Existing work on the democratic accountability of foreign policy suggests that when an incumbent incurs foreign policy losses, including but not limited to standing down in a crisis, making costly compromises, or accepting defeat abroad, opposition politicians at home weigh criticizing the government with the national interest. But this work has largely been developed with a view to explaining oppositional behavior in consolidated democracies. I argue that while electorally competitive oppositions in weakly institutionalized regimes can and frequently do criticize elected incumbents for costly foreign policy reversals, they are less likely to do so if they believe this criticism may negatively affect democratic stability and potentially invite irregular leadership turnover, as this would prevent the opposition from coming into office. I find support for this hypothesis, which I term oppositional pragmatism, in a survey experiment on 430 political party workers affiliated with Pakistan's biggest political party and directionally consistent effects on a smaller but highly elite sample of 202 Pakistani legislators.

中文翻译：

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惩罚者的困境：国内反对与外交政策危机

现有关于外交政策民主问责的研究表明，当现任者遭受外交政策损失时，包括但不限于在危机中下台、做出代价高昂的妥协或接受国外的失败，国内反对派政客会权衡批评政府和国家政策。兴趣。但这项工作的主要目的是解释巩固民主国家中的反对行为。我认为，虽然在制度化薄弱的政权中具有选举竞争力的反对派可以而且经常批评当选的现任者代价高昂的外交政策逆转，但如果他们认为这种批评可能对民主稳定产生负面影响并可能引发不规则的领导层更替，他们就不太可能这样做，因为将阻止反对派上台。我在对隶属于巴基斯坦最大政党的 430 名政党工作人员进行的一项调查实验中找到了对这一假设（我称之为反对派实用主义）的支持，并对规模较小但高度精英的 202 名巴基斯坦立法者样本产生了方向一致的影响。