Issue Salience in International Politics

Kai Oppermann, Henrike Viehrig

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415586511
• eBook ISBN: 9781136725760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This book analyses the salience of foreign and security policy issues to domestic actors, its role in the analysis of international politics and its consequences for foreign policy decision-making. It provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of issue salience and develops the state of the art.

Beginning with a chapter on the concept of issue salience and its role in analysing international politics, it has a strong comparative framework and focuses on different domestic actors: the general public; political parties/parliaments; and the media. It features empirical studies drawn from countries in Western Europe and North America and addresses the salience of different issue areas in three key areas of international politics:

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• European Integration

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• Foreign and Security Policy

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• Transatlantic Relations

Finally the book offers critical appraisals of the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of issue salience and the methods for measuring it.

This volume makes an important contribution to scholarly debates on the role of public opinion in foreign affairs and on the prospects of parliamentary control of foreign and security policy. It will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, international relations and foreign policy.

Kai Oppermann is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Political Science and European Affairs, University of Cologne, Germany and the Managing Editor of Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik.

Dr. Henrike Viehrig is Assistant Professor and Chair of International Politics and Foreign Policy at the University of Cologne, Germany.

Section 1

Introduction

1 Analyzing issue salience in international politics

Theoretical foundations and methodological approaches

Kai Oppermann and Catherine E. de Vries

Introduction

This volume represents a collective endeavor to reflect on and develop further the state of the art in thinking about the role of issue salience in international politics. The individual chapters of the book offer a broad array of analyses that probe into the salience of different substantive issue areas in foreign affairs to different domestic actors in a diverse set of countries employing a number of different methods. They are thus indicative of the empirical and methodological richness of research in the field and bear evidence that the study of issue salience in international politics straddles the disciplinary boundaries between Comparative Politics and International Relations. The common theme of the chapters, however, is that they all set out to further our knowledge about the concept of issue salience and explore its implications for the study of international politics and foreign policy. The introductory chapter is meant to elaborate on this common theme and to set the volume’s theoretical and methodological framework.

To that purpose, the introduction will first define the concept of issue salience and relate it to the basic tenets of cognitive psychology. Section 2 will then review the existing literature in the field, and Sections 3 and 4 will present the theoretical case for analyzing the salience of international affairs and attend to the implications of the study of issue salience for theorizing foreign policy and international politics. Section 5 will then move on to discuss the established methods for measuring the salience of political issues for governments and political parties, general publics and the media. The introduction will conclude with briefly laying out the plan of the book.

The concept of issue salience

The concept of issue salience refers to the relative importance or significance that an actor ascribes to a given issue on the political agenda (Wlezien 2005: 556–61; Soroka 2003: 28–9). It is a measure of the attention actors devote to the issue in question and of the issue’s overall prominence in the minds of decision-makers. In analyzing international politics and foreign policy, the concept constitutes a cognitive shortcut of human actors to select which information they process before deciding on a course of action. Following the basic tenets of cognitive psychology, decision-makers can be conceived of as “cognitive misers” who have to economize on their scarce capacity to process information (Fiske and Taylor 1984: 11–12). That cognitive scarcity concerns not so much the availability of information per se but rather the actor’s attentiveness to information. In order to cope with the “bottleneck of attention” human actors resort to heuristics which produce simplified subjective representations of their decision-making environment and thereby delimit the amount of information they need to consume (Jones 1994: 65). In consequence, their attentiveness is highly selective and they use but a tiny fraction of available information when making choices (Simon 1985: 301–2; Vertzberger 1990: 7–10).

A foremost cognitive shortcut of actors to reduce the informational burden of decision-making is the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1982: 11–14). In what has been referred to as the “top-of-the-head” phenomenon, decision-makers will primarily base their choices on information which is most readily accessible in their memory and which they can most easily bring to mind (Taylor and Fiske 1978). This heuristic, in turn, can be operationalized by the concept of issue salience. The concept is strictly relational and reproduces the trade-offs that human actors in the arena of foreign affairs face when they focus their attention on some issues at the expense of others. Of the countless political issues that compete for their attention at any point in time, these actors will concentrate their cognitive capacity primarily on issues which are amongst their uppermost concerns, i.e. which they consider most salient. When forming their opinion on international affairs and when deciding how to make use of their institutional competences to devise or influence foreign policy, these actors, therefore, will above all consult information on those issues in the international arena to which they attach the highest salience.

Overview of existing research

The salience of international affairs has been studied for different domestic actors. The most sustained efforts in this regard, however, have clearly been devoted to the general public. In particular, a long history of research has investigated the link between issue salience and voting behavior (e.g. RePass 1971; Rabinowitz et al. 1982; Niemi and Bartels 1985; Krosnick 1988, 1990; Fournier et al. 2003). The higher the salience of foreign affairs is, the more responsive voters are to information about it and the stronger the policy’s impact as a bench-mark for the overall evaluation of candidates (Edwards et al. 1995) and thus for individual voting decisions is likely to be (Franklin and Wlezien 1997: 348–51). As regards voting patterns in referendums, moreover, the public salience of the issue on the ballot has been found to speak to the debate about whether referendum outcomes are shaped primarily by the attitudes of voters towards the issue itself (the issue-voting hypothesis) or rather by their attitudes towards different political parties and the incumbent government (the second-order hypothesis) (cf. Hobolt 2005: 86–7): research into the voting behavior in referendums on European integration suggests that the second-order hypothesis is most powerful when the referendum issue is not very salient to voters and that the issue-voting hypothesis, in contrast, gains leverage under the condition of highly salient referendum issues (Svensson 2007: 171–2).

