The Political Geography of Presidential Speeches, 1946–87

Abstract

A central theme of political geography and international relations is the changing foreign policy of the United States, the global leader since 1945. Speech-making is a major geopolitical activity. A political communication-based view of the American presidency combined with a spatial-temporal framework of global politics provided the methodology for the analysis of presidential speeches. The State of the Union addresses offer a consistent source of documentation of the priorities of American policy, and the geography of the speeches indicates the regional emphases of American strategy over time. A content analysis of the forty-two messages from 1946–87 yielded two key indicators, foreign policy ratio and specific regional ratio. In addition, six global regions were defined. Yearly variations in the key indices are randomly distributed in a temporal sense but are strongly related to regional conflicts with U.S. involvement. The maps for each president recorded dramatic differences from detailed (Presidents Carter and Reagan) to nearly blank (Presidents Nixon and Ford). The Soviet Union dominated all maps except that of President Johnson. An environmental model, relating presidential behavior as a function of the domestic, political and international conditions, explained more than half of the variation in the foreign policy proportion, but none of its variables related significantly to the regional index. A geographic shift in regional emphasis over four decades does not represent a reduction of the superpower competition, but represents instead its relocation from the Eurasian littoral to the newly independent states of the Third World and to Central America. East-West political and strategic issues dominated all maps even when Third World countries were discussed, as happened increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s. Negative images were consistently associated with the Soviet Union and its allies while shared interests were typical of American allies. Most states were not specifically stereotyped.

Key Words:

• geopolitics
• cognitive maps
• American presidents
• environmental model
• globalism
• regionalism
• superpower competition