Abstract
Challenging the conventional wisdom that public opinion fails to constrain foreign policy in India, this thesis investigates the extent to which the foreign policy choices of Indian prime ministers were informed by public preferences. Drawing on poliheuristic theory, this thesis suggests that democratically elected leaders are psychologically predisposed to responding to public preferences when deciding on foreign policy. Since leaders have been found to be politically loss averse, poliheuristic theory argues that they eliminate policy options that they perceive as being too politically risky. In a democracy where leaders are elected or deposed through universal suffrage, it is reasonable to assume that public opinion weighs heavily on leaders’ calculations of political risk. The resultant hypothesis that this thesis seeks to test in the Indian context is that politically loss averse leaders are likely to eliminate unpopular policy options from further consideration when deciding on foreign policy. Because leaders’ tolerance for political risk is likely to change under different environmental or situational conditions, however, this thesis embarks on an exploratory investigation into the conditions necessary for democratic constraint in the Indian context.This thesis relies on the technique of process tracing to test and develop its conditional poliheuristic model of democratic constraint. To reconstruct and examine the decision processes and choices of Indian prime ministers, it draws upon a range of sources, including elite interviews, memoirs, archives of news articles, officials’ statements and speeches, parliamentary debates and Q&A, US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, historiographical accounts, and others. Four international crises and conflicts in the Gulf region in which India was not involved as a crisis actor, but rather as a third-party actor, are selected as case studies. These are the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq War, and the 2005-6 IAEA votes on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Based on its four case studies, this thesis concludes that Indian leaders rule out politically risky options only when the following necessary conditions are all in place: (i) leaders perceive the issue to be of high salience for the public, (ii) leaders seek re-election, and (iii) no external conditionality is attached to their decisions. Interestingly and perhaps counterintuitively, the strength of the ruling party or coalition appear to be immaterial to leaders’ responsiveness to democratic constraint. The foreign policy-making model of Indian prime ministers in these four cases is found to resemble a two-level game in which the international sphere conditions leaders’ responsiveness to domestic constraints, public opinion included.Ultimately, this thesis seeks to make several contributions to the literature. As one of the few applications of poliheuristic theory to India, it aspires to make a theoretical contribution by broadening the scope of settings (i.e., India) and situations (i.e., non-crisis decision-making) in which poliheuristic theory is tested and, hopefully, refined. It also seeks to contribute to the study of democratic constraint on foreign policy in India. Although their external validity is limited by the small number of cases on which they are based, the findings of this thesis nevertheless offer important clues as to the underlying causal relationships that large-n studies could then fruitfully explore. Finally, this thesis aspires to contribute to the literature on Indian foreign policy by shedding light on its leaders’ foreign policy choices at four critical junctures in the Gulf region’s history.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Harsh Pant (Supervisor), David Roberts (Supervisor) & Gyanesh Kudaisya (Supervisor) |