Browsing by Subject "Foreign Policy Analysis"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
Numbers in politics : comparative quantitative analysis & modeling in foreign policy orientation and election forecasting
(2017-05) Taylan, Enes
To advance social science in the direction of accurate and reliable quantitative models, especially in the fields of International Relations and Political Science, new novel methodologies borrowed from the Computer Science and Statistics should be employed. In International Relations, quantitative analysis can be carried out to understand foreign policy topic relations in public discourse of decision makers. In domestic politics, Election Forecasting is a suitable area, because of its offering of already quantified vote results and its importance in the decision-making process in domestic politics and foreign policy. This work embarks upon a computational statistical model built on social media (Twitter) data and texts’ meaning extracted, analyzed and modeled with the state-of-the-art methodologies from Computer Science (Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing) and statistics to forecast election results and foreign policy orientation. To verify the model, Turkish General Election 2015, US Presidential Election 2016 and campaign period of Donald Trump are analyzed. This work shows that, sentiment of political tweets can be captured with high predictive accuracy (92% in Turkish, 96% in English) and using opinion poll results for a given period of time, vote percentage fluctuations can be predicted. Furthermore, it is possible to capture the foreign policy orientation of a candidate by his and his team’s tweets in the campaign period.
Open Access
An operational code analysis of İran’s supreme leadership— Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei
(2016-08) Richter, Elizabeth
The psychological approach employed in Leadership Studies asserts that understanding a leader’s characteristics is of paramount importance in understanding the role of that leader in foreign policy decisions. As the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and Khomeini before him, has ultimate veto power over Iran’s foreign policy, and as such, an analysis of his political beliefs is warranted. Utilizing Operational Code Analysis, this research aims to identify patterns in the political belief systems of Khomeini and Khamenei. Three main hypotheses have been posited in this thesis: (1) The political beliefs of Supreme Leaders Khomeini and Khamenei will reveal significant differences from the average world leader (i.e. norming group). (2) Supreme Leader Khamenei’s foreign policy decisions will be more cooperative than his predecessor (Khomeini). (3) The Supreme Leaders’ political belief systems have evolved throughout their tenure as Iran’s leaders due to the experience gained in office. The results reveal that the supreme leaders of Iran demonstrate several significant differences in their political belief system in contrast with the average leader, that Khamenei is indeed more cooperative than Khomeini, and that both leaders’ political belief systems have changed over time. Furthermore, the findings show that Supreme Leader Khamenei is particularly invested in the nuclear program and highly wary of the ‘other’ in the political universe when it comes to this issue.
Open Access
Regional directions of national role conceptions : Turkey's foreign policy in its neighborhood
(2017-05) Sula, İsmail Erkam
This study analyzes Turkey's foreign policy (TFP) through utilizing two foreign policy analysis (FPA) tools: Role Theory and Event Data. Role theory claims that foreign policy conduct is an attempt to perform the role conceptions that decision-makers formulate. The literature mainly focuses on the sources of role conceptions. However, most of the existing studies do not comprehensively incorporate foreign policy practices in their analyses. This study argues that such a stance hinders the explanatory power of role theory and creates a need to develop a systematic focus on states‟ foreign policy practices. Therefore, it utilizes event data analysis, which reviews international news reports to collect data on the actual foreign policy practices of states. Combining event data and role theory, this study observes and measures the parallelism between TFP words and deeds. It collects data by utilizing two methods: hand-coded content analysis and computer-assisted event data analysis. By doing so, it builds the Turkey‟s Foreign Policy Roles and Events Dataset (TFPRED) which analyzes TFP in five regions: Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Euro-Atlantic. This dataset makes it possible to observe the relationship between decision-makers‟ vision and the country‟s foreign policy practices. It presents proofs on the validity of its two main claims: 1) There are region-specific differences in Turkey‟s national role conceptions towards its neighborhood and 2) All role conceptions (words) do not turn into practice (deeds) in foreign policy.
Open Access
Understanding the new middle eastern leaders : an operational code approach
(2014) Canbolat, Sercan
Political Islam and particular Islamist organizations have broadly gained strength across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the post-Cold War era. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is viewed as the world‘s largest and most influential Islamist organization impinging upon the wider landscape of contemporary MENA politics. The psychological approach contends that the characteristics of leaders making foreign policy are crucial to understanding ultimate foreign policy outcomes (Hudson 2005). In this literature, the study of leaders‘ beliefs is one the most progressive approaches to world politics which focuses on leaders‘ belief systems and their impacts on foreign policy-making (Leites 1951; George 1969). By utilizing the operational code analysis, this research aims to unravel the general patterns of Islamist foreign policy iv manifested itself in three MB-affiliated MENA leaders‘ foreign policy behaviors in the post-Arab uprisings era: Egypt‘s Morsi, Tunisia‘s Ghannouchi, and Hamas‘ Meshaal. Two main hypotheses are posited in this thesis. First, the foreign policy beliefs of three MB-affiliated MENA leaders are not significantly different from the world leaders‘ included in the ‗norming group.‘ Secondly, it is hypothesized that foreign policy behaviors of three Islamist leaders designate uniformity pattern even though these leaders operate in quite different political and cultural settings. The analysis results yield that operational codes of three MB leaders are analogous to the average world leader‘s since there are only a few statistically significant differences. The findings also support the argument that despite operating in different political systems, all three MBIslamists exhibit similar foreign policy behaviors towards the ‗other‘ in a strategic environment.