Domestic politics, foreign policy, and theories of international relations

The main argument of this essay may be summarized as follows. What counts as a domestic-political explanation of foreign policy depends on an implicit contrast to explanations that are not domestic-political. The field calls these “systemic” or sometimes “structural” explanations. But there are a number of different ways to define a systemic IR theory, model, or argument (in this essay I use the three terms interchangeably). This implies that what we count as a domestic-political theory can vary depending on the way we conceive of systemic theories.