South Africa's dyadic foreign policy behaviour: patterns of symmetry and reciprocity

ABSTRACT

This is a replication of the methodology of Richardson, Kegley and Agnew's cross‐national study focusing on symmetry and reciprocity as characteristics of dyadic foreign policy behaviour. Our study applied similar scaling (WEIS) and statistical techniques to analyze the dyadic relations of a single country, South Africa. Both studies produced much in common, i.e. the degree of quantitative symmetry in the most active dyads is rather evenly spread from high to low; and affective compatibility is very common with respect to the direction (cooperation or conflictive) of bilateral foreign policy behaviour. However, intensity of affect is very seldom reciprocal. The differences in the two studies were that symmetry and reciprocity were more significantly related for the single country dyads than those of the cross‐national study; and non‐reciprocal affective intensity characterizes cooperative relations more generally than it does conflictive relations in the cross‐national study. For South African dyads this was not the case.