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argument, and rational cost-benefit analyses. Clearly, this could be a doubleedgedfactor, as party values (regime survival) could be in competition withsocietal values (national survival): which hold the day? How does this affect theimplementation of a foreign policy action? As noted by Taliaferro, “The abilityof states to extract resources from society is not simply a function of thestrength of institutions: it also depends on leaders’ ability to raise and maintainsupport for national security strategies”. 195 Legitimating power tends to varywith the perception of external threat by the public, as well as the extent ofsocial cohesion generally, and the level of ideological inclination in society. 196These two variables more than any others determine the conversion of nationalpower into state power, and indeed the mobilisation and extraction of nationalresources for foreign policy purposes. For this reason, the focus on the cognitiveuniverses, or ‘operational codes’ 197 of individual leaders is not primary in this study.A leader’s beliefs about the limits of politics, the weight of history, and the nature ofpolitics and political conflict, while important, are ultimately only a minor factorrelative to his ability to win the mobilisation and extraction of state resources forforeign policy. The latter two abilities depend upon the leader’s place in a legislativesystem, and his legitimacy in the eyes of his constituents and those who control thelevers of state power.How can we hypothesise foreign policy outcomes from the relative strength ofgoverning parties in mobilising and extracting national power? With a basicassumption of a shift in relative power:Hypothesis 1: The greater the institutional freedom and legitimating capacity of thegoverning party, the more autonomy inheres in key decision-making structures, thecloser the model approximates neorealism’s unitary actor. Decisions to allocateresources to international issues will be based on hard power considerations andexercised more frequently, where the state possesses the resources to do so. The state will act inline with neorealism’s predictions, behaving competitively and aggressively.195 Taliaferro, “State Building for future wars”, 489.196 Taliaferro, “State Building for future wars”, 491.197 George, Alexander, cited in Neack, The New Foreign Policy, 60.98