Suchergebnisse

This piece is a response to the Conway, Conway, Gornick, and Houck (2014) description of an automated method for assessing integrative complexity. It builds on the authors' 15 years of experience in automating a variety of textual analysis coding schemes including that measuring conceptual complexity and is intended to address some of the issues raised in the process of automating content analysis categories.

The authors investigate the linkage between presidential operational codes and the management of foreign policy conflicts during the period of strategic adjustment in American foreign policy following the cold war. Beliefs expressed in public speeches by Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton are coded for self and other attributions that represent different forms of the exercise of political power. Bush's beliefs reveal a less cooperative, relatively inflexible approach to conflict management in the foreign policy domain, whereas Clinton's beliefs indicate a more flexible and cooperative approach. Their orientations interacted with contextual variables and the opponents' behavior to shape the selection of U.S. behavior in four post-cold war conflicts: Panama, Haiti, the Persian Gulf, and Bosnia. A favorable power position and the absence of vital or strategic U.S. interests enhanced the effect of presidential operational codes.

AbstractOver the last twenty years since the introduction of automated coding schemes, research in foreign policy analysis (FPA) has made great advances. However, this automatization process is based on the analysis of verbal statements of leaders to create leadership profiles and has remained largely confined in terms of language. That is, the coding schemes can only parse English-language texts. This reduces both the quality and quantity of available data and limits the application of these leadership profiling techniques beyond the Anglosphere. Against this background, this forum offers five reports on the development of freely available coding schemes for either operational code analysis or leadership trait analysis for languages other than English (i.e., Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, German, and Persian).