This study examines the news factors influencing the selection of international news for publication-frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, personal and national elitism, and negativity. The subject of investigation is The Times (London) during a two-week period (January-February, 1975). Comparisons are made between published and unpublished news events, coded according to World Event/ Interaction Survey event categories. To avoid some of the problems inherent in testing individual news factors, the complementarity and additivity hypotheses were also tested; both are supported by the data. In addition, relevance of the study to policy issues such as agenda setting by the press and recent Third World criticism of Western news coverage is discussed. Sophia Peterson is Professor of Political Science at West Virginia University. This research was supported by grants from West Virginia University and the West Virginia University Foundation. The author is indebted to William Rees-Mogg, Editor, and to Louis Heren, Deputy Editor and Foreign Editor, The Times (London), for their cooperation in the conduct of this project. The contributions of graduate research assistants P. Douglas Fawcett and Cary W. Smith are also gratefully acknowledged. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the International Studies Association, St. Louis, Missouri, March 16-20, 1977. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 45:143-163 ? 1981 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/81/0045-143/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 06:48:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

International News Selection by the Elite Press: A Case Study

It is widely believed that asymmetrical economic interdependence affords political leverage on foreign policy whereas symmetrical economic transactions generally do not. A more recent impression is that “vulnerability” (as opposed to mere “sensitivity”) dependence identifies those particular asymmetrical economic ties that create political opportunity. We adopt these distinctions to test the proposition that asymmetrical trade vulnerability compromises the foreign policy behavior of the more dependent of two partners. We examine trade and foreign policy relations between the United States and the 25 nations that were trade dependent upon it between 1950 and 1973. Time-series data for trade and selected roll calls of the UN General Assembly permit cross-sectional and longitudinal tests of the underlying political economy proposition. The evidence is consistent with the expectation that the asymmetrical trade vulnerability of the dependent countries leads to their compliance, albeit selective, with U.S. foreign policy preferences. On roll calls not salient to the United States, dependent countries are no more in accord with the United States than are the remaining Assembly members. Our data reinforce the tentative conclusions of two studies that were exclusively cross-sectional. Even so, there is some indication that trade sensitivity has no systematic political repercussions. The last interpretation lends quantitative support to an interdependence thesis that has previously relied upon case study evidence.

Trade Dependence And Foreign Policy Compliance A Longitudinal Analysis

The survey points to the age-old European interest in the role of small states, almost ignored in the recent literature on small states. It is shown that the numerous attempts to define a small sta...

The Perennial Problem of Small States: A Survey of Research Efforts

The primary aim of this article is to present an inventory of the propositions that have been made concerning the ways in which small states can exercise influence over Great Powers. The paradox of relatively resourceless states sometimes being able to exercise substantial influence in international relations received some attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The weak state — powerful state relations have, however, also been dealt with in a number of more recent studies, some of which have discussed the 'paradox of weak state power'.In this article we revisit the subject area and take stock of the work by presenting the factors which have been mentioned as conceivable explanations to the phenom enon. The factors are divided into two groups, with four and three subcategories, respectively. The first group consists of the propositions which focus on 'power bases' and statements about the effects of various basic conditions in the international system. The second group contain the propositions which ...

The Paradox of Weak State Power. A Research and Literature Overview

Strand, Jonathan R. and John P. Tuman. (2012) Foreign Aid and Voting Behavior in an International Organization: The Case of Japan and the International Whaling Commission. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1111/j.1743-8594.2011.00173.x



This study examines the relationship between Japanese foreign aid disbursement and recipient state membership and voting in the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Focusing on 104 countries for the period 1994–2005, we investigate whether Japan gives more aid to IWC members that vote with Japan. The effects of the independent variables are estimated with a linear mixed regression model. Controlling for other possible influences on official development assistance (ODA) disbursements, and employing different measures of dyadic voting similarity, the study finds Japanese aid concentrates in members of the IWC that are microstates. The findings of the paper also indicate that microstate members of the IWC who align their votes with Japan are more likely to receive Japanese ODA. By demonstrating that Japan’s strategy is focused on microstates, the study provides a more refined understanding of the mechanisms Japan employs to end the IWC’s moratorium on commercial whaling.

Foreign Aid and Voting Behavior in an International Organization: The Case of Japan and the International Whaling Commission

As a comparative study of the foreign policy behavior of 30 black African states in the middle 1960s, we present a typology of states and foreign policy patterns that permits testable, comparative hypotheses to be derived. These hypotheses relating size, level of modernization, and inner or other directedness to four patterns of foreign policy—participation, conflict, political and economic dependence—are operationalized by use of the AFRICA data set and tested via regression and path analysis. Our findings support our typology and hypotheses, accounting for from 50% to 79% of the variance in each foreign policy pattern. They are also simple and interpretable to specialists in African and small state foreign policy behavior.

Klaus-Peter Gottwald

Papers

Small State Foreign PoliciesA Comparative Study of Participation, Conflict, and Political and Economic Dependence in Black Africa