Who Wants Cooperation? Understanding Support for Multilateral Peace Operations

• In Event: Public Opinion and Individual Preferences on International Collaboration

Abstract

International cooperation has been increasingly politicized by populist and nationalist leaders around the world. Public opinion research finds that citizen support for international cooperation is influenced by partisanship as well as concerns about funding. Yet, we still lack a fine-grained understanding of how domestic audiences interpret (and weigh) elite cues that emphasize diverse types of benefits and costs. In this project, we theorize that there are important differences in how citizens respond to the benefits and costs of cooperation which vary based on how specific or broad the benefits are (a benefit-specificity dimension) and the degree to which the home country controls the scope of cooperation (a sovereignty cost dimension). First, we theorize that citizens are more likely to support international cooperation as the benefits become more specific to the home country. Namely, citizens are more supportive of cooperation when they perceive it as yielding a private good for their country relative to global public goods or private goods for other countries. Second, we theorize that citizens are more sensitive to the costs of cooperation when they are perceived to infringe on sovereignty and less sensitive to the costs of funding cooperation. We test our theory through a pre-registered survey experiment on a representative sample in the US which gauges citizens’ approval of US supporting UN-led peacekeeping operations. The results corroborate our theoretical framework, suggesting that citizen support for cooperation is influenced by the dimensionality of the benefits and costs, which can be manipulated by elites. Importantly, they demonstrate that observed partisan differences in public support are likely driven by elite discourse which emphasizes different dimensions of cooperation.

Authors

• Andrew David Lugg, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

• Jared Oestman, University of Nevada Las Vegas