This dissertation examines an increasingly common phenomenon in the post-Cold War context, the military coalition. At the heart of the dissertation is thus the question: what explains political leaders’ participation and burden-sharing decisions on military coalitions? In tackling the question, two distinct lines of research were brought together; the one based on alliances, the other based on foreign policy decision making. Based on the two lines of research, an explanatory framework was developed that combined the insights of alliance dependence thesis and poliheuristic theory. A set of hypotheses was derived and tested, utilizing a multimethod approach: statistical, case study, and experimental analyses. Overall, the results of applying the multimethod approach is suggestive of the strength of the poliheuristic theory, with a supporting role of alliance dependence thesis, in understanding participation and burden-sharing decisions on military coalitions. Moreover, though in large part the second Iraq War (2003 -) was used as the reference in much of the dissertation, an implicit underlying claim of the current research is that the findings may be extended to any broad context wherein the development of a military coalition may be a possibility.

Why do small states contribute to great power led wars even though they lack the capabilities to determine the success of the war and there are no clear interests to gain? The peaceable states of the Nordic countries could have opted for a free-riding strategy instead of being active participants. Still, the Nordic countries were in relation to their size, some of the top military contributors in Afghanistan. In recent small state literature, it has been suggested that small states use military contributions as means to increase their international status position. There are however two competing and sometimes overlapping arguments of whether status is a means for increasing political influence or securing protection. This thesis contributes to this literature by differentiating the concept of status in two categories - influence and security. This distinction enabled a cross case comparative congruence test which reveals that the Nordic states had different status motivations in their decision to contribute to the Afghanistan war. Denmark and Sweden had a clear preference of seeking status seeking as means for influence while Norway used status mainly as means for enhancing security. This thesis shows that small states are not only dependent security consumers. It suggests that the decision-making processes in the small states were guided by independent preferences of enhancing status, which ultimately transformed into military contributions. However, rather than considering status as the main objective, the potential gains of enhancing the status position were the central ambition. The Nordic states’ preferences of status gains differed more than what previous research has suggested.