Mapping Internationalization: Domestic and Regional Impacts

This article introduces a conceptual design for mapping the domestic impact of internationalization. It proposes that internationalization leads to a trimodal domestic coalitional profile and advances a set of expectations about the regional effects of each profile. Aggregate data from ninety-eight coalitions in nineteen states over five regions suggests that between 1948 and 1993 the three coalitional types differed in their international behavior. Internationalizing coalitions deepened trade openness, expanded exports, attracted foreign investments, restrained military-industrial complexes, initiated fewer international crises, eschewed weapons of mass destruction, deferred to international economic and security regimes, and strove for regional cooperative orders that reinforced those objectives. Backlash coalitions restricted or reduced trade openness and reliance on exports, curbed foreign investment, built expansive military complexes, developed weapons of mass destruction, challenged international regimes, exacerbated civic-nationalist, religious, or ethnic differentiation within their region, and were prone to initiate international crises. Hybrids straddled the grand strategies of their purer types, intermittently striving for economic openness, contracting the military complex, initiating international crises, and cooperating regionally and internationally, but neither forcefully nor coherently. These findings have significant implications for international relations theory and our incipient understanding of internationalization. Further extensions of the conceptual framework can help capture international effects that are yet to be fully integrated into the study of the domestic politics of coalition formation.