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Rachel Myrick, "Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. I'm an associate professor of political science at Amherst College. Today I'm here with Professor Rachel Myrick, author of the book Polarization and International How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Security Stability. The book was published in 2025 by Princeton University Press in their Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Welcome.
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C
Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I'm excited to be here.
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B
Tell us a bit about yourself. Yes.
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C
I'm an associate professor of political science at Duke University, and I work on the domestic politics of international security. Much of my research speaks to and is informed by contemporary debates about US national security policy.
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B
And we're so grateful that you're joining us today to talk about your book. We were hoping you would start by sharing with us the origin story of the book. What kind of intellectual puzzle or observation first sparked your interest in this topic?
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C
So this book really started with an interest in polarization as a political phenomenon. Just looking around about how polarization was intersecting with these really interesting foreign policy debates in somewhat troubling ways. And of course, that's partly motivated by the US case, but we're also observing the intersection of polarization and other security questions in lots of other places. Places Like Brazil, Israel, India, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan. And when I started learning about the research on polarization in my graduate training, I think two things really struck me. The first was that polarization wasn't really a new phenomenon at all. It seems to ebb and flow in many democracies. So in many ways it feels like this sort of structural, perennial challenge. That democracies are going to continue to periodically encounter. But the other observation was that I wasn't actually learning much about polarization in my classes on international relations, which was my main field of study within political science. So there were all sorts of really interesting discussions about polarization and classes on comparative politics and American politics and political theory. But from what I could gather, there was very limited work on how this important phenomenon was actually affecting our theories of international politics. And that disconnect between what I was observing in the world. But felt was conspicuously absent from my international relations courses. Is what I ultimately became interested in.
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B
And indeed, polarization is the topic of the book. Would you please walk us through the argument you make in the book?
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C
Right. So this book is in many ways a response to conventional wisdom around what is called the democratic advantage tradition in international relations. This is a long tradition of scholarship in the field of international relations that basically argues that democracies are advantaged in a lot of different ways in their conduct of their foreign policy relative to non democracies. So it's largely thought that these advantages tend to come from two sets of constraints on democratic leaders. One is a set of vertical constraints that help kind of keep leaders accountable to the public through regular elections. And then the other is a set of horizontal constraints which keep leaders accountable to other actors within the government, like the political opposition. And so the book starts by kind of talking about how these constraints produce different advantages in foreign affairs. And it focuses on three key advantages. The first is a stability advantage, which means that democracies tend to keep their foreign policy pretty stable or consistent over time. The second is a credibility advantage, which means that democracies are able to leverage domestic constraints to credibly signal information abroad to foreign adversaries. And the third is a reliability advantage, which suggests that democracies are better able to keep their commitments to their foreign allies. So the main argument of this book is really that these more extreme forms of polarization are eroding these systems of vertical and horizontal constraint within democracies. And in turn, that undermines each of these three democratic advantages. So, I mean, I think in that way we can think about the book as sort of a Corrective to the democratic advantage tradition. Justin, insofar as it points out that there is this underappreciated variation in Democratic foreign policy making that comes from varying levels of political polarization.
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B
That's very interesting. Were there any surprising turns in your thinking as you developed this argument?
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C
Yes. I mean, I think when I started researching for the book, I was thinking a lot about polarization in the standard sense of ideological polarization. That is, I was trying to measure the effects of diverging ideological preferences across the political parties, and I was trying to do things to measure foreign policy in, sorry, polarization and foreign policy cross nationally and also on various foreign policy issues in the US And I think as I was doing all that, I think one thing I came to realize is, like, polarization still can have a lot of negative consequences for foreign policymaking, even if we don't observe coherent ideological divergence across the parties. And in some regards, I think this might be one of the reasons why the impacts of polarization on foreign policy haven't been fully appreciated. So just to provide like a concrete example of that, one example comes from thinking about how polarization might impact the stability advantage by making democratic foreign policy less predictable and consistent over time. Of course, one way that might happen is a simple story about preference divergence that, you know, parties espouse increasingly distinctive policies, and they want to implement their preferred policies once they're in power. But we could also think about other ways that polarization makes foreign policy less stable that aren't just about enacting an ideologically coherent foreign policy agenda. So, for instance, it might be the case that heightened partisanship gives leaders incentives to politicize or weaken national security institutions that maintain continuity in foreign affairs. And that's another indirect way that a stability advantage might be eroded. So I think, you know, over the course of this research, I just came to appreciate the fact that there are lots of different ways polarization could affect foreign policy, not strictly just about ideological divergence or different policy preferences.
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B
So thank you for telling us a little bit about the origin story of the book and what the argument looks like and what it was like to put together the argument. Your journey through the argument, as someone would say, let's talk about your research methodology. Could you share with our listeners how you approached gathering and analyzing the evidence that supports your argument?
