Populism and Foreign Policy-nurbook

Populism and Foreign Policy book cover

Populism and Foreign Policy

Author(s): Sandra Destradi (Author), Johannes Plagemann (Author)

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: December 29, 2025
Language: English
Print length: 344 pages
ISBN-10: 0197694985
ISBN-13: 9780197694985

Book Description

How and why does the formation of populist governments lead to changes in foreign policy? This book theorizes and empirically analyzes how populism, understood as a thin-centred ideology, impacts foreign policy. It argues that two common features of populists’ foreign policy, the use of foreign policy issues for domestic political mobilization and the personalization of decision making, are key to explain different intensities of foreign policy change. The strongest change can be expected if both mobilization and personalization in a specific issue area are strong. More moderate changes are a result of a combination of strong mobilization and weak personalization, or weak mobilization and strong personalization.

The empirical analysis focuses on transitions from non-populist to populist governments in Bolivia, India, the Philippines, and Turkey. It addresses foreign policy change in four fields: the escalation of international disputes, the provision of global public goods, the engagement in multilateral institutions, and the reorientation of each country’s international partnerships. As a part of an abductive research process, the theory of populism and foreign policy initially applied to cases from the Global South is then also used to analyze populist governments’ foreign policies in Hungary, the UK, and Italy.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sandra Destradi holds the Chair of International Relations at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and she is currently serving as a DAAD long- term Guest Professor at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel.

Johannes Plagemann is Senior Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute for Asian Studies in Hamburg, Germany, where he is speaker of the Research Team ‘Ideas, Actors, and Global Politics’.

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