(iPoster) Do Foreign Policy Cues Influence Voting Behavior in U.S. Mayoral Elections?

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Abstract

Foreign policy is conventionally understood as a domain that shapes national elections but remains electorally irrelevant in U.S. local politics. Mayoral candidates possess no formal authority over international affairs, and voters in municipal elections are assumed to prioritize proximate concerns such as public safety, housing, infrastructure, and service delivery. As a result, foreign policy has received little attention in studies of local electoral behavior. Yet recent political developments challenge this assumption. Highly salient international conflicts (most notably the 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine war) have increasingly surfaced in U.S. mayoral campaigns, raising an important empirical question: can foreign policy cues influence voter decision-making even in elections where such issues have no institutional relevance?
This paper examines whether foreign policy positions can function as symbolic heuristics in local electoral contexts. Drawing on theories of political heuristics, symbolic politics, and the nationalization of local elections, I argue that when international issues become morally charged and politically salient, voters may use foreign policy cues not as policy-relevant information, but as expressive signals of a candidate’s values, group alignment, or partisan identity. In low-information local elections, such cues may substitute for substantive policy evaluation and activate affective responses, even when they lie outside the jurisdiction of municipal office.
To test this argument, I field a vignette-based survey experiment with approximately 200 U.S.-based respondents recruited through an online panel. Participants were randomly assigned to read a short, newspaper-style profile of a fictional independent mayoral candidate. The vignette was designed to closely resemble real local political coverage, emphasizing the candidate’s background, leadership style, and bipartisan appeal. All candidate attributes—including name, race, gender, and biography—were held constant across conditions. The experimental manipulation consisted of a single sentence embedded in the article: in the control condition, no foreign policy was mentioned; in the treatment conditions, the candidate was described as either supporting Israel’s right to defend itself or participating in a protest calling for a humanitarian ceasefire for Palestinians. This design allows for causal identification of the effect of minimal foreign policy cues in a low-information local electoral setting.
Party identification was measured prior to treatment exposure, and respondents were randomized within partisan blocks to enable analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects. The primary outcomes include indices of vote intention, candidate evaluation, and trustworthiness, constructed from multiple Likert-scale items. The analysis estimates both main treatment effects and interaction models to assess whether partisan identity conditions responses to foreign policy cues.
The findings offer three central insights. First, foreign policy messaging provides no electoral upside in U.S. mayoral elections. When the two treatment conditions are pooled, exposure to any foreign policy cue does not significantly alter voter support relative to the control condition. Second, issue-specific effects reveal asymmetry: a pro-Israel stance produces a modest but detectable decline in vote intention, while a pro-Palestine stance has no overall main effect. Third, partisan heterogeneity analyses show that Republicans respond strongly and negatively to a pro-Palestine cue, whereas Democrats do not significantly shift their evaluations in response to either foreign policy position.
Taken together, these results suggest that foreign policy can enter local electoral decision-making as a symbolic heuristic, but in selective and politically risky ways. Rather than mobilizing broad support, foreign policy cues appear more likely to generate asymmetric backlash conditioned by partisan identity. The study contributes to research on the nationalization of local politics by demonstrating how global conflicts can permeate municipal elections through symbolic and moralized channels, even in the absence of institutional relevance. More broadly, it highlights the growing permeability of boundaries between local and national political cognition in an era of polarized, identity-driven politics.

Author

• Bedirhan Kir, American University