A Hawk for a Hawk: Why Leaders Choose Foreign Policy Advi- sors with Similar Personal Characteristics.

What do political leaders look for in potential foreign policy advisors? I argue that the delegation of foreign policy decisions by the political leader constitutes a principal-agent problem that the leader will account for during the selection of their foreign and defense ministers. More specifically, I argue that leaders with hawkish foreign policy preferences will tend to have foreign and defense ministers with similarly hawkish foreign policy preferences, and that this efect will weaken whenever the leader does not have as much control over the selection of those ministers; specifically, when the leader is the head of a coalition government in which the foreign affairs and defense portfolios have been awarded to a different political party. I test these hypotheses using ordered probit analyses of the European Representative Democracy (ERD) data set on cabinet formation in post-WWII Europe, as well as original data on the time in office, age, military service, and gender of the foreign and defense ministers in 29 countries between 1950 and 2000. I find moderate to strong support for the hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]