In addition, a rich literature exists on the mediating role of public issue salience in democratic politics, which explores other aspects of the relationship between public opinion and policy-making than the voting mechanism. For one, numerous studies have shown that policy outcomes are more consistent with public preferences in cases of high issue salience than in cases of low issue salience (Page and Shapiro 1983; Monroe 1998; Petry and Mendelsohn 2004). Such consistency, moreover, is more likely to result from a bottom-up rather than a top-down process when the salience of the issue in question is high (Hill and Hurley 1999). In a similar vein, a distinguished line of research on the public responsiveness to policy outputs suggests that publics will only take note of policy decisions and adjust its preferences in a “thermostatic” fashion when the respective policy area is sufficiently salient to them (Wlezien 1995, 2004). The extent to which publics respond to policy outputs in a given domain is thus indicative of that domain’s public salience.

More specific empirical insights into the patterns of the public salience of foreign affairs issues, moreover, have been accumulated by a substantial body of work which has tracked changes in the salience of international affairs to general publics in single countries – above all in the US (cf. Asher 1992; Persily et al. 2008) – as well as similarities and differences across countries and specific issues (Oppermann and Viehrig 2009). Most notably, there is evidence for systematic cross-country differences in the public salience of defense issues, which appears to be higher in the United States and the United Kingdom than in Canada and Sweden, for example (Wlezien 1996; Soroka and Wlezien 2004, 2005; Eichenberg and Stoll 2003). Also, a number of pertinent works have probed into the salience of European integration to European publics, which displays strong variations across countries and over time (Franklin and Wlezien 1997; De Vries 2007; Oppermann 2008b; Oppermann and Viehrig 2008). Other studies, in turn, have sought to explain such variations by distinguishing between issue-specific and country-specific determinants of issue salience: the public salience of foreign affairs in a specific country at a given point in time was hypothesized to be a function of issue-specific news factors inherent to the issue in question and of country-specific catalysts of the issue’s newsworthiness, i.e. the degree of domestic elite dissent on the issue and the extent of the country’s direct involvement in it (Oppermann and Viehrig 2009: 928–31). Along these lines, the holding of EU referendums has been shown to increase inter-party conflict over European integration and thus to spur the issue’s public salience in national elections (De Vries 2009).

Moving beyond general publics, moreover, a good amount of research has been done on the salience of international affairs to political parties. Existing scholarship in this regard has primarily focused on European integration and found that the issue has come to be a much more salient parameter of national party systems in the EU in the post-Maastricht era than hitherto (Marks et al. 2002; Steenbergen and Scott 2004; Kriesi 2007). On the level of members of parliament, a regular survey has been established that biennially polls the salience of international affairs in the German Bundestag (Jäger et al. 2009; see also Chapter 12 in this volume). When it comes to the foreign policy executive, however, we are aware of no studies that have yet set out to directly explore the salience of different foreign affairs issues to foreign policy decision-makers themselves.

Issue salience in international politics and foreign policy analysis: a principal–agent perspective

Given this brief overview of existing research, the theoretical significance of studying the salience of international affairs to different domestic actors, first and foremost, is in assessing the role of these actors in foreign policy and international politics. In particular, the concept of issue salience captures a cognitive precondition for actors in the domestic arena to be able to influence the conduct of foreign policy and thus to have an impact on the international level. The formal powers of domestic actors to assert their preferences in the realm of international affairs will be of little avail if the issue in question has not sufficiently drawn their attention. The higher the salience of a foreign affairs issue to a domestic actor is, in contrast, the more mobilized the actor is to make her views heard and the more consequential the actor’s preferences and power become.

These basic propositions follow from a broad principal–agent perspective on foreign policy. The defining feature of principal–agent relations is the delegation of a task or responsibility by a principal to an agent. Such relations rest upon the expectation on the part of the principal that the employed agent will use its authority according to the principal’s interests. At the same time, however, it is a corollary to the inherent logic of delegation that agents inevitably enjoy a certain leeway to act independently from their assigned brief and their principals’ wishes (Pratt and Zeckhauser 1985: 2–8). From a principal’s perspective, therefore, the perennial challenge of principal–agent relations is to devise suitable control mechanisms which constrain an agent’s slack and prevent him/her from violating the principal’s interests. Agents, on the other hand, will seek to defend their discretion vis-à-vis the principals and they will employ their leeway to further their own interests which may well differ from those of the principals (Lupia 2003: 33–6; Kiewit and McCubbins 1991: 24–6).

In the fields of foreign affairs and international politics, in turn, governments – including the ultimate foreign policy decision-makers – can be conceived of as collective agents that have been assigned the tasks of formulating foreign policies on behalf of their domestic principals and of implementing them in the international arena.¹ In parliamentary democracies, these principals are the government’s parliamentary support coalition, the government parties, and the electorate.² Directly or indirectly, they delegate the authority to conduct the foreign relations of a country to a government of their choosing (Strøm 2003: 64–6). Most important, these principals also have means at their disposal to revoke this authority and to deselect their governmental agent. Parliamentary majorities and the parties that carry them can at any time unseat a government, and general publics may use democratic elections to punish the government by voting it out of office. In terms of Roger Hilsman’s concentric circles model of different power centers in the foreign policy process, these principals distinguish themselves from other actors in the domestic environment by having the power to impose the most consequential sanctions against the foreign policy executive and ultimately to threaten the very survival of governments (Hilsman 1987: 68–78). They are thus the foremost sources of audience costs which may accrue to foreign policy decision-makers in the domestic arena (cf. Fearon 1994; Pahre 2003: 15–24).

However, the institutional power of principals to credibly threaten their agents with costly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Contributors
• SECTION 1. Introduction
• SECTION 2. Public opinion
• SECTION 3. Intermediary actors: The media and political parties
• SECTION 4. Political elites
• SECTION 5. Conclusion
• Index