Analyzing issue salience in international politics: preliminary fi ndings and open questions

Introduction 1 For some time political scientists have been interested in understanding the theoretical mechanics and empirical implications of issue salience – research on salience cuts across nearly every cleavage in the discipline. It is a topic of interest to those who study political behavior and those who take a more institutional approach to studying politics (cf. Wlezien 2005; Miller et al. 2006; Epstein and Segal 2000; Kiousis 2004; Braman and Pickerill 2009). Attention to salience also spans across virtually all subfi elds, including American politics (Epstein and Segal 2000; Clinton and Lapinski 2006), comparative politics (Givens and Luedtke 2004), international relations (Diehl 1992) and formal theory (Selck 2006).