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C
Yeah. The approach that I took with this book, you know, started with theorizing, right, about how polarization interacts with these different systems of domestic constraint and democracies and what the downstream impacts were on the democratic Advantages. But then I knew that the. I wanted the book to have two overarching empirical approaches. The first was a bit more descriptive and looking at quite cross national trends on polarization and foreign policy. And the main approach in that chapter is to extend existing analyses of the democratic advantage from international relations scholarship. And that involved a large data collection effort to be able to develop a variety of different measures of polarization cross nationally. Then the second empirical approach to kind of complement that was to zoom into one institutional context, so in this case, it was the case of contemporary American foreign policy, and to try and trace how polarization actually interacted with each of these three democratic advantages. And here I think the approach was really to look for the sources of evidence that were best suited to illustrate different aspects of the argument. So, for instance, for each democratic advantage, I started each of those chapters looking at the relationship between polarization and vertical constraints or accountability to the public. So there I was really focused on public opinion data and some original survey experiments. And then to look at the relationship between polarization and horizontal constraints or accountability to other politicians, I gathered a lot of descriptive data about the behavior of politicians over time in different foreign policy domains. So that included congressional roll call voting, congressional speech data, and so forth. And then lastly, in each chapter, to illustrate the implications for the democratic advantages, I focused on a discussion of a particular case. And a lot of those case discussions were coupled with like interview or survey data. So I think overall I thought that this book really wasn't going to be a book that had one smoking gun piece of evidence. And so the approach was to collect lots of different pieces of evidence that might resonate with different audiences. And that's something that I think as the researcher, you have the luxury of doing in a book length project that you might not be able to do in a single article.
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B
Yes, very much so. And the book has a rich empirical component, so I'm glad you shared some of its structure with us today. Another question on your research we often ask if you wanted to share the most challenging methodological obstacles that you faced. And of course, how did you overcome those obstacles?
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C
I think the trickiest methodological obstacle in this type of project was about the conceptualization and measurement of polarization. We know because there's so much research on the topic that there are tons of different types of polarization, lots of definitions, lots of measurements. And so for the cross national analyses in this book, I think I struggled a lot with that and ultimately decided that I couldn't really use off the shelf data. I had to construct my own data set because conceptually what I was interested in was the extent of the divergence between the party or the coalition of the primary leader that was responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs and the key opposition party or the opposition coalition that was constraining that leader. And so that required building a new data set that went through and identified the political party of democratic leaders and then identified the relevant opposition or opposition coalition and then matched those parties to their respective political party platforms and developed measures of polarization on different ideological dimensions. So that was a lengthy process, but I think existing kind of off the shelf measures weren't really well suited to the dynamic that I was interested in. And I'm hoping that the data that I collected for this book might be of use to other researchers for different projects in the future.
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B
That's great. Let's talk about the broader implications of the book. How might practitioners or policymakers use your research to inform their work?
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C
When I talk to foreign policy practitioners about this book, I think that they are interested in these themes. Of course, I think some of the arguments are actually quite intuitive to them just because they're seeing a lot of repercussions of polarization firsthand in their own work. I think maybe one piece of the book that might be especially interesting to practitioners is an extended discussion in one of the chapters about how perhaps we could mitigate the negative consequences of polarization for foreign policymaking.
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B
I imagine that would be of interest.
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C
Right. So this chapter, you know, essentially, in a lot of ways, it just reviews a bunch of the research that lots of different disciplines have conducted on strategies to reduce congressional polarization, strategies to reduce affective polarization or that social form of polarization among the American public, and then strategies that are actually insulating foreign affairs and national security issues from partisan politics. And, you know, just to give an example of some of the latter, because I think that's a. That discussion is a bit more unique to this book relative to others. You know, the book talks a bit about strategies to build better cross partisan legislative coalitions in specific areas of foreign policy where there is a degree of bipartisan consensus or shared, shared interests. It also talks about some. Some proposals that have been made where congressional leaders might reaffirm a sort of partisan truce in different areas of foreign and defense policy that might help mitigate some of the problems of polarization. And it also talks about some potential reforms to the national security bureaucracy that lots of different researchers have proposed that could help strengthen the nonpartisan character of core foreign policy institutions that would reduce their vulnerability to politicization. So I imagine that these types of discussions might be of particular interest to practitioners. I agree with you.
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B
Let's talk about how this book was received. Of course, it just came out, but you must have presented it before it was published, I'm sure. So what aspect of your argument do you find scholars most frequently challenging and how do you respond to those critiques?
