Yet others have drawn attention to contrasting decision-making features in parliamentary and presidential systems. Richard Neustadt used the events of the Anglo-American Suez crisis and the Skybolt affair to illustrate that neither side considered the implications of the structural differences between their respective political systems. Moreover, both sides made the mistake of drawing analogies to positions and characteristics inherent to their own system.27 During the Suez crisis, the American government misinterpreted Labor’s parliamentary opposition to Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s Suez plans, thinking it “weakened Eden’s hand.”28 In the Westminster system, however, the minority party does not affect the decisionmaking process as long as the leading party carries a comfortable majority of seats in the House of Commons. On the other side of the Atlantic, the British leadership closed its eyes to the realities of the American budgetary process and the looming signals that the Skybolt program would be canceled before long.29 The American decision to cancel the program, which would have meant an independent nuclear deterrent for the British, presented a huge dilemma to the prime minister: it threatened to undo a carefully crafted cabinet decision, thus making Prime Minister Harold Macmillan vulnerable to criticism within his own ranks.30
Exactly one hundred years after Walter Bagehot published his tribute to the British constitution, Kenneth Waltz set out to disprove, inter alia, that the British system is superior to that of the United States when it comes to foreign policy formulation by analyzing their “politics and institutions.”31 Waltz emerged as a staunch proponent of the U.S. system. In his view, the diffusion of power within the U.S. government provides room for constant innovation and reform that the more rigid, less permeable British parliamentary system lacks. In the separation of powers system, the president is required to bargain and coordinate with the members of Congress at every step of the process, and needs strong leadership skills to get the job done. The many access points also provide for a plethora of interests and stakes, so that, ultimately, accountability and blame must be shared by all decisionmaking players. Issues and opponents are confronted in the open, encouraging competition of ideas. In the Westminster system, by contrast, almost all bargaining and discussion are contained within the cabinet. While British prime ministers appear strengthened by the centralization of legislative power in their cabinet, they also face a conundrum: their main concern is to maintain the party unity—even if this means disregarding concerns of the electoral base—but they also know that the public will hold their cabinet accountable for all decisions. Prime ministers, who typically serve in the House of Commons for many years, know these dynamics by heart and thus exercise prudence and caution accordingly. In the American “hands-on” approach, presidential candidates have not been molded into a structure; conversely, members of the two branches are locked in continuous competition, conscious they will have to deliver results to get reelected.
Like Waltz, R. Kent Weaver and Bert Rockman were concerned with the quality of policy outcomes and hypothesized that “political institutions shape the processes through which decisions are made and implemented and that these in turn influence government capabilities.”32 Weaver and Rockman go beyond Waltz by not only comparing a whole range of government systems but also by accounting for variations in parliamentary and presidential systems, in addition to other possible explanations independent of parliamentary or presidential features, including federalism, judicial review, or bicameralism. They stress that “the US system cannot be compared with the small minority of Westminster-style and single partydominant parliamentary systems, but must also be compared with the larger range of coalitional systems.”33 In contrast to the UK fusion of power system, coalition governments increase the number of veto points and diffuse power. Among other things, their more eclectic analysis allows Weaver and Rockman to illustrate important similarities between the U.S. separation of powers system and parliamentary coalition governments with their plethora of stakeholders and extensive bargaining procedures.34
More recently, David Auerswald argued that coalition parliamentary governments are less likely to engage in military action than weak presidents, who in turn are less likely to use force than majority parliamentary governments or strong presidents.35 This is determined by whether executive leaders can be held responsible by the public, legislature, or coalition partners or by means of elections, votes of confidence, and termination of coalition agreements, respectively. Finally, among the rational choice literature devoted to institutional constraints, George Tsebelis’s research is of particular interest when analyzing decision-making processes. Tsebelis introduced the veto-player analysis as a means to determine and predict countries’ ability to produce policy changes and stability. According to Tsebelis, the potential for policy changes decreases with the number of veto players (both institutional and partisan), which are most abundant in presidential, coalitional parliamentary, and federal systems. His model, thus, permits comparison across different government systems, regardless of, for example, parliamentary-presidential distinctions, even if “counting the number of veto players in a given policy area is often a messy and subjective affair.”36
While a series of excellent works have thus focused on the decisionmaking effects of government structures, there is currently no work that measures and compares structural restraints on counterterrorism decisionmaking after 9/11. This book is designed to fill this gap. By doing so, I hope not only to contribute to the structural-bureaucratic debate, but also to evaluate and improve existing theories on government structures and policy outcomes.
While I do not aim to assess the effectiveness or extremeness of measures, I can and do address changes in the relationships between executive, legislative (or judicial) branches as they relate to the workings of government structures. My findings, therefore, further complement a set of scholarly studies that have focused on the expansion of executive power in the post-9/11 United States in particular, while there seems to be less consensus when it comes to evaluating British counterterrorism responses.37
Methodology and Definitions
At the interface of domestic and foreign policy-making, counterterrorism provides an ideal example for examining policy outcomes in relation to underlying structural processes. Programs, strategies, and institutions needed to contain and counter foreign threats are decided within the domestic framework.
Why Focus on National Governments?
As law enforcement and intelligence are among the last remaining cornerstones of sovereignty that states are reluctant to give up, states’ abilities to combine resources to counterterrorist activities are constrained by state jurisdiction and borders. The limited extent of European Union-wide counterterrorism structures and cooperation illustrates this dilemma well. The EU’s ability to shape counterterrorism cooperation (in the “area of freedom, security, and justice”) is still small and also varies greatly, depending on the nature of the issue and the member state, as “most CT responsibilities remain in the hands of the member states.”38 While most decisions involving justice and home affairs matters are subject to qualified majority voting after the Lisbon Treaty, any decisions involving operational police cooperation require member states to take unanimous decisions.39 Should the EU decide on measures that directly affect national counterterrorism practices, these often still need to be transposed into national law and, therefore, reviewed and approved by the national legislatures and/or courts. Finally, implementation is up to the member states and varies greatly. The only EU directive that carries direct relevance for this analysis was adopted in December 2005. Until 2014,40 it obliged telecommunication providers in the EU to retain traffic data for a period of six to twenty-four months, “for the purpose of investigation, detection and prosecution