Replication Data for: Patterns of Political Ideology and Security Policy

Recent studies on political ideology suggest the existence of partisan divides on matters of foreign and security policy – challenging the notion that “politics stops at the water’s edge”. However, when taken as a whole, extant work provides decidedly mixed evidence of party-political differences outside domestic politics. This article first conducts a systematic empirical analysis of the relationship between parties’ left-right positions and their general attitude towards peace and security missions, which suggests that right-leaning parties tend to be more supportive of military operations. Yet, the results also show that the empirical pattern is curvilinear: centrist and center-right parties witness the highest level of support for military missions, while parties on both ends of the political spectrum show substantially less support. The second part of our analysis examines whether the stronger support of rightist parties for peace and security missions translates into a greater inclination of right-wing governments to actually deploy forces to military operations. Strikingly, our results suggest that leftist governments were actually more inclined to participate in operations than their right-leaning counterparts. The greater willingness of left-wing executives to deploy military forces is the result of their greater inclination to participate in operations with inclusive goals.近年来有关政治意识形态的研究表明，外交与安全政策领域存在党派分歧——这对“政治止于水边”这一传统认知构成了挑战。然而总体而言，现有研究对于国内政治之外领域的党派政治差异，所提供的证据显著混杂。本文首先对政党左右翼立场与其对和平与安全行动的总体态度之间的关系开展系统性实证分析，结果显示右翼政党往往更支持军事行动。但研究结果同时表明，这一实证模式呈曲线型特征：中间派与中右翼政党对军事行动的支持度最高，而处于政治光谱两端的政党支持度则显著更低。本文分析的第二部分探讨右翼政党对和平与安全行动的更高支持度，是否会转化为右翼政府实际出兵参与军事行动的更强意愿。值得注意的是，我们的研究结果显示，左翼政府实际上比右翼同类政府更倾向于参与军事行动。左翼执政者更愿意出兵的原因，在于它们更倾向于参与带有包容性目标的军事行动。