1. Africa and Non-Alignment: A Comparative Study of Foreign Policy
- Author
-
Patrick J. McGowan
- Subjects
Non alignment ,Microeconomics ,International relations ,Sociology and Political Science ,Foreign policy ,Political Science and International Relations ,Economics ,Position (finance) ,International economics ,Unit of analysis ,Causal model ,Test (assessment) - Abstract
Research in international relations has many goals. One of the most important is the attempt to establish propositions which can serve to explain and perhaps predict the international behavior of the basic units of the international system, the nation-states. Ideally, such propositions will eventually be brought together to form a coherent theory of foreign policy. In this paper I have adopted the position that the most direct approach to this goal is the comparative study of the foreign policies of a number of state-actors. This method has the great advantage of increasing the number of units of study from one international system to a maximum of over one hundred and thirty states. This increase in units of analysis permits the use of statistics which, in turn, permits the use and manipulation of large quantities of data. By means of various statistical techniques one may draw from the data measures of foreign policy behavior, examine the relationships between theoretically interesting variables, test hypotheses, and develop causal models or theories of foreign policy. This paper illustrates only one aspect of this approach by means of an analysis of the foreign policies of thirty-two African states with
- Published
- 1968