly implement, and for audiences to follow and engage with, foreign policy.Footnote 146 Inexperienced advisers are also less able to effectively check the populist leader, which increases the likelihood of mistakes, that is, policies that consistently contravene the national interest.Footnote 147 A corollary of this may be that more experienced leaders are more likely to successfully capture foreign policy.Footnote 148
This makes a consistent strategy of confrontation less likely in the short term, but more likely the more time (and ideological motivation) the populist leader has to reshape the foreign policy process. In Hungary, the Orbán government captured the state in stages: only after consolidating its domestic power did it seriously seek to reshape foreign policy via the ‘injection of new organizational priorities, an altered understanding of the role of diplomats and an alternative set of norms and values’.Footnote 149 This implies that the longer populists remain in power, the more likely a pronounced diversion from systemic incentives towards a more ‘purely populist’ policy of confrontation vis-à-vis the established international order.
Conclusion
NCR offers a way to systematise the study of populist foreign policy at the same time as it opens promising avenues for theory generation and, ultimately, empirical testing. It offers new ways to theorise the interlinkages of populism, policy processes, and state behaviour. Complementing often quasi-inductive or single-case scholarship with more general theory pushes the study of populist foreign policy to further integrate with IR scholarship. In turn, taking populism seriously allows NCR to tackle a dual challenge: that realism struggles for relevance in times of change and in the face of new, global challenges (of which the rise/return of populism is one); and that populism, rooted in domestic politics, could upend foreign policy, largely disregarding the systemic conditions that states face and therefore discarding NCR as a useful approach.
NCR is suited to addressing an empirical pattern of populist foreign policy: confrontation in some cases, but compromise in others. It can do so by ordering the interlocking causal factors emanating from international and domestic politics, thereby contributing to theoretical development even beyond its paradigmatic boundaries. Systemic conditions, that is, geopolitical leeway and the presence of direct threats, ultimately predict state behaviour. The greater the leeway, and the less direct (or perhaps more ambiguous) the threats a state faces, however, the more likely that populist politics may, over time, capture the state. In turn, populism may be a strategy to affect the geopolitical leeway and identify new options and patrons, especially in the case of weaker states. Based on previous scholarship, I discussed two avenues of state capture: via the depth of a leader’s commitment to populist ideas, and via the degree to which populist policies reshape foreign policy processes. This produces two key insights: one, it offers a corrective to the most alarming warnings of populist take-over. Consistently confrontational foreign policy, let alone aggressive populist reordering of the international system, is difficult. Two, should such distinctly populist foreign policy occur, it is likely produced by a combination of wider systemic dynamics (e.g., a return to multipolarity) as well as populist governments chipping away at democratic foundations. NCR is thus well suited to complement extant scholarship on the foreign policy of populist governments.
What does this mean for future research? While I suggested the above model fit well with existing evidence on populist foreign policy, attention must be paid to where it might not. Firstly, while NCR has been suspected of a kitchen sink approach to foreign policy analysis, we can derive specific expectations as to the interrelation between systemic and domestic drivers of state behaviour. State behaviour must primarily be shaped by systemic conditions. Where populist foreign policy is rooted primarily in domestic politics or leader personality, that is, turns out to be a genuinely populist foreign policy (as opposed to a state’s regular foreign policy captured on occasion by populist ideas), this is not easily squared with NCR – unless systemic punishment occurs. The UK’s Brexit policies, though enacted in part by non-populist governments, constitutes an interesting case to investigate in this light. Secondly, populism’s impact on foreign policy is difficult to ascertain, especially where it interrelates with populism’s broader effects on democracy and the state. The variation noted in the foreign policy of populist governments may not be the result of the suggested mediating variables, but of insufficient or improper theorisation of the effects of populism altogether. This hinges on not only clear conceptualisation but also the detailed study of empirical evidence beyond the examples provided here.
In terms of research design, this means that empirical testing is necessary to check whether the proposed model has analytical purchase. Here, a case can be made both for single-case designs, for example, picking ‘hard cases’ where a distinctly populist foreign policy seems emergent to see whether systemic conditions do prevail, or punishment occurs – the second Trump administration offers suitable testing grounds. More likely, the model’s strength will hinge on comparative theoretical testing across multiple cases, as well as against contending approaches to populist foreign policy. The different ways in which Central and Eastern European states, for example populist-governed Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, responded to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine may be a useful starting point to test the suggested interrelation between systemic incentives, leader beliefs, state capture, and resultant foreign policy.Footnote 150 It would be especially desirable to broaden the comparative basis beyond great powers and Western states, more fully making sense of populism’s effects on state behaviour in the global south and/or in authoritarian regimes.
I suggested above how systemic drivers might interact with unit-level factors to produce populist foreign policies. What remains to be further specified in this model are the variables’ specific operationalisation and measurement within empirical research as well as, importantly, the relative causal weight and interlinkage between the two intervening factors, that is, leader beliefs and populist-captured institutions. The former is likely to be analytically and temporally prior to the latter, as leaders buying into populist ideas seek to reshape policy processes and institutional arrangements. This is consistent with standard NCR models that assume leader beliefs to be causally primary in the shorter term.Footnote 151 However, since populism can also be understood as a politico-strategic approach or a wider discursive pattern primarily aimed at enshrining political power via institutional capture, the former may be reducible to the latter.
This is problematised further by the wealth of relevant (comparative politics) scholarship associated with personalisation and centralisation as two pathways towards institutional capture I briefly discussed above. Further integration with this scholarship can only benefit the study of populist foreign policy. And here again, empirical testing can further illuminate the causal mechanism that produces distinctly populist foreign policy. NCR scholars have often tended towards (comparative) case studies,Footnote 152 which seems sensible considering the interaction between systemic variables and unit-level populist politics suggested above. That said, NCR scholars have also sought to embrace quantitative and mixed-methods approaches to more fully capture patterns of state behaviour across time, regions, regime types, and so forth.Footnote 153 Studying patterns and effects of the foreign policy of populist governments is likely to involve not only theoretical integration but also methodological variation.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the RIS editors and anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments. I also thank Corina Lacatus, Chris Nijhuis, Guangyu Qiao-Franco, Reinout van der Veer, Bertjan Verbeek, and the participants of the 2022 pre-ISA workshop on neoclassical realism for their feedback on previous drafts.
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