My research project on the party-political contestation of the liberal international order will be funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) between 2023 and 2026.
Project Summary
The liberal international order (LIO) is in a severe crisis. In addition to being challenged by non-liberal rising powers such as China, the LIO’s three pillars – free movement of goods and people, rule-based cooperation, and military interventions to protect and promote liberal values abroad – have been politically contested within the societies of the Global North, which have been its main stakeholders. In order to understand the challenge to the LIO from within the Global North, this project examines patterns of party-political contestation of all three pillars of the LIO because political parties are the key intermediaries between citizens’ attitudes and government policies. The project will analyse patterns of support for and opposition to the LIO in Western Europe as well as in two understudied regions: post-communist Eastern Europe and East Asia. The project will examine parliamentary votes and speeches in Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, South Korea and Japan in order to answer the empirical questions how political parties have positioned themselves on the three pillars of the LIO and how these positions have developed and changed over time. Furthermore, the project will advance a theory of the foreign policy space by linking parties’ policy positions to political core values and by identifying the main cleavages that structure the party politics of foreign policy.
An abbridged version of the grant proposal with a more detailed description of the theoretical background, the methodological approach and the envisioned case studies can be found here.
Project Team
from left to right: Oliver Crazzolara (student assistant), Martina Stankova (PhD), Wolfgang Wagner (back row), Richard Sonneveld (PhD), Sungmi Shin (PhD), Lourdes Melese (student assistant) (front row).
picture taken by Özlem Terzi, February 2023
kickoff-conference on 11 July 2023
On 11 July 2023 we had our kickoff conference with a keynote by Stephanie Hofmann (European University Institute) and presentations by Baris Ertürk, Sungmi Shin, Martina Stankova, Christina Stremming, Richard Sonneveld, and Vanessa Vohs. For a full program see here.
International Scientific Advisory Board:
Prof. Michal Onderco, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
Prof. Brian Burgoon, University of Amsterdam
Prof. Juliet Kaarbo, University of Edinburgh, UK
Prof. Tapio Raunio, Tampere University, Finland
Dr. Michal Smetana, Charles University Prague
Prof. Atsushi Tago, Waseda University, Japan
Dr. Joo Hee Kim, Pukyong National University, South Korea
Dr. Cornelia Baciu, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Prof. Dr. Stephanie Hofmann, European University Institute
Wolfgang Wagner 