Parliamentary Interest in Foreign Security Policy: Insight from the Indian Lok Sabha

Abstract Existing scholarship argues that the effectiveness with which democracies craft foreign security policy depends on the level of engagement elected officials give the topic. Yet, there is little research on the factors driving individual parliamentarians’ interest in the topic beyond the notion that some issues have more resonance with the electorate than others. Introducing an original dataset of 10,180 parliamentary questions on foreign and defense matters in India, this study demonstrates that analysis of questions can have significant utility for the fields of international relations and foreign policy analysis by revealing the specific aspects of foreign security policy elected officials focus on, which, in this case, are at odds with the prevailing expectation that the mass political salience of an issue determines the level of attention given by elected officials. Moreover, factors such as electoral security, opposition party membership, representation of historically disadvantaged groups, and the geographic location of one’s constituency are shown to predict varying levels of attention by individual politicians operating in the same political environment.