Foreign Pressure and Public Opinion in Target States

• In Event: External Influences on Human Rights Practices

Abstract

How states govern within their borders is today considered a legitimate concern of the international community. To influence states’ treatment of their citizens, other states deploy a broad array of tools, including moral suasion and material assistance (or more commonly the threat of its withdrawal). Research on the consequences of these instruments has focused mainly on their impact on target states’ behavior. Although the efficacy of foreign pressure is posited to depend on how publics in target states respond, evidence on the effect of this pressure on public opinion in target states is limited. Moreover, the literature provides competing arguments regarding the direction and magnitude of the effects of different tools. The purpose of this project is to examine how two common tools of external influence—public condemnation and economic sanctions—affects domestic public opinion in states engaged in human rights violations. We focus on both forms of external pressure to understand not only how each instrument affects public opinion in target states but also to determine whether they have complementary or countervailing effects. We employ survey experiments in three developing countries with very different political histories and regimes—Indonesia, Myanmar, and Nepal, focusing on human rights issues that are currently drawing the attention of the international community. We believe the arguments we propose should apply to a wide range of issues and in a wide variety of political contexts. To the extent that we obtain similar results across issue areas and across the three countries, we can have more confidence that the dynamics we observe will occur in other contexts. Our results should have implications for debates regarding the utility of foreign pressure to improve governance in the developing world.

Authors

• Masaru Kohno, Waseda University

• Gabriella R. Montinola, University of California, Davis

• Matthew S. Winters, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign