The politics of military deployments: contestation of foreign and security policy in the Netherlands

Abstract

In many liberal democracies today, foreign policy is the subject of increasing political contestation. Recent studies have demonstrated that political parties cluster predictably when voting on military deployments. In the economic left/right dimension, support for military deployments is highest for centrist and centre-right parties, and decreases towards the (far) left and (far) right. This pattern is not as robust in the non-economic GAL/TAN dimension, which pits parties with green, alternative and libertarian (GAL) values against those with traditional, authoritarian and nationalist ones (TAN). This article addresses the dimensionality of foreign and security policy by analysing 57 votes on military deployments in the Dutch parliament between 1998 and 2019. The results show that even in the Netherlands, where the GAL/TAN dimension is most likely to explain party–political contestation, foreign and security policy remains more attuned to the left/right cleavage. These findings contribute to analyses of party–political contestation in other Western European democracies.