Measuring Perceptions Of National Interests

National interests are the most fundamental yet elusive concepts in international relations.Objectively measuring national interests through empirical data is undoubtedly valuable for the study of international relations.This paper employs deep learning models to measure specific national interests of countries based on open source information.By analyzing information from newspapers and governments using natural language processing,we identify whether countries confirm specific issues as national interests and measure and track changes in the categories and degrees of countries’ interests over time.When formulating and implementing foreign policies,a country’s preferences and strategies influence each other.A country’s preferences involve ranking different interests and can be seen as a country’s perception of interests.This paper argues that a country’s perception of specific interests is actually a kind of preference.This study uses the bag-of-words model and the BP neural network model to measure national interests in three dimensions: identification,classification,and judgment.The results show that: the accuracy of national interest identification is the highest at 93%;political interest classification is 94%,higher than economic interests at 84% and security at 74%;the accuracy of importance judgment is 82%.By examining four representative events,data fluctuations reflect the impact of events well.This study finds that there are two explanatory paths for Vietnam’s interests in the South China Sea: first,when strategic pressure decreases and international institutions are favorable,interest claims rise;second,when both strategic pressure and domestic political pressure are high,interest claims also rise even if international institutions are unfavorable.Strategic pressure and domestic political pressure are the two most critical factors influencing Vietnam’s position,while international institutions have less influence on Vietnam.For Vietnam,maintaining domestic political stability and responding to external threats are the two main considerations regarding the South China Sea issue.Although international institutions also have an impact,their role is secondary.Vietnam’s policy depends on achieving a balance among these three aspects,but domestic factors are in the first place.