Abstract
Existing literature has examined party positions on military interventions across various countries, mostly using manifestos and expert surveys as sources of data. This article employs a different approach by analysing German parties’ positions on one mission only: the Afghanistan intervention (2001-2021). We extract positions from parliamentary speeches through the automated text scaling method Wordfish and from voting data, and we compare MPs’ speeches with their voting behaviour. We find that centrist parties were more in favour of the intervention than radical parties at the fringes. We also note a strong government/opposition divide, which is more pronounced in voting as both government and opposition parties have more incentives to act strategically. Surprisingly, we find little evidence of differences in positioning across missions. In addition to being the first comprehensive assessment of parties’ positions on the intervention in Afghanistan in any country, this article offers a methodological contribution to the study of the party politics of peace and security operations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 784-806 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | German Politics |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 20 Oct 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Funding
Falk Ostermann has done most of the work for this article while working at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. Special thanks go to our research assistants Elisabeth Alm and Stephan Friebe at JLU for preparing the parliamentary data for analysis. We are also grateful to Cornelia Baciu and two anonymous reviewers for many useful suggestions for improving the manuscript. All mistakes remain of our own.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Justus Liebig Universität Gießen | |
| Cornelia Baciu |
Keywords
- Afghanistan
- German foreign policy
- party positions
- scaling methods
- voting data
