Assessing Partisan and International Cues on Support for Foreign Policy Actions

• In Event: Survey Experiments in Foreign Policy Studies

Abstract

A central feature of audience costs is the connection between the public and the leader. Through their approval of the leader and ability to elect a new leader, the public is theorized to have the capability to restrain a leader from participating in certain foreign policy actions; most notably reneging on foreign policy commitments. This mechanism has been applied in a variety of foreign policy contexts, but substantial research has focused on alliance commitments. Current research has shown a that the public does have coherent and stable attitudes around alliance commitments and that the public does punish leaders for backing down on international commitments. However, there are many conditionals to this relationship that need further exploration. One that we focus on here is how cues and heuristics influence public impressions and support for the leader. We focus on two specific cues: 1) partisan cues, and 2) international cues. Both have been discussed in the broader public opinion literature but their connection to audience costs and alliance commitments is lacking. We theorize that both partisan and international cues should influence how the public views an intervention and their response to the leader’s actions. When both cues are pointing the public in the same direction, we should expect strong levels of support for the leader. However, we should not expect cues to always be in sync and need to understand which cues the public considers more strongly and under what conditions. We evaluate our theoretical arguments through a survey experiment conducted through Amazon mTurk in the summer of 2016. This research provides a number of important contributions. First, it clarifies our understanding of leader assessment by considering if cues and heuristics shape overall assessments, and if so, how this relationship is played out in the context of both congruent and opposing cues. Second, it broadens our understanding of how cues influence individual preferences and attitudes more generally. Finally, it extends existing experimental work on audience costs, alliance commitments, and the role of the public in foreign policy perceptions.

Authors

• Brian Lai, University of Iowa

• Nicholas Martini, University of Iowa

• Eveline M. Dowling, Carleton College