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C
So I think there are a few lines of critique that I encounter. Some of them are from scholars of US Foreign policy, and some of them are from international relations scholars. And I would say that all of the critiques I see as pretty reasonable and try to engage with in the book, but I'll just kind of point to a few of them that I think are particularly relevant. The first set of critiques from scholars of US Foreign policy is just that there's a lot of people who think that polarization really isn't a big issue in foreign policy still. And mainly that's because. Or that thinking is because there's still a lot of heterogeneity within the parties on various issues in foreign affairs, and we still observe a lot of bipartisan cooperation on foreign and defense policy. And I guess, you know, I don't really disagree with that critique per se. In The United States, of course, polarization is much less of a problem in foreign policy relative to domestic policy. But, but I would argue, and do in the book that, you know, we are increasingly observing partisan conflict extend to foreign affairs, and the book walks through which sets of issues are most vulnerable to that sort of conflict extension. And as a result of that, some of the consequences are maybe underappreciated. Another critique that I receive often from scholars of American foreign policy is that polarization might not really be the problem that we should be worried about in national security policy. Right. That really this argument is sort of like really the pathology we should be worried about is excessive groupthink and status quo bias. And maybe we need more polarization in national security.
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B
Wow, I did not see this critique coming.
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C
Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. I think this is a common characterization of the US Foreign policy establishment. And, you know, I think more. So it was a little bit more relevant in the Biden administration, a little bit less relevant now. But, but I mean, I, I do think, you know, my response to this tends to be that to the extent that polarization is reflecting healthy partisan disagreement and political contestation and foreign affairs, that's certainly a good thing. But the type of polarization that we are observing in American politics right now, these more extreme forms of polarization that couple both ideological and affective polarization, my contention is that those are not contributing to creative and constructive policy debates, and in fact, they are crowding out those deeper, richer, more substantive debates. And then I think a final set of objections comes from international relations scholars who think that this argument doesn't really overturn the democratic advantage tradition. And once again, I actually don't disagree with that. And that's why I think about this book as more of a corrective to that literature rather than overturning that literature. Right. So it still could be the case that democracies are on average advantaged in foreign affairs relative to non democracies, but that there's important variation in democratic foreign policy making that's coming from polarization, and that's really what the book is arguing.
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B
Okay, understood. How. How is your thinking? How has your thinking on this topic evolved since completing the book?
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C
So I think, unfortunately I've. I've actually become more concerned about this topic since I completed the book. Right. So as I was writing the book, I actually, I was really trying to be even handed in this exploration of how polarization might impact foreign policy making, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And you know, if you read the introduction chapter, I talk about how this isn't really intended to be kind of a dire warning for democracies or for the US and actually, as a funny anecdote, when I was presented with book covers, I selected the least dramatic one. Right. So we see very dramatic covers associated with academic books about polarization and democratic backsliding. You know, but this to me was much more of a society systematic, you know, theoretical exercise than like a call to arms. But if I'm being honest, I think a lot of that thinking was informed by the fact that I was writing this book during the Biden administration where there was this sort of sense that the US Was going to reinvigorate its security commitments, that it was going to restore a general liberal, liberal internationalist orientation and foreign affairs. And I think with the reelection of Donald Trump, a lot of the themes of the book feel even more relevant, despite the fact that President Trump doesn't feature prominently in the book itself. So, you know, but, but, you know, it was so kind of caveat that I anticipate that a lot of the book's arguments are going to continue to feel relevant to, not just to American politics, but to politics in many advanced democracies for a long time that are struggling with these similar challenges related to polarization.
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B
Yes. Well, we've taken enough of your time. I'll ask you one more question. What are you working on right now?
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C
So I have started a second book project that really dives deeper into the implication of this first book project about the challenges that polarization might create for responding to new security crises or new foreign threats. And so if you think about the first book project as a sort of inside out exploration, that is, how is domestic polarization affecting international politics? But the second book I want to be about the reverse question, more of an outside in exploration, that is how is the international system structuring patterns of domestic polarization? So in that vein, I'm working on a book about the extent to which new security threats that arise in different places are going to be unifying or divisive in democratic societies. And so if anyone listening is interested, I have an article on this subject that was published in International Organization a few years ago called Do External Threats Unite or Divide? And that article is a bit more specific to U.S. foreign policy and thinking about how American politics might be impacted by the security threats posed by a rising China. But some of the themes in that article are going to be actually the kernel of this new book project that's going to extend to a number of other countries and contexts. So I'm excited to begin some work on that.
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B
We are excited too. We hope you will come back and tell us all about it when it's done. Well, thank you so much for talking to us today. My guest has been Professor Rachel Myrick, author of the book Polarization and International How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability. The book was published in 2025 by Princeton University Press. In their Princeton Studies in International History and Politics, I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. Until next time.
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A
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C
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