Look Over There! References to Other Countries in U.S. Domestic Policy Debates

• In Event: Trip Through Your Wires: The Mediated Information Flow of Policy Content

Abstract

International Policy Comparisons (IPCs) are references to other countries that appear in U.S. domestic policy debates. How prevalent are these IPCs and from what sources do they come? This paper begins to answer these questions. I argue that IPCs are a common feature of domestic policy debates, though with distinct partisan patterns: Democrats are likely to use foreign examples as aspirational, while Republicans tend to counterargue IPCs. To test these assertions, I perform a content-analysis on a) New York Times editorials b) stories from the liberal magazine The Nation and its conservative counterpart The National Review c) popular liberal and conservative Facebook pages, and d) Tweets from Democratic and Republican Members of Congress. Results show that IPCs are a common feature of political communication in U.S. domestic policy debates, that they are particularly prevalent among liberal and Democratic sources, and that when they do get used by conservatives and Republicans it is to suggest the U.S. should not emulate foreign examples.

Author

• Bas W. van Doorn, College of Wooster