Methodological Appendix

I use public statements by the president to measure the president’s agenda. I employ the same approach as previous articles measuring presidential attention to issues (Edwards and Wood 1999; Wood and Peake 1998), counting the weekly number of paragraphs in the Public Papers of the President related to each issue. The following keywords were used.

Key Words for the Presidential Attention, Public Papers of the President
Caribbean 1984-1995	Caribbean (all subheadings), Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Bahamas, Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica
Central America 1984-1995	Central America, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Contras, Sandinistas
Foreign Aid 1984-1993	Used Public Papers available on CD-ROM with search engine. The keywords included aid and assistance.
Foreign Trade 1984-1995	Business and Industry, Commerce-International, Economy-International, Maritime Affairs-country, Export, Import, Country name- US trade.

I measure attention to foreign policy by the national news media by content coding the ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly news programs. I use the same approach as Edwards and Wood (1999), counting the number of minutes devoted to each issue by the networks using the Vanderbilt Television News Archives available on-line at http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu. I search the Archive using the following keywords.

Key Words for the Media Attention, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Caribbean 1984-1995	Caribbean, Cuba, Havana, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Bahamas, Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Castro
Central America 1984-1995	Central America, Guatemala, Belize, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Contra*, Sandinista*, Noriega
Foreign Aid 1984-1993	Foreign aid, Aid, foreign and aid, Famine, Military and Aid, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Africa (aid related), Afghanistan (aid related), Egypt (aid related), Israel (aid related), Nicaragua (aid related)
Foreign Trade 1984-1995	Foreign Trade, Trade, International Commerce, Commerce, Economy, International Economy, NAFTA, GATT, Tariff*, Quota*

Note: * means wild card.

Instances of attention (both formal and informal) to foreign policy by Congress provide indicators of the congressional foreign policy agenda. The Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report provides the database used to measure congressional attention to the foreign policy issues. As with the previous databases, I used keywords related to the issues in the subject indexes for each yearly volume of the CQ Weekly Reports. I counted text columns mentioning activity or attention by Congress or by members of the legislature.

Key Words for the Congressional Attention, Congressional Weekly Reports
Caribbean 1984-1995	Caribbean (all subheadings), Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Bahamas, Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica
Central America 1984-1995	Central America (all subheadings), Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama
Foreign Aid 1984-1993	Foreign Aid (all see also), Afghanistan, Africa, Egypt, Food for Peace, Israel, Nicaragua
Foreign Trade 1984-1995	Foreign Trade (all see also), Country name- foreign trade, Exports, Imports, NAFTA, GATT

To develop a time series measure of exogenous foreign events related to each of the issues, using the same approach as previous work (Edwards and Wood 1999). I rely on the PANDA data set developed by the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions in Conflict and Defense, in the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (see Bennett and Bond 1994). PANDA is a database that relies on artificial intelligence to code news leads from Reuters reports. It is important to recognize that one singular event in a foreign nation is likely to receive several reports on the Reuters news wire as the event unfolds and develops. Therefore, the severity of the event is represented by the actual number of reports. The keywords are reported below. I excluded events where the U.S. was listed as a source or target nation.

Key Words for the International Events Measure using PANDA
Caribbean 1984-1995	Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Bahamas, Antigua, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica
Central America 1984-1995	Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama