Comparative public diplomacy: Message strategies of countries in transition

•Comparative public relations variables are applied to the study of public diplomacy.•Methodology is content analysis of Ministries of Foreign Affairs websites.•Message strategy was correlated with democracy, economic development, and reputation.•Significant correlation between level of democracy and advocacy messages.•Findings indicate countries could benefit from advocacy and promotional strategies.

This exploratory study used infrastructural variables that have been used in comparative public relations research and applied them to the study of public diplomacy. It also compared message strategies using a content analysis of Ministry of Foreign Affairs websites of eight countries that are recent members or candidates to join the European Union to examine how public diplomacy message strategies correlate with economic development, level of democracy, and perceptions of the country. The most common message strategy was informational. There were no statistically significant correlations between reputation and message strategy, but descriptive statistics show countries that used advocacy strategies had higher means for reputation. There was a significant correlation between the level of democracy and the use of advocacy messages. Findings indicate that transitional countries could benefit from advocacy and promotional message strategies.