The Transition from Quantitative to Computational Methods in Foreign Policy Analysis

Yıl 2025, Cilt: 22 Sayı: 87, 165 - 183, 18.09.2025

Ahmet Erğurum

https://doi.org/10.33458/uidergisi.1718972

Cited By: 1

Öz

Computational methods have been increasingly used in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Text analysis, geospatial analysis, and network analysis are among the most used computational methods. This article examines the FPA literature that utilizes computational methods and discusses their theoretical and empirical implications for future research. I argue that while these methods are not without their criticisms, the integration of computational tools enables FPA researchers to create and use big data sets, improve sampling, and collect and analyze data. Computational methods in FPA enable theory-driven analysis of big data, providing both theoretical and empirical insights, and allowing testing of micro-level foundations of FPA theories. However, challenges such as the validity of measures and selection bias should be taken into account. While computational methods present significant opportunities for advancing FPA, these challenges need consideration.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Foreign Policy Decision-Making , Text Analysis , Geospatial Analysis , Network Analysis , Computational Social Science

Kaynakça

• Akbaritabar, Aliakbar. 2024. Thinking Spatially in Computational Social Science. EPJ Data Science 13 (1): 1–12.
• Alvarez, R. Michael, ed. 2016. Computational Social Science. Cambridge University Press.
• Antons, David, Eduard Grünwald, Patrick Cichy, and Torsten Oliver Salge. 2020. The Application of Text Mining Methods in Innovation Research: Current State, Evolution Patterns, and Development Priorities. R&D Management 50, 3: 329-351.
• Azar, Edward E. 1980. The Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) Project. Journal of Conflict Resolution 24, 1: 143–152.
• Benoit, Kenneth. 2020. Text as Data: An Overview. In The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations, eds. Luigi Curini and Robert Franzese. New York, SAGE: 461-497.
• Blair, Robert A., Robert Marty, and Philip Roessler. 2022. Foreign Aid and Soft Power: Great Power Competition in Africa in the Early Twenty-First Century. British Journal of Political Science 52, 3: 1355– 1376.
• Boero, Riccardo. 2015. Behavioral Computational Social Science. New York, John Wiley & Sons.
• Branch, Jordan. 2016. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in International Relations. International Organization 70, 4: 845–869.
• Canbolat, Sercan. Have Middle Eastern Leaders Learned from the Arab Uprisings? An Arabic Operational Code Approach, Uluslararası İlişkiler, Advanced Online Publication, 24 April 2025, pp. 1–21.
• Choi, Seulah. 2023. Where You Sit Matters: The Power of Brokers in Diplomatic Networks & Interstate Conflict. International Interactions 49, 5: 669–695.
• Corradi, Andrea, Cassie McMillan, and Nick Dietrich. 2022. A Hostile Reputation: A Social Network Approach to Interstate Hostility. Social Networks 71:61–69.
• Crichlow, Scott. 1998. Idealism or Pragmatism? An Operational Code Analysis of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Political Psychology 19, 4: 683-706.
• Çuhadar, Ç. Esra, Juliet Kaarbo, Barış Kesgin, and Binnur Özkeçeci-Taner. 2021. Turkish Leaders and Their Foreign Policy Decision-Making Style: A Comparative and Multi-Method Perspective. Turkish Studies 22, 1: 1–27.
• Dai, Yaoyao, and Alexander Kustov. 2022. When Do Politicians Use Populist Rhetoric? Populism as a Campaign Gamble. Political Communication 39, 3: 383–404.
• Edelmann, Achim, Tom Wolff, Danielle Montagne, and Christopher A. Bail. 2020. Computational Social Science and Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 46: 61–81.
• Elshehawy, Ashrakat, Nikolay Marinov, Federico Nanni, and Jordan Tama. 2023. SASCAT: Natural Language Processing Approach to the Study of Economic Sanctions. Journal of Peace Research 60, 5: 877–885.
• Feng, Huiyun. 2005. The Operational Code of Mao Zedong: Defensive or Offensive Realist? Security Studies 14, 4: 637–662.
• Feng, Huiyun. 2007. Chinese Strategic Culture and Foreign Policy Decision-Making: Confucianism, Leadership and War. London, Routledge.
