This week is a big one for America’s global relations. While Congress started hashing out whether to hand the president authority to finish the largest trade deal in history, Obama was wrapping up the G-7 economic summit in Germany.

Beneath the talking points, what are America’s real priorities when it comes to the rest of the world? We decided to analyze what Congress actually talks about when it discusses foreign affairs — essentially, to draw a map of the world as seen from Capitol Hill.

We took all the public statements of members of Congress from 2009 to 2014 (thanks go to VoteSmart for compiling them) and crunched them to see what countries Democrats and Republicans talk about, how their lists differ, and they view those countries as connected.

First question first: What countries do Democrats and Republicans talk about? The graph above looks at the top 20 countries mentioned by both parties, and plots the frequency with which they come up in documents. (Frequency is out of documents that mention any country.)

The first thing to note is that—perhaps reassuringly—there isn’t a radical difference between parties. The rankings are pretty close. However, there are some substantial differences. Afghanistan and Iraq loom large for both parties, but larger for Democrats. Iran, Russia, Syria, North Korea, and Libya, on the other hand, are all mentioned far more by Republicans. Our data can’t answer the question of why certain countries came up, but it’s possible to guess a rule of thumb: Mention a country if it was involved in crises during the other party’s Presidency.

Now for a more complex question: How do Democrats and Republicans see these countries as linked together? In other words, how do they draw a mental map of the world’s issues? To explore this question, we took all of the documents in which more than one country was mentioned. If two countries occurred in a lot of documents together, we considered them “linked.” In the figures below, a tie indicates that at least 10 percent of the documents that mention either country talk about both countries. When we consider all countries and all links, we get a picture of these mental maps:

Here, again, there is a fair amount of similarity. The strongest link (unsurprisingly) is between Afghanistan and Iraq. There is the same odd triad of Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. (Why? Because of trade legislation that involved those three countries.) In both cases Iran is linked to Syria, North Korea, and Russia, as well as to Israel (the Iran-Israel link is stronger for Republicans). Interestingly, in both cases, Pakistan is linked to Afghanistan but not India, its regional (and nuclear) rival, with which it has fought multiple wars. Instead, India is linked to China in both networks. Mexico, Japan, and Canada are mentioned a fair amount, but largely mentioned in isolation from other countries.

A spot of significant difference between the parties is Europe: in the Republican network, there is a cluster of EU countries in financial crisis (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal), and a small France-Germany cluster (warnings of profligacy run amok?). In the Democratic network, the most prominent European cluster is of small, wealthy European countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands)—perhaps because they are seen as models of affluence and equity.

We should note that all of this is a rough analysis, and on the agenda in the future will be to look how these views of the world have evolved over time, and also how they vary with US regions. Is the West Coast more oriented to Asia, and the East Coast to Europe? Who cares the most about Kazakhstan? Stay tuned.

Authors: David Lazer, Katherine Ognyanova, and Oren Tsur.

David Lazer is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University, Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, and founder of Volunteer Science. Oren Tsur is a postdoctoral fellow in computational social science and natural language processing at Northeastern University and Harvard University. Katherine Ognyanova is a postdoctoral fellow in computational social science and network science at Northeastern University and Harvard University.

The authors gratefully acknowledge Votesmart’s gathering of the original data, and have posted the data used to produce these visualizations.

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