Domestic cultural foundations of foreign policy roles: a theoretical framework for a broad cross-country analysis

Abstract

Role theory presents a broad framework for understanding the social foundations of foreign policy actions. The theory investigates how states act in foreign policy in accordance with the constructed role conceptions. Yet, the domestic cultural roots of these foreign policy roles remain rather understudied in the literature. This paper addresses this gap and builds on the question of what are the domestic cultural variables that shape certain foreign policy roles. The paper presents the preliminary findings of a three year research project on the cultural foundations of foreign policy roles. By focusing on a thirty-year temporal frame between 1990 and 2020, the authors conduct a content analysis of speeches given by the heads of executive organs and policy documents of dominant parties in five countries, namely Turkey, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russian Federation and Germany, to build a dataset of cultural variables and foreign policy roles. The paper aims to develop a theoretical framework within which the causal relationships between cultural variables (as independent variables) and foreign policy roles (as dependent variables) can be observed. Within this framework, we use Inglehart’s traditional/secular and survival/self-expression scale for independent variable, while we categorize Holsti’s role conceptions into four major categories, namely assertive, cooperative, neutral and challenger, for the analysis of dependent variable.