The Roles of Political Culture, Values and Identity Proximity in International Political Communication: A Comparative Analysis

The Roles of Political Culture, Values and Identity Proximity in International Political Communication: A Comparative Analysis Tamir Sheafer, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Shaul Shenhav, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Pazit Ben Nun Bloom, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Elad Segev, Tel Aviv University Plans to attend the workshop What explains our interest in foreign countries? This study provides a comparative analysis of the role of political values and identities in the arena of international political communication in an attempt to answer this question. It relies on analyses of web coverage of foreign countries in 54 countries. Our main goal is to understand the effect of identity proximity between countries on the level of interest in foreign countries. The possible centrality of cultural proximity in the newsworthiness of foreign countries is not new to political and international communication scholars. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, scholars hypothesized that cultural affinity influences the newsworthiness of events and actors (Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Hester, 1973; Rosengren, 1970). Theoretically and empirically, however, these studies, and more recent models, are usually missing two main aspects: first, a greater focus on the role of national values and identities; and second, a theoretical acknowledgment and an empirical test of the possibility that political culture chronically primed different values and identities, and hence countries will rely on different sets of values in their assessment of the importance of foreign countries. This latter issue is a central aspect of an international comparative analysis. The centrality of values and identities. Models of international newsworthiness usually operationalize cultural similarity based on similar religion or language. It is assumed (although not always empirically supported) that similar countries in terms of religion and language are considered more newsworthy, holding other explanations constant. Values-based analyses are hard to find, though. Yet international comparative analyses in related fields, such as political science and cross-culture psychology, demonstrate in the last two decades "a growing interest in studying values at both the individual and national levels. Values have been recognized as having a crucial role in understanding cultures, and they have become the focus of intensive cross-cultural research" (Knafo, Roccas, and Sagiv, 2011, p. 178). It is therefore our goal to focus on value and identity proximities between countries. Is culture chronically prime values? Current political and international communication models of media interest in foreign countries assume that the impact of the explanatory variables is universal across countries and cultures. Yet this assumption contradicts the basic premise of comparative analysis. Both national-level analyses conducted in the last four decades (e.g., Conover and Feldman, 1981; Kerlinger, 1967), and international-level analyses conducted mainly in the last two decades suggest that different cultures prime different values and identities--that members of different cultures might differ dramatically in their cognitive processes (e.g., Nisbett, Peng, Choi and Norenzayan, 2001; Oyserman, Coon, and Kemmelmeier, 2002; Oyserman and Lee, 2008) and hence may use different evaluation criteria. Initial Findings The study analyzes the amount of attention given to foreign countries in a country''s main web sites. Fifty four countries are included in the study, and the analyses explain the attention given by each one of them to the other 53 countries. Although in the initial phases of data analysis, two main findings appear to be present: first, value and identity proximity between countries positively affect attention to foreign countries after holding all other known explanations constant; and there are strong and significant interactions between culture and certain values and identities. Thus, for example, values that represent large-supra nation groups, based on shared religion and historical aspects, play a much greater role among collectivist cultures than among individualistic cultures. Among individualistic culture, proximities in democratic values at the individual and institutional levels play a much greater role than in collectivist cultures. Similar distinctions can be also found between less and more democratic countries, and between cosmopolitan vs. non-cosmopolitan (parochical) cultures (see Norris and Inglehart, 2009). To the best of our knowledge at this point, this is the first time that such effects are found. Data Data is based on multiple data banks such as the World Values Survey, POLITY IV, World Bank, and various meta analyses. We have collected data regarding the dependent variable from the most popular websites in each of the 54 countries, using Yahoo! Search (based on Alexa). The data set is dyadic: every line represents a single dyad or specifically, the relationship (e.g., mutual trade) and value proximity between two courtiers. This makes the proposed data References Conover, P. J., and Feldman S. (1981). The origins and meaning of .iberal/conservative self-identifications. American Journal of Political Science, 25(4), 617-645 Galtung, J., and Ruge, M. H. (1965). The structure of foreign news. Journal of Peace Research, 2, 64-91. Hester, A. (1973). Theoretical considerations in predicting volume and direction of international information flow. International Communication Gazette, 19, 239-47. Kerlinger, F. N. (1967) Social attitudes and the criteria referents: A structural theory. 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