Looking across: A survey study of cross‐border impression formation in the Tijuana‐San Diego and Seattle‐Vancouver border corridors

Abstract

Much of politics is driven by images people may hold in their minds. This is particularly true for cross‐border politics, where cultural, economic, linguistic, and legal perceptions and misconceptions may affect meaningful interaction. These may raise hurdles to integration. A first step to overcome such potential hurdles is to understand the processes by which images are formed across cultural and national borders. This study proposes a simple model of cross‐border impression formation and tests it with survey research data collected in the Tijuana‐San Diego and Seattle‐Vancouver border regions. The results confirm that cross‐border impressions are influenced by exposure to foreign and domestic media, pre‐existing world views, and personal cross‐border experiences. The relative importance of these factors is found to vary across cities, countries and regions. Unlike U.S. citizens which rely primarily on their personal cross‐border experiences to judge their neighbors, Mexicans and Canadians are significantly influenced in their view of the U.S. presented by U.S. television. The paper concludes with a discussion of some implications of the findings

Notes

Professor Pfau is Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego.