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This is the first systematic book-length examination of the meaning and influence of world opinion. Using media content analyses, survey data, documentary evidence, and comparative theory, it analyzes how world opinion influences the construction of national identity, the growth of global markets, and the emergence of an imagined international community to rival the influence of the nation-state.
Using newspaper content analyses, survey research data, documentary evidence, and comparative theory, this book examines the meaning, influence, and structure of world opinion in the emerging international order. It begins by analyzing the construction of individual identity in the presence of the Other and then describes the influence of opinion processes upon this construction at all levels, including familial, religious, national, and ethnic.
Subsequent chapters deal with the effects of a global public on the construction of individual identity and the role of world opinion in this process; the definition of world opinion and its component parts; the effects of world opinion on nations' behavior in times of crisis; the role world opinion plays in the construction of national identity and the manner in which this prompts a resurgence of nationalism in the post-Cold War era; the relationship between world opinion and the global market; the search for an attentive public to link elites and mass publics in world opinion; and the appearance of an imagined international community in the post-Cold War era based around the concept of world opinion. The final chapter discusses the effects of world opinion on our vision of history and evaluates the significance of the nation-state in an international environment increasingly governed by global forces and world public opinion. A major study for researchers, scholars, and students involved with international relations, public opinion, and international communications.
List of contents
Series Foreword by Robert E. Denton Jr.
Introduction
Toward a Notion of "World Opinion" by Frank Louis Rusciano and Roberta Fiske-Rusciano
World Opinion During Times of Crisis by Frank Louis Rusciano and John Crothers Pollock
National Consciousness, International Image, and the Construction of Identity by Frank Louis Rusciano and Bosah Ebo
World Opinion and the Global Market by Frank Louis Rusciano and Sigfredo Hernandez
Does an "Attentive Public" Exist for World Opinion? by Frank Louis Rusciano and John Crothers Pollock
"Imagined Communities" in the Cold War and Post-Cold War Eras by Frank Louis Rusciano
Conclusion
Appendix I: Definition of Terms
Appendix II: Notes Toward the Measure of World Opinion
References
Index
About the author
FRANK LOUIS RUSCIANO is Professor of Political Science at Rider University. He was a Guest Professor at the University of Mainz and a three-time Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the German Federal Republic. Among his earlier publications is Isolation and Paradox: Defining the Public in Modern Political Analysis (Greenwood, 1989).
