The Smithsonian’s soft power: how foreigners engage the US national museum

ABSTRACT

Foreigners’ engagement with the Smithsonian provides clues to understanding what is attractive about America. There are two main draws -American science and technology and America’s immigrant community. For foreign visitors the National Air and Space Museum is the most popular. Foreign experts are especially drawn to the Institution’s science research and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The Soft Power Rubric uses the volume and direction of observable social interactions to measure the social connection between countries. Whether foreigners feel endearment for another country and wish to emulate it is an essential distinction between soft power and hard power.

KEYWORDS:

• Soft power
• museum
• science
• technology
• immigrant

Disclosure statement

This work reflects the views of the author only, not those of the US Federal Communications Commission, its members, or staff.

Notes

1. Gallarotti (2022) in this issue analyzes higher education programs as chariots of soft power.

2. All the data used in the Soft Power Rubric are collected by international organizations and published free: online for recent data and in yearbooks at public libraries for earlier data.

Migration data. Immigrant stock information is published every five years, https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/data/global-migration-database .

Study abroad. UNESCO publishes online the number of foreign students enrolled in a country’s universities, including the students’ country of origin at http://data.uis.unesco.org/.

International travel. The UN World Tourism Organization publishes visitor and tourism data (United Nations World Tourism Organisation n.d.). Country specific data on outbound tourism is available from around 1999 onward.

Movies. UNESCO publishes online the top 10 movies by admissions as reported by several dozen countries from 2005 onward at http://data.uis.unesco.org/.

3. Figure 3 multiplies the fraction of foreign visitors in the survey data by the total number of visits to that museum in 2017. The 2017 survey reflects studies done in 2015 and 2016, therefore the numbers in in Figure 3 should be regarded as estimates only (Uetani 2022, Smithsonian 2021).

4. https://www.viafauna.com.br/

5. https://festival.si.edu/past-program/1976

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irene S. Wu

Irene S. Wu is a Lecturer in the Communications, Culture, and Technology Program of Georgetown University. She is a former fellow at the Wilson Center for international Scholars where her research focused on developing the Soft Power Rubric.