Sebastian Bitar is Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. He is visiting this July on an IAS International Visiting Fellowship, hosted by Tom Long. They will co-present their working paper. An abstract follows:

The literature on Latin American foreign policy places an analytical emphasis on external constraints and presidential prerogatives vis-à-vis domestic actors. We examine several Colombian cases that illustrate when and how domestic political actors mobilize to oppose presidential foreign policy prerogatives despite supportive external contexts. These outcomes contrast with the expectations of foreign policy presidentialism. Drawing on insights from recent political science literature on foreign policy and reevaluations of domestic Latin American presidential predominance, we propose a model and a set of propositions that illustrate that Colombian domestic actors mobilize to block presidential preferences when these cause distributional concerns or activate ideological polarizations. However, their success depends on the institutional and political context. We find that the costs imposed by domestic actors often lead presidents to substitute second-best policies for preferred options. We also explore alternative explanations that emphasize international constraints, presidential popularity, bureaucratic opposition and coalitional politics, but these perform poorly across the cases. These findings domestic constraints in Colombian foreign policymaking offer a point of departure for re-examining foreign policy presidentialism in Latin America more broadly.