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13 - Configuring Issue Areas: Belgian and Dutch Representations of the Role of Foreign Assistance in Foreign Policy

from Part III - Empirical Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2018

Marijke Breuning
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Truman State University
Donald A. Sylvan
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
James F. Voss
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Summary

Belgian and Dutch decision makers represent the role that foreign assistance plays in the larger scope of their foreign policies in different ways. Specifically, there is some indication that Belgian decision makers represent foreign assistance as an aspect of their foreign economic relations, rather than as a separate issue area (Breuning 1992, 1994a). This representation of foreign assistance as subordinate to foreign economic policy in Belgium stands in contrast to the thorough separation of foreign assistance and foreign economic policy in the Netherlands. This difference in issue categorization provides a plausible explanation for the differences in the foreign assistance policy behavior between the two states.

But showing the existence of a contrast between the representations of the decision makers of these two states does not explain the origins of such differences in categorization. This chapter, therefore, is intended not only to outline the differences in issue categorization but also to explore plausible explanations for them and, finally, to outline the ingredients of a framework for the systematic empirical study of the manner in which groups of decision makers configure issue areas in foreign policy.

The roles foreign assistance plays in the respective foreign policies of Belgium and the Netherlands illustrate that the categorization of various issues may differ between groups of decision makers who represent different states. This supports the notion that the social context within which cognition takes place has significant effects on both cognitive content and processes (Resnick 1991; Levine, Resnick, and Higgins 1993). In other words, the social context within which a person is embedded affects not only what that person knows but also how that knowledge is structured and used. This is consistent with the notion that an individual's ontology constrains the manner in which problems can be represented and, consequently, the choices that are judged to be adequate responses (Sylvan and Thorson 1992; Voss, this volume). However, it differs in its additional claim that a person's ontology is shaped by the social environment within which that person is embedded. In other words, it assumes representations to be intersubjective (Levine et al. 1993). A group of people who share a social environment may be expected to share some similarities in the manner in which they represent phenomena in their environment: They share similarities in their “patterns of inference’, (Cole 1991: 403).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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