Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience

Waltz challenges the widespread 1960s assumption that democratic regimes are inherently disadvantaged in foreign policy compared to authoritarian states. Through comparative analysis of the United States and United Kingdom, he concludes that democracies are 'well able to compete with authoritarian states' and are not structurally handicapped . More provocatively, he argues that the American presidential system is superior to British parliamentary government for foreign-policy making, because separated institutions produce broader deliberation and information gathering than fused parliamentary power . The book thus inverts the then-dominant anglophilia of American political science.

Published in 1967, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics sits between Man, the State, and War (1959) and Theory of International Politics (1979). Scholars have recovered it as the missing link explaining Waltz's trajectory: it shows him engaging seriously with domestic institutions and regime type before his structural turn abandoned those variables entirely . The book's conclusion—that similarities between democracies and autocracies outweigh regime-driven differences—helped Waltz justify excluding democracy as a variable in his later systemic theory . Its neglect has led scholars to describe it as 'almost never cited' yet essential for understanding his continuity .

In this book, Waltz treats domestic institutions, historical traditions, and international pressures as three independent variables shaping foreign policy . He still sees anarchy as a permissive condition but insists there remains 'a vast range of choice' despite systemic constraints—he is 'not yet structural' . By Theory of International Politics, he had abandoned this multi-variable approach for a purely systemic theory that excluded domestic politics entirely. The later work treats unit-level factors as irrelevant to systemic outcomes; Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics treats them as central to explaining variation in actual policy.

A 1968 review in The Journal of Politics praised it as 'fresh, provocative, stimulating' and a 'worthy contribution' to a debate running back to Walter Bagehot, though the reviewer noted Waltz occasionally 'overflows into an almost flag-waving polemic' that marred an otherwise fine book . The study drew on foreign-policy opinion polls in both countries and a year of interviews in England with politicians, officials, journalists, and academics . Despite this, the book went out of print and became largely neglected in subsequent IR scholarship.

Waltz argues that the American presidential system is superior to British parliamentary government for foreign policy. The separation of powers—despite its inefficiencies and potential for gridlock—produces more thorough deliberation because Congress provides an independent evaluative check on executive proposals . In Britain, fused parliamentary power and strong party discipline concentrate decision-making in the prime minister and cabinet, narrowing the range of viewpoints considered. Waltz also notes that foreign policy issues cut across party lines more frequently than domestic issues, weakening the restraint that party unity normally imposes on British leaders .

After concluding that regime type produced more similarities than differences between states, Waltz had little theoretical reason to retain democracy as an explanatory variable . His structural turn required parsimony: a theory explaining state behavior across all regimes and conditions could not include unit-level variables that generated difference. As one analysis notes, Waltz 'studied democracy and concluded that it made sense to exclude it from later works' . The book thus served as a clearing operation—testing and discarding the democratic-peace hypothesis avant la lettre so that his later theory could proceed without it.