Technologies of Affect: Social Media & Domestic Constraints on Crisis Escalation

• In Event: Political Communications and International Relations in the Digital Era

Abstract

While democratic peace theory claims that information is necessary for a domestic audience to hold a leader’s foreign policy to account, an emerging literature on social media and foreign policy accountability theorises that social media can in fact erode these constraints. In this paper I empirically investigate how a leader’s choice of message and medium can weaken democratic constraints on crisis escalation. I first leverage observational evidence from a crisis simulation on seven senior national security officials in Pakistan to show how selection effects result in a qualitatively more affective framing of crisis decision-making on Twitter relative to online communication. I then randomize these curated messages across an online panel of 1,687 Pakistani social media users to show that escalatory messaging is less likely to alert citizens to the risks of crisis escalation when conveyed via a leader’s Tweets, and also more likely to lower the domestic costs of nationalist anti-foreign mobilisation.

Author

• Fahd Humayun, Tufts University