Parliamentarisation as a two-way process: Explaining Belgian parliamentary approval for military operations in Libya (2011) and Iraq (2014-)

This article investigates the drivers of parliamentarisation in the domain of foreign and security policy, and foreign military interventions more in particular. While supporting the increasing scholarly attention for the drivers of parliamentarisation in this domain, we argue that the current state of the art remains unsatisfactory when it comes to explaining the executive-side of the puzzle. We suggest that the study of changing executive-legislative dynamics should ideally take into account both sides of the relationship. For doing so, we propose a novel framework that allows for identifying the strategies of both parliamentary and executive actors. We apply this newly proposed framework to the cases of the Belgian participation in the military interventions in Libya (2011) and Iraq (2014-). The main finding of this article is that stronger parliamentary involvement in the decision about military deployment is not necessarily solely the result of increased parliamentary pressure, but that it also strongly depends on the willingness and strategy of the executive to seek legitimacy or support, particularly in systems characterized by strong party discipline.status: publishe