SYMMETRY AND RECIPROCITY IN SOUTH-AFRICA FOREIGN-POLICY

This is a replication of Richardson, Kegley, and Agnew's cross-national study focusing on symmetry and reciprocity as characteristics of dyadic foreign policy behavior. Our study applied similar scaling (WEIS) and statistical techniques to analyze the dyadic relations of a single country, South Africa. Both studies produced much in common, that is, the degree of quantitative symmetry in the most active dyads is rather evenly spread from high to low; and affective compatibility is very common with respect to the direction (cooperation or conflictive) of bilateral foreign policy behavior. However, intensity of affect is very seldom reciprocal. The differences in the two studies were that symmetry and reciprocity were more significantly related for the single-country dyads than those of the cross-national study; and nonreciprocal affective intensity characterizes cooperative relations more generally than it does conflictive relations in the cross-national study. For South African dyads this was not the case.