Legislative Behavior, Mass Media, and Foreign Policy Making: The Case of Paraguay

Abstract

Does national media news coverage affect the behavior of legislators when deciding foreign policy matters? This article aims to disentangle the relationship between the media and legislative behavior in foreign policy, using Paraguay as a case study. We analyze the level of public debate on international affairs, measured by the frequency of news in the newspaper ABC Color in the six months before the roll-call votes on the Chamber of Deputies of Paraguay. The literature on Latin American studies finds a lack of parliamentary interest in foreign affairs due to low voter attention to this subject, and therefore a low impact on reelections. We find the relationship between parliamentary polarization and public interest in a bill to be mediated by mass media. After estimating a Tobit model, we observe a significant and positive relationship between the news coverage a law receives and the degree of polarization among parliamentarians. Thus, our empirical evidence contradicts the idea that there is a lack of electoral interest in foreign policy. We confirm this finding through qualitative data gathered from in-depth interviews.

The National Legislatures in the Enlargement of Mercosur: Paraguay’s Acceptance of Venezuela and Bolivia

“…That is, although the executive branch remained largely controlled by the ANR-PC, the congress saw the election of new political groups, creating, to a certain extent, an institutional opposition (Molinas et al 2004). Studies suggest that Paraguay usually has three main parties, with ANR-PC and PLRA always the leading forces, while the third political party varies over time (Duarte Recalde 2012; Ribeiro et al 2021; López 2010).…”

The politics of regional integration: Domestic support for the enlargement of Mercosur in South America

“…One of the main innovations from this study is to compare all the four parliaments (in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay) with a common framework to understand how national legislatures operate with the enlargement of this regional bloc. While there are other important works about individual cases (Burian, 2017;Mesquita, 2012;Ribeiro et al, 2021;Sanchez, 2015), there is a gap in the literature to find commonalities regarding the legislative behaviour about Mercosur. This article analyses nine cases from 2006 to 2021: covering the four founding members of Mercosur, each of them incorporated two Protocols of Accession (the exception is Uruguay, which approved three, because of a dispute about the Bolivian protocols). It applies Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to understand which conditions were present in the approval of these agreements that allowed the enlargement of the bloc.…”

“…One of the main innovations from this study is to compare all the four parliaments (in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay) with a common framework to understand how national legislatures operate with the enlargement of this regional bloc. While there are other important works about individual cases (Burian, 2017; Mesquita, 2012; Ribeiro et al, 2021; Sanchez, 2015), there is a gap in the literature to find commonalities regarding the legislative behaviour about Mercosur.…”