Collective Emotions and National Security Elites in US & Israeli Foreign Policy

• In Event: Elites and Foreign Policymaking in the US

Abstract

Are state national security bureaucracies receptive to naming and shaming strategies? Under what conditions do they experience group-based shame as a result of their association with the country they represent? This paper builds a theory of the micro-foundations of group-based shame for U.S. and Israeli foreign policy elites. We argue that elites experience the emotion of shame at both personal and group level and empirically examine it from 100 in-depth semi-structured interviews with U.S. and Israeli national security officials to advance an innovative theoretical framework to understand and test the influence of group-based shame on state foreign policy elites. The study relies on an original adaptation of the shame experience interview scale employed in social and cognitive psychology to elite interviewing in International Relations. Officials’ attitudes are measured on the basis of compliance with international norms, namely, the Convention against Torture, the Law of Occupation, and the LOAC, as well as great power responsibility and perceptions of declining international standing in global politics. In this paper, we find that while affective responses differ, officials feel shame as a result of the violation of an international norm; when naming and shaming campaigns are targeted against the country, the source of the shaming matters in driving an emotional reaction.

Authors

• Carlotta Maria Minnella, European University Institute

• Baekkwan Park, University of Missouri