Student Support for Contentious Policies on Campus: A Backlash Against International Human Rights Norms

• In Event: Navigating challenges in education: perspectives on language and controversial policies

Proposal

For decades, university campuses have been at the front line of struggles for human rights and social justice, spearheading many important social change efforts such as the Civil Rights Movement (McAdam 2010; Morris 1981), the anti-Apartheid movement (Soule 1997), and democracy movements in Hong Kong and mainland China (Calhoun, 1997; Wong et al, 2019), South Korea (Altbach, 1970; Kim & Kim, 1964), and across Latin America (DeFronzo, 2018; Sandoval & Rosario Ramírez, 2011). One of the most prominent issues that have arisen recently on American campuses is that of free speech, with students organizing protests both in support and opposition of inviting controversial speakers on campus (Kidder & Binder, 2021; Morse, 2018). Another issue that is perhaps less hotly debated yet very important is the issue of providing in-state tuition to unauthorized immigrants (Peña, 2021). States have long struggled with whether they should provide in-state tuition to unauthorized students, with one concern being that doing so will increase a public image that immigrants are a burden to the state and tax-paying citizens (Peña, 2021).

Public Reaction to Contentious Policies and Priming
In addition to measuring overall support for contentious policies, we are interested in how students react when reminded that such policies are backed by international law. The literature that examines the normative pull of these laws presents contrasting results. Some studies find that evoking that a policy or action in question is supported by international law increases public support for such policies or actions (Kreps and Wallace, 2016). Researchers argue that this is because of the normative pressure that these laws introduce (Kreps and Wallace, 2016). For example, Kreps and Wallace (2016) show that the public decreases their support for counter-terrorism drone strikes when informed that such strikes violate international law, because it makes the public more likely to believe that these strikes are morally wrong and that such actions will hurt the U.S. image around the world. So then, reminding students that the policy in question is backed by international law might make them more likely to think that not supporting this policy is morally objectionable and makes them less of a “good American,” thus increasing their overall support for the policy.

Alternatively, reminding respondents that the policy in question is backed by international law can lead to a backlash effect (Chapman and Chaudoin, 2020; Cope and Author, 2020; Lupu and Wallace, 2019). For example, Cope and Author (2020) conducted an experiment in Turkey and found that Turks were less supportive of accepting refugees when reminded that refugee rights were protected by the Refugee Convention. One potential reason for the backlash is that respondents might have a negative view of the endorsing authority and thus, when this authority supports the policy, they decrease their support (Cope & Author, 2022). Additionally, if nationalistic sentiment is high, a backlash to international law might result from respondents’ knee-jerk reaction to being criticized by outsiders (Kuzushima et al., 2023).

In this paper, we test these two competing hypotheses.

Data and Methods
To test our hypotheses, we fielded a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of 773 college students. Data collection occurred in 2018.

The survey asked questions about student personal background and about how they would evaluate their college across a range of human rights practices. Additionally, we presented respondents with two survey experiments. We presented the students, in random order, with a paragraph of text describing the at-the-time ongoing policy debates about (1) whether universities should permit radical political figures to speak on campus or (2) whether states should provide in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. Each paragraph of text described the issue but we randomly assigned some respondents to a version of the text that also included a frame that described either free speech or education access as a human right guaranteed under international law. As such, because the frames are exactly the same except for one mentioning international law and the other one not, we can attribute any effects that we find to international law being evoked.

Below are experimental frames for the free speech experiment.

Baseline: Since 2016, there have been frequent disputes about whether universities should permit radical political figures to speak on campus. These arguments often focus on the relative harms and benefits to the students and the broader community. [Treatment: An additional reason to allow these speakers to speak on campus is because international law mandates that free speech is a human right and thus all individuals have an equal right to express themselves freely.] To what extent do you support the policy of allowing radical political figures to speak on campus? Please indicate your level of support using the slider below. 10 = strong support.

The immigration frames follow a similar logic; we are not including them here due to space limitations.

Results
We find that an average student in the U.S. is neutral regarding inviting radical political speakers to campus and providing in-state tuition for unauthorized immigrants. As for our experimental findings, students decrease their support for inviting controversial speakers to campus when international law is evoked. However, we do not find the same effect for the immigration frame, i.e., support for in-state tuition for unauthorized immigrants is unaffected when international human rights law is evoked. As such, like Krebs and Cope (2022), we find that policymakers and other interested pundits might be remiss to use international law framing if their goal is to increase support for contentious policies. While it might seem that such framing might increase the legitimacy of the policy, it appears that in some cases it can instead lead to a backlash effect. Additionally, in this paper, we merge the literature on U.S. campus politics with the literature on international human rights, making this paper relevant to CIES audience.

Authors

• Volha Chykina, University of Richmond

• Charles Crabtree

• Kiyoteru Tsutsui