Domestic Politics Matters in Diplomacy: A Brief Review on Robert Putnam’s “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics”

Abstract

This review introduces Robert Putnam’s article “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two Level Games” and analyzes its merits and limitations. Putnam’s article is an approach to analyzing international foreign policy beyond the state-centric assumption and placing focus on domestic factions, which are pillar causes determining the ‘ratification’ of international agreements. Diplomacy, in Putnam’s view, is not only the affairs for professional diplomats, but also a public agenda for various social groups, thus the “win-set” in negotiation of a state actor should be determined by their respective domestic situations. The review concedes that Putnam’s idea is comprehensive and provides new foundations for IR research after the system-based approach, but his comprehensiveness is also a defect for his theory compared with his latecomers.