Canada’s foreign policy and bureaucratic (un)responsiveness: public diplomacy in the digital domain

ABSTRACT

The Trudeau government’s foreign policy seeks to return Canada to its liberal internationalist roots. Executing this agenda falls upon the foreign affairs bureaucracy, particularly the missions and diplomats abroad. Recognizing this, Trudeau “ungagged” bureaucrats, thereby empowering them to engage in public diplomacy that promotes his stated agenda. How responsive have the bureaucratic agents been to the new political directive? We examine available evidence from digital diplomacy to assess whether the new foreign policy agenda and the change in communication policy have altered the public diplomacy of the foreign affairs bureaucracy. Analysis of over 400,000 tweets from the 296 major Twitter accounts associated with Global Affairs Canada points to few signs of a significant shift in levels of engagement, content of diplomatic outreach, independence of missions, or user interaction with tweets. We argue that despite the key policy change and global visibility of Trudeau’s professed agenda, institutional stickiness has inhibited a concomitant shift in the bureaucracy, thereby limiting the impact of the political directives.

RÉSUMÉ

La politique étrangère du gouvernement Trudeau cherche à ramener le Canada vers ses racines internationalistes libérales. La mise en œuvre de ce plan revient à la bureaucratie des Affaires étrangères, en particulier aux missions et aux diplomates basés à l’étranger. Reconnaissant cette nécessité, Trudeau a « débâillonné » les bureaucrates, leur accordant par-là le pouvoir de s’engager dans la diplomatie publique favorable à son plan. Dans quelle mesure les agents de la bureaucratie ont-ils été réactifs à la nouvelle directive politique ? Nous examinons les données provenant de la diplomatie numérique pour vérifier si le nouveau plan de politique étrangère et le changement de la politique de communication ont modifié la diplomatie publique de la bureaucratie des Affaires étrangères. L’analyse de plus de 400.000 tweets émanant de comptes Twitter majeurs, associés aux Affaires mondiales Canada, révèle un faible nombre d’indicateurs d’un changement important de l’engagement, du contenu de la stratégie diplomatique, de l’indépendance de la mission ou de l’interaction des usagers avec des tweets. Nous soutenons que malgré le changement politique majeur et la visibilité mondiale de la stratégie avouée de Trudeau, la fidélité aux principes institutionnels a inhibé un changement concomitant de la bureaucratie, limitant par-là même l’impact des directives politiques.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• foreign policy
• digital diplomacy
• bureaucratic responsiveness
• communication policy
• Twitter

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editorial team and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. Robert Bond, Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, Cesi Cruz, and one further anonymous researcher deserve special thanks for their support. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kai Ostwald holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, San Diego. He is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy & Global Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Find him at www.kaiostwald.me or @KaiOstwald.

Julian Dierkes was trained as a sociologist at Princeton University. He is an associate professor and Keidanren Chair in Japanese Research at UBC's School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. In addition to Japan and digital diplomacy, much of his research focuses on mining policy and political development in Mongolia.

ORCID

Kai Ostwald http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9876-955X

Julian Dierkes https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4322-4699

Notes

1 See The Economist, “Canada’s new government: Ungagging order” (12 November 2015). Excerpts from the letter were reported in The Star story entitled “Trudeau tells Canadian diplomats he relies on their judgement” (5 November 2015).

2 See Tsalikis (2017) for a discussion of changes in Canada’s foreign service, including under Harper and Trudeau.

3 See Jones (2012) for a comprehensive review of bureaucratic politics.

4 Reported in The Globe and Mail, “Canadian diplomats should use social media more, foreign minister says” (7 February 2014). See also Paris (2014).

5 See Urbinati and Warren (2008) for a discussion of representation theory.

6 While extensive research has examined bureaucratic responsiveness (see Bevan 2015, Clinton et al. 2014, Kennedy 2015, Wood and Waterman 1991), we are unaware of work that considers the responsiveness of bureaucratic agents to a fundamental change in their relationship to their principals.

7 See Steinert-Threlkeld (2018) for an extensive guide on using Twitter as data.

8 Here, we acknowledge the limitations of an analysis that relies on keywords, as tweets since Trudeau’s election could be talking about the same key topics in a different way. Cursory impressions of tweets, however, do not suggest this as an explanation.

9 See: The Independent, “How Trump’s first year has decimated the federal bureaucracy” (31 December 2017); New York Times, “Federal Agencies Told to Halt External Communications” (25 January 2017).