Dehumanizing Enemy Images & Public Support for Cooperation with Adversaries

• In Event: Elite Cues, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy

Abstract

Policy makers frequently evoke dehumanizing enemy images when talking about their country’s traditional adversaries. Despite tough rhetoric, when national security interests are at stake, politicians do change their discourse and are willing to engage in pragmatic strategic cooperation with adversaries. Are members of the public able to make a similar U-turn? To date, no study has analyzed how politicians’ use of dehumanizing images affects public preferences for strategic security cooperation with traditional adversaries. We argue that politicians’ use of dehumanizing images of enemies in public discourse creates a psychological barrier to strategic thinking in security policy at the mass level, and this barrier is greater when enemy images are used by Republican politicians. Using nationally representative data from an original survey experiment, we show that once politicians have used dehumanizing images to describe an adversary, the American people are more likely to oppose cooperating with that country. We also observe that enemy images invoked by Republicans are stickier than those used by Democrats, yet do not find that messages from co-partisans have more impact on public opinion. This study makes the first systematic attempt to bring the dehumanization literature in direct conversation with the public opinion, elite-cuing, domestic audience costs and foreign policy literatures.

Authors

• A. Burcu Bayram, University of Arkansas

• Faten Ghosn, University of Essex