The party politics of diplomatic engagements: evidence from Italy

Leaders decide to engage diplomatically with their foreign peers for various reasons but, given their limited time and resources, they have to choose which peers to prioritize. As such, the study of international diplomatic visits helps shed light on a government's foreign policy approach and better understand its priorities in how it conceives and builds foreign relations. While the literature on diplomatic engagements has largely debated its drivers and effects, the role of domestic influences, in particular of party politics, has remained understudied. We address this gap and investigate the party politics of diplomatic engagements leveraging a new dataset on Italy's high-level international bilateral diplomatic visits in 2000–2023. Our findings show that partisan differences influence not only the overall frequency of such engagements, following curvilinear left–right patterns, but also the political regimes that left- and right-wing governments prioritize in such endeavours, exposing the lower importance right-wing parties assign to democratic principles when managing their countries' foreign relations, as these governments are systematically more likely to interact with authoritarian regimes than with democracies.