How Prime Ministers Manage the Foreign Policymaking Process in Parliamentary Systems: The Agent-Structure Nexus.

In the past two decades, there has been an upsurge of interest in the research on the effect of prime ministers on foreign policymaking. One of the most controversial issues within this body of research concerns the following question: What is the primary determinant of how prime ministers manage foreign policy decision-making processes in parliamentary systems? The response to the question has taken different shapes: Whereas students of comparative politics prioritized structural constraints that affect the power position of a prime minister (such as ministerial autonomy, existence of a pivotal party within the coalition, etc.), scholars in leadership studies emphasized the personality factor and leadership style. Structural approaches to the question tend to downplay the extent to which individual prime ministers can shape the process, while psychological perspectives understate the importance of external constraints within which any agent is to act. In seeking to bridge the relevant literatures in comparative politics and international relations, I offer a systematic comparison of prime ministerial management of foreign policy-making processes which attends simultaneously to institutional constraints and the leadership styles of individual prime ministers. Following the structured-focused comparison method, the paper focuses on a total of six cabinet decision-making cases in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Israel. The paper is guided by the following question: How does the interaction between leadership style and institutional constraints shape the prime ministerial management of the foreign policy decision-making process in various types of cabinets? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]