Government and Politics

Germany’s emerging role as a supplier of security by contributing troops to out-of-area operations is a significant change in post-unification German foreign and security policy, and yet few studies have sought to explain how the process of decision making also has changed in order to accommodate the external and domestic factors that shape policy preferences and outcomes. The dissertation addresses these theoretical gaps in foreign policy analysis and in German foreign and security policy studies by examining the decision-making process in the case of Afghanistan from 2001–2008, emphasizing the importance of institutional structures that enable and constrain decision-makers and then gathering the empirical evidence to construct a framework for analyzing German foreign policy decision making. The dynamics of decision-making at the state level are examined by hypothesizing about the role of the chancellor in the decision-making process— whether there has been an expansion of chancellorial power relative to other actors— and about the role of coalition politics and the relative influence of the junior coalition partner in coalition governments. Results indicate that there are few sign