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When, how, and to what ends do opposition parties look beyond their borders for support? In an increasingly authoritarian global environment, oppositions face acute barriers to gaining power and promoting fair elections. International actors, such as foreign governments, diaspora communities, and transnational activists, all present opposition parties with potential sources of support, from material and rhetorical backing to political and economic leverage. But engaging foreign actors also comes with risks: doing so can eat up limited resources and open parties up to repression and charges of "foreign interference'' that risk undermining their domestic support. Faced with these trade-offs, parties and politicians have diverged in the extent to which they deliberately internationalize their struggles, and these choices have implications not only for their prospects at home, but also for relations between the governments they engage and challenge.
This dissertation considers various forms of international engagement by opposition politicians and develops and tests a theory of when parties pursue them and to what ends. I focus, in particular, on a set of activities aimed at encouraging international pressure on incumbent regimes, which I refer to collectively as opposition diplomacy. This includes lobbying foreign officials, networking through international organizations, and enlisting diaspora supporters to advocate on their behalf. Drawing on original cross-national data on opposition lobbying and membership in transnational political party networks—which I argue serve as important venues for coalition building, access, and solidarity—I explore the dynamics of opposition diplomacy since the end of the Cold War. To deepen and contextualize these findings, I also draw on case studies based on in-depth, interview-based fieldwork in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States.
I demonstrate that opposition parties and politicians tend to engage in opposition diplomacy when pathways to power are constrained at home, and that these activities can influence decisions by Western policymakers, such as the choice to impose sanctions, particularly when oppositions can successfully convince those policymakers that they are both viable electoral contenders and credibly committed to democratic norms. Taken together, however, these dynamics can generate a selection problem: international pressure tends to concentrate on the most entrenched regimes, encouraging isolation while simultaneously weakening the linkages that might otherwise create leverage for reform.
Ultimately, by bringing the international role of opposition parties into our analysis of global patterns of pressure and political change, the dissertation reveals both the underappreciated influence of politically motivated opposition actors from the Global South, and hidden sources of the persistent challenges that international democracy promotion has faced in the post-Cold War period.