La interculturalidad en las propuestas educativas ofi ciales ecuatorianas

The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) records that something described as salient is “prominent [and] conspicuous” and stands out in consciousness. This general definition has taken on a more technical meaning in the International Relations literature, where issue salience, according to Oppermann and de Vries (2011, 3), refers to “the relative importance or significance and importance that an actor ascribes to a given issue on the political agenda”. This definition raises two additional ideas that are pivotal to the current discussion. In this thesis, I define the political agenda as the list of issues to which political actors, and people closely associated with them, devote their attention135_.

Issue salience is fundamentally an expression of the availability heuristic, the cognitive process (or mental shortcut) which describes how all human beings are prone to behaving with reference

135 _{This definition is an amalgam of the definitions advanced by Kingdon (1995, 3) and Green-Pedersen and}

Chapter 4

Page 102

to the information most readily accessible in their mind (Oppermann 2010, 4). As Oppermann (2010, 4) explains, “actors will concentrate their cognitive capacity primarily on issues which are amongst their uppermost concerns, i.e. which they consider most salient”. Constrained by the inescapable limitations on both their time and attention, humans are forced to pay more attention to some issues than others.

Each actor, therefore, can be conceived as maintaining a personal salience profile which reflects the unique way that they personally order the importance of various issues. An actor’s personal salience profile will constantly evolve over time, with some issues becoming more salient as others become less so. The adjustments in this profile are always relative, “since the attention and resources that an actor devotes to an issue cannot be devoted again to another issue” (Hose 2011, Loc. 5639). “Salience is by definition”, explains Oppermann (2014, 27) “a relational concept”, meaning that “[a] specific... issue can only be classified as a high-salience issue relative to another issue”.

Scholars rarely pay attention to individual salience profiles. This is because the preferences of one individual typically have a negligible impact on political decisionmaking. Usually, far more explanatory purchase is achieved by assessing how cumulative preferences influence decisionmaking. Three such aggregations of ‘priority issues’ are especially important: the political agenda (the list of issues that political actors within a society collectively pay attention to); the media agenda (the list of issues that media actors within a society collectively pay attention to); and the public agenda (the list of issues that voters within a society collectively pay attention to) (Lelieveldt and Princen 2011, 208).

The concept of issue salience really only becomes analytically useful when the crucial ‘salience for whom’ question is answered (Oppermann and Viehrig 2011a). In line with the threefold delineation above, international relations scholars have typically examined issue salience from the perspective of the public, intermediary actors (especially the media but also political parties), or political elites (Oppermann and Viehrig 2011a)136_{. The method of measuring issue}

salience varies according to which of these perspectives is adopted. Opinion polling is the most common way to assess which issues the public considers to be important, typically by asking respondents to identify the ‘most important problem’ facing their nation (Wlezien 2005). For providing insight into which issues the media, political parties, and bureaucracies consider important, content analysis generally proves more useful (e.g. Van Belle 2003). Finally, elite

136 _{Oppermann and Viehrig’s (2011b) edited volume, Issue salience in international politics,is structured in three}

Argument

Page103 surveys are often used to understand the issues resonate most for political elites. Such surveys can target parliamentarians (Jäger et al. 2009, 2011) or the foreign policy elite (Riecke 2011).

Although I did not initially conceive of it in these terms, the process of reconstructing aid policy decisionmaking episodes functioned as an indirect way of observing the issue salience of aid for the political actors involved in the process. Reconstructing the decisionmaking episodes allowed me to observe “the actions of elite actors to infer the salience of different issues to them” (Oppermann and Viehrig 2011a, Loc 6534). I was able to infer the salience of aid issues to key political actors in a variety of ways, including by observing: the amount of time political actors and their key staff members devoted to aid-related issues and the extent to which these individuals engaged with the policy detail of an aid policy output; the amount of political capital powerful political decisionmakers were willing to expend to ensure the aid policy output bore their imprint; how eager the political actors involved were to publicise the aid policy output; the degree to which the political actors involved were required to get ‘sign off’ from the Prime Minister, party hierarchy or cabinet colleagues; and the degree of media interest in the decisionmaking process. In short, reconstructing aid policy decisionmaking episodes facilitated making an assessment of how prominent aid was in the minds of key political actors (Oppermann and Spencer 2013, 41).

The collective message conveyed by these inferences—that aid is a low salience issue amongst the political elite—was strongly supported by the testimony of participants and observers, many of whom, without prompting, sought to contextualise these episodes for me by alerting me to the relatively low position that aid issues typically occupied in the political hierarchy. What was impressed on me was that many of the participants and observers close to the aid policy making process were keenly aware that that they were working within an issue area characterised by its low issue salience. They took it for granted that the attention of powerful political actors was rarely focused on aid policy issues.