On Tuesday, 26th November, the Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs proudly celebrated the recipients of its annual Dissertation Prizes. Runner-up James Heyburn, a 2024 graduate of our MSc Diplomacy, International Business and Trade, wrote a piece discussing his dissertation: “How does the extent of centralisation in domestic political systems influence the outcome of international negotiations: A comparative analysis of UK and Swiss negotiations with the EU.’

Facing the challenge of researching the UK and Switzerland

by James Heyburn

There’s no denying that the most important aspect of the dissertation project is deciding if you are ready to begin the topic you’re interested in. It’s not only vital you pick one you enjoy. You must also pick one you are confident you can tackle. For me that meant being able to draw on the themes and material covered in lectures and seminars. Having taken the modules Foreign Policy Analysis, International Negotiations, Global Cities in Diplomacy, and Diplomacy in the Digital Age I felt I had a good foundation to tackle my topic. The second important thing to ensure was in place right from the beginning was an effective working relationship with my supervisor to design an approach to my research project. The first sessions with my supervisor were not just about deciding what the topic was to be but also how to go about the research. My supervisor regularly asked “what is the puzzle you are trying to solve” as a means of focusing my thinking and plans. Remaining focused on what my dissertation was about gave me a degree of clarity about the topic, the point of the research, and the approach I needed to take.

My research looked into the influence centralisation of domestic political decision-making structures has on the way a country approaches international negotiations. There is a long-standing debate in international relations on the extent to which states can be considered ‘unitary actors’ given various domestic factors contribute to different outputs in the international arena. With my research I wanted to highlight how centralized or decentralized domestic constitutional structures can affect international negotiations. As Graham Allison (1969) made clear: to understand foreign policy formulation we have to analyse state-level processes. My research was going to investigate what researchers (Rose, 1998) call the ‘‘innenpolitik’’: the social, economic, and political domestic factors that influence a state’s international relations.

How to do this? The first challenges was in how to categorise different forms of democracy. Arend Lijphart’s work classifying democratic political systems provided the foundation for this. I dedicated a chapter of the dissertation to justifying the cases of the UK, Switzerland, and the EU as appropriate for analysis. In that chapter I used the models provided by Lijphart to differentiate the UK and Switzerland as polar opposites in their forms of democracy: the UK being highly centralized, while Switzerland is a confederation. Both are non-members of the EU which helped justify the selection of the European Union (EU) as the negotiating partner for both countries. Both Switzerland and the UK now have an extensive history of negotiating with the European Union. That provided plenty of material on which to build a comparison.

To those familiar with foreign policy analysis it will come as no surprise that Robert Putnam’s Two-Level Game Theory (1998) was fundamental to my analysis. Putnam rejects the idea that states are unitary actors and seeks to understand the entanglement of domestic and international factors in shaping outcomes. For Putnam the important games occur at two-levels: the National Level, where the question is ’what can be ratified’? And The International Level, where the question is ‘what can be agreed’? By applying this understanding to the UK and Switzerland I was able to look into how important national and sub-national authorities were in shaping negotiations with the EU.

By looking at Switzerland and the UK I was able to show that while the centralized or decentralized structure of government clearly matters, the relevance of the structure varies across the different stages of negotiations. Switzerland conducts more extensive consultations prior to negotiations than the UK. It is this consultation period that secures the Swiss executive a mandate to conduct negotiations with the EU and which also underpins a unified position. Swiss negotiators also face the need to secure ratification of any agreement. EU negotiators are cognizant of the domestic constraints these consultations produce for the position of Switzerland at the negotiating table. They understand Switzerland will have a rigid position meaning they are unlikely to grant concessions. The UK’s position is more flexible because the centralized system means minimal if any wider consultations. This combined with the relative ease by which the UK’s executive can pass international policy creates a greater Zone of Possible Agreement which in turn generates greater potential for concessions with the EU. Ultimately, there is a paradox of weakness when observing how two-level games interact in producing outcomes in international negotiations. EU.’