How Manipulable Is Country Favorability? The Case of US-Russian Relations

• In Event: Russian Foreign Policy Narratives and Soft Power

Abstract

We know that governments consider country favorability, or positive attitudes towards a given foreign country, to be important since they commonly spend large sums to burnish their own countries’ images abroad and, on occasion, to muddy the images of those they see as rivals or enemies. A great deal of research shows they are not misguided in attaching importance to country favorability. Perhaps most famously, Joseph Nye and many others have found that “soft power” (the power of attraction, of which country favorability is one part) can positively facilitate desired foreign policy outcomes for the countries that wield it. And more specifically, public opinion is now established by a number of studies to be an important influence on foreign policy. At the same time, we know relatively little about the sources of variation in country favorability. What interests us here is the following question: To what extent is country favorability subject to manipulation through framing?

To address this question, we examine two countries whose governments’ mutual efforts to shape country favorability are of intrinsic global importance even beyond their usefulness for theory-building: Russia and the United States. In particular, we conducted original nationally representative surveys of each country’s population at the same time, late July 2019. Each survey was conducted by a leading polling agency in the respective country. Along with a battery of other relevant questions, the survey in both countries contained two experiments designed to probe the nature of country favorability and its responsiveness to different frames.

The first experiment is a priming experiment aimed at assessing the degree to which self-reported country favorability (specifically, overall positive or negative assessments of Russia in the US and of the US in Russia) can be manipulated by different primes that reflect alterative frames available in US-Russian relations. Two primes are designed to convey bases for hostility (senses of threat and divergent interests) and bases for good relations (common threats, historic cooperation). By exploring heterogeneous treatment effects, we also explore the extent to which the responsiveness to these frames (and in general, the plasticity of individuals’ attitudes toward the other country) varies according to factors like age, gender, education, nationality, the extent to which people are informed about foreign affairs, media consumption patterns, prior exposure to the other country, economic perceptions, and partisanship.

The second experiment explores a more specific manifestation of country favorability, the willingness to compromise with the other on issues where the two countries’ governments disagree. Here we consider both compromise in the abstract and compromise on the Ukraine conflict specifically. We explore whether these can vary when people are led to have different considerations in mind, including the need to avoid catastrophic war, prospects for economic benefit, concern for ordinary people in countries that are the site of “proxy conflicts,” and the common enemy of terrorism. This experiment thus tests the hypothesis that the willingness to make compromises for the sake of mutual relations is subject to manipulation through framing (not highly frame-resistant), and the extent to which the plasticity of individuals’ attitudes varies according to factors like age, gender, education, nationality, the extent to which people are informed about foreign affairs, media consumption patterns, prior exposure to the other country, economic perceptions, and partisanship.

Authors

• Henry E. Hale, George Washington University

• Olga Kamenchuk, Northwestern University