ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to evaluate if extant theories on coalition and foreign policy making help us better understand India’s external actions. It discusses insights from the existing scholarship on coalition politics and federalism and foreign policy, which could be applied to the Indian context. The chapter suggests how the study of evolving institutional set-ups in India, such as the emergence and normalisation of coalition governments, can help us understand how regional actors and factors have affected Indian foreign policy since 1989. It also discusses specific features from the Indian experience with coalition politics which need to be integrated in order to be able to measure the effective influence of such institutional variables. Despite an important theoretical literature in foreign policy analysis on the domestic determinants of external behaviour, there have been only limited attempts to develop robust domestic theories of foreign policy making in India.
