Foreign Policy Role Conceptions and Their Cultural Foundations: A Cross Country Analysis

Role theory helps students of FPA to understand the broad social context in which foreign policy actions are realized and justified. The theory suggests that role conceptions are not only built upon material interests but also motivated by certain ideational variables. Domestic cultural roots of foreign policy roles remain rather understudied in the literature. This paper bridges role theory to domestic political culture studies. It aims to explore the causations and correlations between cultural values and foreign policy role conceptions through a cross country analysis. The paper presents the preliminary findings of a three year research project. Focusing on a thirty-year frame between 1990 and 2020, we conduct a content analysis of speeches by the heads of executive organs and policy documents of dominant parties in five countries, Turkey, the US, the UK, Russia and Germany, to build a dataset of cultural variables and foreign policy roles. We analyze the data through statistical analyses to explore which domestic cultural values promoted what types of foreign policy roles. We use Inglehart’s traditional/secular and survival/self-expression scale for independent variable, while we categorize Holsti’s roles into four major categories, namely assertive, cooperative, neutral and challenger, to analyze the dependent variable.