This book analyses the salience of foreign and security policy issues to domestic actors, its role in the analysis of international politics and its consequences for foreign policy decision-making. It provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of issue salience and develops the state of the art. Beginning with a chapter on the concept of issue salience and its role in analysing international politics, it has a strong comparative framework and focuses on different domestic actors: the general public; political parties/parliaments; and the media. It features empirical studies drawn from countries in Western Europe and North America and addresses the salience of different issue areas in three key areas of international politics: European Integration Foreign and Security Policy Transatlantic Relations Finally the book offers critical appraisals of the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of issue salience and the methods for measuring it. This volume makes an important contribution to scholarly debates on the role of public opinion in foreign affairs and on the prospects of parliamentary control of foreign and security policy. It will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, international relations and foreign policy. Kai Oppermann is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Political Science and European Affairs, University of Cologne, Germany and the Managing Editor of Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik. Dr. Henrike Viehrig is Assistant Professor and Chair of International Politics and Foreign Policy at the University of Cologne, Germany.

This book analyses the salience of foreign and security policy issues to domestic actors, its role in the analysis of international politics and its consequences for foreign policy decision-making. It provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of issue salience and develops the state of the art. Beginning with a chapter on the concept of issue salience and its role in analysing international politics, it has a strong comparative framework and focuses on different domestic actors: the general public; political parties/parliaments; and the media. It features empirical studies drawn from countries in Western Europe and North America and addresses the salience of different issue areas in three key areas of international politics: European Integration Foreign and Security Policy Transatlantic Relations Finally the book offers critical appraisals of the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of issue salience and the methods for measuring it. This volume makes an important contribution to scholarly debates on the role of public opinion in foreign affairs and on the prospects of parliamentary control of foreign and security policy. It will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, international relations and foreign policy. Kai Oppermann is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Political Science and European Affairs, University of Cologne, Germany and the Managing Editor of Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik. Dr. Henrike Viehrig is Assistant Professor and Chair of International Politics and Foreign Policy at the University of Cologne, Germany.

Multi-level governance systems like the European Union (EU) calibrate integration with member state discretion in order to implement common, yet context-sensitive solutions to shared policy problems. Research on implementation in the EU typically focuses on legal compliance with EU policy. However, this focus gives us an incomplete picture of EU implementation, its diversity and practice. The contributions of this collection represent a shift toward a more performance-oriented perspective on EU implementation as problem-solving. They approach implementation fundamentally as a process of interpretation of superordinate law by actors who are embedded within multiple contexts arising from the coexistence of dynamics of Europeanization, on the one hand, and what has been termed ‘domestication’, on the other. Moving beyond legal compliance, the contributions provide new evidence on the diversity of domestic responses to EU policy, the roles and motivations of actors implementing EU policy, and the ‘black box’ of EU law in action and its enforcement. By reassessing the relative importance of EU policy and domestic factors and actors for the outcomes of EU implementation, the results give insight into on the nuanced interplay between Europeanization and domestication forces, useful for both EU researchers and practitioners. The chapters originally published as a special issue in the Journal of European Public Policy.

Discusses the way leaders deal with risk in making foreign policy decisions

Alan I. Abramowitz has emerged as a leading spokesman for the view that our current political divide is not confined to a small group of elites and activists but a key feature of the American social and cultural landscape. The polarization of the political and media elites, he argues, arose and persists because it accurately reflects the state of American society. Here, he goes further: the polarization is unique in modern U.S. history. Today’s party divide reflects an unprecedented alignment of many different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and geographic. Abramowitz shows how the partisan alignment arose out of the breakup of the old New Deal coalition; introduces the most important difference between our current era and past eras, the rise of “negative partisanship”; explains how this phenomenon paved the way for the Trump presidency; and examines why our polarization could even grow deeper. This statistically based analysis shows that racial anxiety is by far a better predictor of support for Donald Trump than any other factor, including economic discontent.

Using decades of public opinion data from the US, UK, Australia, Germany and Canada, and distinguishing between three concepts - issue ownership, performance and generalised competence - Green and Jennings show how political parties come to gain or lose 'ownership' of issues, how they are judged on their performance in government across policy issues and how they develop a reputation for competence (or incompetence) over a period in office. Their analysis tracks the major events causing people to re-evaluate party reputations and the costs of governing which cause electorates to punish parties in power. They reveal why, when and how these movements in public opinion matter to elections. The implications are important for long-standing debates about performance and partisanship, and reveal that public opinion about party and governing competence is, to a great extent, the product of major shocks and predictable dynamics.

The process of negotiation, standing as it does between war and peace in many parts of the globe, has never been a more vital process to understand than in today's rapidly changing international system. Students of negotiation must first understand key IR concepts as they try to incorporate the dynamics of the many anomalous actors that regularly interact with conventional state agents in the diplomatic arena. This hands-on text provides an essential introduction to this high-stakes realm, exploring the impact of complex multilateralism on traditional negotiation concepts such as bargaining, issue salience, and strategic choice. Using an easy-to-understand board game analogy as a framework for studying negotiation episodes, the authors include a rich array of real-world cases and examples—now updated with the results of the Paris climate change agreement—to illustrate key themes, including the intensity of crisis situations for negotiators, the role of culture in communication, and the impact of domestic-level politics on international negotiations. Providing tools for analyzing why negotiations succeed or fail, this innovative text also presents effective exercises and learning approaches that enable students to understand the complexities of negotiation by engaging in the diplomatic process themselves.