• Fouquet, Stephan, and Klaus Brummer. 2023. Profiling the Personality of Populist Foreign Policy Makers: A Leadership Trait Analysis. Journal of International Relations and Development 26, 1: 1–29.
• Goemans, Hein E., and Kenneth A. Schultz. 2017. The Politics of Territorial Claims: A Geospatial Approach Applied to Africa. International Organization 71, 1: 31–64.
• Hafner-Burton, Emilie M., Miles Kahler, and Alexander H. Montgomery. 2009. Network Analysis for International Relations. International Organization 63, 3: 559–92.Hofman, Jake M., Duncan J. Watts, Susan Athey, Filiz Garip, Thomas L. Griffiths, Jon Kleinberg, Helen Margetts et al. 2021. Integrating Explanation and Prediction in Computational Social Science. Nature 595 7866: 181-188.
• Hox, Joop J. 2017. Computational Social Science Methodology, Anyone? Methodology 13, 1: 3–12.
• Hudson, Valerie M. 2005. Foreign Policy Analysis: Actor-Specific Theory and the Ground of International Relations. Foreign Policy Analysis 1, 1: 1–30.
• Jost, Tyler, Joshua D. Kertzer, Eric Min, and Robert Schub. 2024. Advisers and Aggregation in Foreign Policy Decision Making. International Organization 78, 1: 1–37.
• Kaarbo, Juliet. 2015. A Foreign Policy Analysis Perspective on the Domestic Politics Turn in IR Theory. International Studies Review 17, 2: 189-216.
• Kim, Jae Yeon, and Yee Man Margaret Ng. 2022. Teaching Computational Social Science for All. PS: Political Science & Politics 55, 3: 605–609. Kinne, Brandon J. 2014. Dependent Diplomacy: Signaling, Strategy, and Prestige in the Diplomatic Network. International Studies Quarterly 58, 2: 247–259.
• Kitts, James A., and Eric Quintane. 2020. Rethinking Social Networks in the Era of Computational Social Science. In The Oxford Handbook of Social Networks, eds. Ryan Light and James Moody. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 70–97.
• Lazer, David, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-László Barabási, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, et al. 2009. Computational Social Science. Science 323, 5915: 721–723.
• Lazer, David M. J., Alex Pentland, Duncan J. Watts, Sinan Aral, Susan Athey, Noshir Contractor, Deen Freelon, et al. 2020. Computational Social Science: Obstacles and Opportunities. Science 369, 6507: 1060–1062.
• Leites, Nathan Constantin. 1953. A Study of Bolshevism. Glencoe, The Free Press.
• Lin, Zhi. 2024. A Virtual Battlefield for Embassies: Longitudinal Network Analysis of Competing Mediated Public Diplomacy on Social Media. Political Communication: 1–29.
• Malici, Akan. 2006. Germans as Venutians: The Culture of German Foreign Policy Behavior. Foreign Policy Analysis 2, 1: 37–62.
• Maoz, Zeev, Lesley G. Terris, Ranan D. Kuperman, and Ilan Talmud. 2007. What Is the Enemy of My Enemy? Causes and Consequences of Imbalanced International Relations, 1816–2001. The Journal of Politics 69, 1: 100–115.
• Maoz, Zeev. 2012. How Network Analysis Can Inform the Study of International Relations. Conflict Management and Peace Science 29, 3: 247–256.
• McClelland, Charles A. 1976. World Event/Interaction Survey Codebook. ICPSR Ann Arbor.
• Mochtak, Michal, and Tomas Diviak. 2019. Looking Eastward: Network Analysis of Czech Deputies and Their Foreign Policy Groups. Problems of Post-Communism 66, 6: 418–433.
• Mochtak, Michal, and Richard Q. Turcsanyi. 2021. Studying Chinese Foreign Policy Narratives: Introducing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press Conferences Corpus. Journal of Chinese Political Science 26, 4: 743–761.
• Nelson, Laura K. Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework. Sociological Methods & Research 49, 1: 3-42. Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian, and Kathleen M. Carley. 2023. Deflating the Chinese Balloon: Types of Twitter Bots in US-China Balloon Incident. EPJ Data Science 12, 1: 1–28.
• O’Connor, Brendan, Brandon M. Stewart, and Noah A. Smith. 2013. Learning to Extract International Relations from Political Context. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), eds. Hinrich Schuetze, Pascale Fung, and Massimo Poesio. Sofia, Association for Computational Linguistics: 1094–1104.
• O’Reilly, Kelly. 2014. Nuclear Proliferation and the Psychology of Political Leadership: Beliefs, Motivations and Perceptions. London, Routledge.
