UC Davis

When do domestic events affect international relations? Our answer to this puzzle emphasizes patterns of interaction in domestic networks. Leaders depend on coalitions of subnational actors—civilians, parties, militaries, and so on—for political survival. Structural imbalance emerges when the higher-order relations of subnational actors contradict their revealed preferences, such as when actors cooperate with enemies of friends or conflict with friends of friends. Imbalance generates uncertainty about the preferences and future behaviors of subnational actors, which in turn diminishes the government’s confidence in domestic coalitions. Imbalance thus increases the probability that leaders will turn to survival strategies, such as manipulating foreign relations in order to show competence. At the same time, foreign governments respond to imbalance by implementing preventive measures or intervening for strategic gain. We develop and test these arguments from a networks-of-networks approach. We introduce generalizable metrics of structural imbalance and foreign-relations shifts. Extensive empirical analysis shows that the greater the imbalance generated by domestic events, the greater the probability that those events will affect foreign relations.