Nationalists Protests as Credible Signals in International Crisis Bargaining

• In Event: Nationalist Politics in Asia

Abstract

How do nationalist protests at home affect crisis bargaining abroad? The overall effect and the scope conditions for nationalist protests to influence international crisis bargaining remain unspecified, particularly due to two sets of uncertainties: the home government, who is uncertain whether the protest will evolve into an anti-government mobilization, and the foreign government, who is uncertain whether nationalism constitutes a genuine credible and costly constraint of the home government. In this paper, I formally analyze these two uncertainties, and clarify 1) the conditions under which the home government can and will use nationalism as leverages in international bargaining, and 2) the conditions under which the outsiders believe the signal as credible rather than cheap talk. Results from the model will be tested against original datasets on nationalist protests, gathered via natural language processing of a large corpus of social media text, and in-depth case study of the (in)effective signaling with the 2014 anti-China protest in Vietnam.

Author

• Xinru Ma, University of Southern California