• Özdamar, Özgür. 2017. Leadership Analysis at a ‘Great Distance’: Using the Operational Code Construct to Analyse Islamist Leaders. Global Society 31, 2: 167–198.
• Özdamar, Özgür, and Erdem Ceydilek. 2020. European Populist Radical Right Leaders’ Foreign Policy Beliefs: An Operational Code Analysis. European Journal of International Relations 26, 1: 137–162.
• Özdamar, Özgür, Burak Toygar Halistoprak, and Michael Young. 2023. Do Campaign Speeches Predict Foreign Policy? An Operational Code and Leadership Trait Analysis of Donald Trump’s MENA Policies. Uluslararası İlişkiler 20, 80: 73–91.
• Rohrer, Samuel R. 2014. What Makes a Prime Minister Great?: A Leadership Trait Analysis of the Effectiveness of British Prime Ministers from 1902 to 2004. Research & Politics 1, 3.
• Salganik, Matthew J. 2019. Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age. New Jersey, Princeton University Press.
• Saunders, Elizabeth N. 2022. Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy. Annual Review of Political Science 25, 1: 219-240.
• Schafer, Mark, and Stephen G. Walker. 2006. Operational Code Analysis at a Distance: The Verbs in Context System of Content Analysis. In Beliefs and Leadership in World Politics: Methods and Applications of Operational Code Analysis, eds. Mark Schafer and Stephen G. Walker. New York, Palgrave Macmillan US: 25-51.
• Schrodt, Philip A. 1995. Event Data in Foreign Policy Analysis. In Foreign Policy Analysis: Continuity and Change in Its Second Generation, eds. Laura Neack et al. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall: 145-166.
• Spry, Damien. 2019. From Delhi to Dili: Facebook Diplomacy by Ministries of Foreign Affairs in the Asia-Pacific. The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 15, 1–2: 93–125.
• Thiers, Consuelo. Political Leaders’ Role in Latin American Foreign Policy: A Systematic Review, Uluslararası İlişkiler, Advanced Online Publication, 15 April 2025, pp. 1–17.
• Thiers, Consuelo, and Leslie E. Wehner. 2022. The Personality Traits of Populist Leaders and Their Foreign Policies: Hugo Chávez and Donald Trump. International Studies Quarterly 66, 1: sqab083.
• Trubowitz, Peter, and Kohei Watanabe. 2021. The Geopolitical Threat Index: A Text-Based Computational Approach to Identifying Foreign Threats. International Studies Quarterly 65, 3: 852–865.
• Turcsanyi, Richard Q., Kamil Liškutin, and Michal Mochtak. 2023. Diffusion of Influence? Detecting China’s Footprint in Foreign Policies of Other Countries. Chinese Political Science Review 8, 3: 461–486.
• Ünver, H. Akın. 2019. Computational International Relations What Can Programming, Coding and Internet Research Do for the Discipline? All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace 8, 2: 157– 182.
• Van Weezel, Stijn. 2015. A Spatial Analysis of the Effect of Foreign Aid in Conflict Areas. AidData Working Paper #8. Williamsburg, VA, AidData. Accessed at: https://docs.aiddata.org/ad4/pdfs/wps8_a_spatial_analysis_of_the_effect_of_foreign_aid_in_conflict_areas.pdf.
• Vecci, Joseph, and Tomas Zelinsky. 2017. A Spatial Analysis of Foreign Aid and Civil Society. https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/51440.
• Walker, Stephen G., Mark Schafer, and Gary E. Smith. 2018. The Operational Codes of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In The Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Political Science, eds. Alex Mintz and Lesley Terris. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1-24.
• Ward, Michael D., Katherine Stovel, and Audrey Sacks. 2011. Network Analysis and Political Science. Annual Review of Political Science 14, 1: 245–264.
• Willigen, Niels van, and Femke E. Bakker. 2021. Trauma and Belief Systems; an Operational Code Analysis of Dutch Prime Minister Rutte and the Downing of Flight MH17. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy 12, 2: 215-233.
• Windsor, Leah C. 2022. Bias in Text Analysis for International Relations Research. Global Studies Quarterly 2, 3: ksac021.
• Zeitzoff, Thomas, John Kelly, and Gilad Lotan. 2015. Using Social Media to Measure Foreign Policy Dynamics: An Empirical Analysis of the Iranian–Israeli Confrontation (2012–13). Journal of Peace Research 52, 3: 368-383.