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The quest to identify patterns of issue salience in crises and noncrises inevitably confronts several thorny methodological questions. Which foreign policy cases should be included in the analysis? How do we measure issue salience? How do we know when one decision stage ends and the next one begins?The following explanation gives the interested reader an in-depth look into the research methods that were used to track the ebbs and flows of public attention in chapter 3. Case Selection The first step of the research project entailed compiling a list of relevant crisis and noncrisis foreign policy events. The population from which I selected the thirty-four cases in chapter 3 consists of highly visible U.S. foreign policy events over the past forty years.The International Crisis Behavior Project database provided the population of crisis cases.1 I am unaware of a comparable dataset for noncrises; therefore, I compiled a population drawn from Charles Kegley and Eugene Wittkopf’s chronology of foreign policy events, supplementing their work with a list of congressional hearings on foreign policy issues taken from Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones’s Policy Agendas Project.2 These procedures ensured a population of crisis and noncrisis cases that includes virtually all of the more visible U.S. foreign policy cases. Put differently, the population includes those cases that were sufficiently familiar to the American public that mass opinion could have been a plausible premise for presidential decision making, while it excludes persistently low-visibility cases in which presidents would have had little cause to consider public opinion. This allows us to focus the pattern, duration, and intensity of public attentiveness. Measuring Issue Salience Issue salience is a surprisingly difficult concept to operationalize. The literature employs three common indicators of salience.The first technique is to examine Appendix A: Quantitative Methods 1. The International Crisis Behavior Project data can be accessed at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu. 2. Kegley and Wittkopf, American Foreign Policy. Baumgartner and Jones provide a wealth of valuable data at http://www.policyagendas.org. the open-ended “most important problem” (MIP) question asked by many survey organizations.3 The advantage of this measure is its directness—it literally asks people what issue they are most concerned about. The disadvantage of using the MIP question is that it conflates importance with salience in ways that complicate the analysis.4 For instance, the public may believe that the economy is the most important problem, but might then be more attentive to the latest Paris Hilton scandal.5 A second method of measuring attentiveness is to examine public opinion polls that ask respondents how closely they have been following the news about various issues.6 Like the MIP question, the advantage to this measure is its directness. However, there are several reasons why survey responses may not necessarily be the most valid indicator of the public’s attention.7 National polls typically take the public’s pulse only when a particular issue has already reached a sufficient degree of salience. Moreover, response categories for questions on public attentiveness usually feature vague quantifiers that are particularly susceptible to variation in respondent interpretation.8 What is, after all, the difference between following the news “fairly closely” and “somewhat closely”? Finally, questions addressing attentiveness are prone to “social desirability effects,” as a respondent may attempt to conceal ignorance in order to convey the impression of an informed citizen to the interviewer.9 This particular bias increases if the respondent has little reason to expect follow-up questions assessing factual knowledge. The final method, and the one ultimately employed in this analysis, is to use network television news coverage as a proxy for issue salience. There are a number of advantages to this particular measure. The main benefit is that television , unlike surveys, offers a daily running indicator of what issues Americans 222 appendix a 3. See McCombs and Zhu, “Capacity, Diversity, and Volatility,” and Jones, Reconceiving DecisionMaking . An example of the most important question is “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” Survey by CBS News/New York Times, March 28–April 2, 2008, http://www.pollingreport.com/prioriti.htm (accessed August 8, 2006). 4. Edwards, Mitchell, and Welch, “Explaining Presidential Approval”; Wlezien, “Salience of Political Issues.” 5. See Baum and Jamison, “Oprah Effect”; Baum, “Going Private”; and Baum, Soft News Goes toWar. 6. Survey questions on attentiveness generally take the following form: “How closely...

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