Foreign Policy Co-optation: Managing Right-Wing Challengers Through Migration

The electoral rise of right-wing populism has reshaped domestic political competition across Western democracies. Democratic governments have simultaneously developed bilateral arrangements to control migration, often involving authoritarian partners with questionable legal and human rights practices. In this paper, I present a novel dataset on the emergence of these agreements across five continents and over the last thirty years. I then develop a theory of foreign policy co-optation that explains when and why governments appropriate flexible foreign policy instruments central to the narrative of the opposition to reduce their electoral threat. I show that bilateral security Cooperation Arrangements on Migration (CAMs) are most likely to emerge when incumbent governments are challenged by right-wing populist parties, especially from left-of-center governments. The findings suggest that right-wing populist pressure paradoxically enables executives to manage electoral opposition through foreign policy, highlighting the need to revisit assumptions about the domestic sources of international cooperation and migration policy.