Elite Messaging and Diversionary Foreign Policy

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

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how and why foreign policy becomes salient to domestic politics and the national dialogue. I argue that leaders exploit their relative informational advantage regarding foreign affairs to draw attention toward international tensions during times of acute domestic insecurity. In other words, I assert that diversionary theories of war can be extended to lower-stakes, more commonly occurring forms of interstate interactions beyond outright conflict. Building upon a substantial body of psychological work, I note that other forms of conflictual foreign policy which highlight conflict over core national values and beliefs or which emphasize international competition for power and resources can be successful in generating greater feelings of in-group affinity and out-group derogation even when they do not involve the direct use of force. In particular, I posit that disputes which appeal to extant historical rivalries and frame foreign behavior as a violation of national sovereignty, identity, or pride rile strong nationalistic sentiment and are therefore uniquely effective in bolstering support for the regime. As a result, I expect vulnerable leaders to emphasize aggressive foreign policy in disputes over goods of high nationalistic value against historic foes in order to draw attention away from internal controversies. To test this theory, I collect a large sample of native language sources of daily news media coverage in South Korea, Japan and China and employ a transformer-based language model to thoroughly classify the content and character of domestic discussions surrounding international relations. Using this data, I construct monthly measures of elite framed hostility at the directed-dyad level that capture how a state frames its relations toward a given foreign counterpart and demonstrate that higher levels of hostility coincide with periods of peaked domestic insecurity.

Author

• Ciara Sterbenz, UCLA