Race, Issues, and Public Support for International Coalitions

• In Event: Race and International Relations

Abstract

When the trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States (AUKUS) was announced in 2021, a high ranking Indian military officer wondered whether “Anglosphere nations … inspire more confidence in each other.” India, along with Japan, has had a three decade “Quad” arrangement with the UK and Australia, working towards similar goals, and yet was not included in the negotiations. Does the perceived race of potential coalition partners influence support for coalitions themselves?
Identifying the specific influence of race on coalition support is challenging because of the number of confounding variables, including the variety of issue areas covered by such coalitions. We take advantage of the broad-ranging, but relatively unknown Indo-Pacific Quad coalition to tease out whether white Americans are less supportive when the coalition partner presented is non-White and whether the bias is consistent across economic and security goals. In a survey experiment fielded in September 2021 via Dynata to a representative sample of approximately 3,000 Americans, we manipulated the presentation of the Quad to focus on different leaders and issue concerns and compared respondents’ support conditional on whether the country leader was white (specifically Anglo) or non-white. Additionally, we took advantage of the announcement of AUKUS on the eve of our scheduled survey to also compare support of the Quad to the similar, but all-white Trans-Atlantic Quad and AUKUS trio.

Author

• Elizabeth Nathan Saunders, Georgetown University