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Political Behavior

Erschienen in:

02.01.2023 | Original Paper

Perceived Motives of Public Diplomacy Influence Foreign Public Opinion

verfasst von: Kasey Rhee, Charles Crabtree, Yusaku Horiuchi

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 1/2024

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Abstract

Although many countries engage in public diplomacy, we know relatively little about the conditions under which their efforts create foreign support for their desired policy outcomes. Drawing on the psychological theory of “insincerity aversion,” we argue that the positive effects of public diplomacy on foreign public opinion are attenuated and potentially even eliminated when foreign citizens become suspicious about possible hidden motives. To test this theory, we fielded a survey experiment involving divergent media frames of a real Russian medical donation to the U.S. early in the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an adapted news article excerpt describing Russia’s donation as genuine can decrease American citizens’ support for sanctions on Russia. However, exposing respondents to information suggesting that Russia had political motivations for their donation is enough to cancel out the positive effect. Our findings suggest theoretical implications for the literature on foreign public opinion in international relations, particularly about the circumstances under which countries can manipulate the attitudes of other countries’ citizens.

Vorheriger Artikel The Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Political Interest Representation

Nächster Artikel Correction: Nail in the Coffin or Lifeline? Evaluating the Electoral Impact of COVID-19 on President Trump in the 2020 Election

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Our definition of a donation is general and includes any overt economic assistance to other countries for non-development and non-military purposes.

See Section A of the Supplementary Materials for news reports about this event.

Also see Mercer’s (1996) “desires hypothesis,” which highlights the difficulty in changing enemy images.

Domestic media reacts to investments, funding, or donations from foreign countries. See Section A of the Supplementary Materials for examples.

We can think of scenarios where the two—public diplomacy and domestic media framing—can be separated. For example, Russia’s public diplomacy could occur without U.S. media framing. Still, Americans may consume international media, such as Russian media coverage of Russian actions. Therefore, influencing the target country’s public opinion—even without that country’s domestic media coverage—is increasingly feasible given that countries have the technology to broadcast their media (e.g., Russia Today) abroad. Although we think delinking these two processes (i.e., public diplomacy and domestic media framing) theoretically and empirically is important for future research, this paper focuses on what happens when states engage in public diplomacy and the targeted country’s media frame these campaigns.

Baum and Potter (2008) argue that elites provide supply: reporters rely on elites as official sources.

Entman’s (2003) theory echoes the concept of homophily: people and states tend to have positive ties with those similar to them (Cottam, 1994; Herrmann, 1985).

Similarly, Bush and Prather (2020) show that support for economic relations with another country is shaped by whether people perceive that country as having taken their party’s side. Flynn et al. (2022) examine how American attitudes toward China are influenced by misinformation about Chinese foreign policy.

Alrababa’h et al. (2020) show how framing impacts views on aid from the European Union but not from Russia, while we find significant effects from Russia’s aid. We will discuss explanations for this difference later.

Opinion formation research confirms elite commentary’s salience (Zaller, 1992).

We do not separate the effects of media frames from elite commentary. We added elite quotes to both of our treatments, which we explain next, to maximize ecological validity. Media reports about public diplomacy typically contain such quotes from elites. Future work could identify the effects of media framing and elite cues separately by varying the presence and substantive content of elite comments.

See Eri Sugiura, “Blinken denounces China’s ‘strings attached’ vaccine diplomacy,” Nikkei Asia, March 17, 2021, https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/Blinken-denounces-China-s-strings-attached-vaccine-diplomacy (last accessed on August 16, 2022).

See Section B of the Supplementary Materials for additional information about our survey design. We pre-registered our study on August 11, 2020 at Evidence in Government and Politics (EGAP), after collecting a small number of observations in soft launch (https://osf.io/pt8ry/). The pre-analysis plan is also available in Section G of the Supplementary Materials. The study was approved by the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects at Dartmouth College (IDs: STUDY00032069, MOD00010279). A complete replication package is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZXSGPP.

We took this precaution to alleviate concerns about the quality of survey samples collected during the COVID-19 pandemic (Aronow et al., 2020).

One potentially salient difference between the treatments is that the first quotes a current official, while the second quotes a former official. Future research could test different sources and their credibility.

Answer option order was randomized to eliminate order effects.

Since the objective is only to remind respondents of the main point, we do not subset based on these answers. We also note that our estimated treatment effects are, strictly speaking, the effects of asking respondents to read and then more carefully consider information about Russia (using the question above).

Still, the insincerity frame may be more likely than the sincerity frame to have been circulated in the United States and, therefore, the probability of individuals being assigned to our treatments in the real world may be imbalanced. Future work could use treatments with ecologically-valid weights.

For example, any treatment effects might be consequences of providing positive vs. negative information about Russia and not necessarily be linked to Russia’s motivations. Future work could expose respondents to a range of negative information about a country, including some about sincerity. Variation in types of negative information would contextualize the effects of insincerity versus those of other revealed information. We thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this potentially fruitful future direction.

We also run an ordered probit regression model and present results in Section D of the Supplementary Materials.

If we had a strong prior about the backlash effect or if our objective were to test such an effect, we could test whether the Treatment 2 coefficient is positive; namely, \(b_2 > 0\). However, this expectation would still be consistent with our expectation of \(b_2 - b_1 > 0\) under the Sincerity Hypothesis of \(b_1<0\). (Note that we believe that \(b_2 <0\) is highly unlikely. That would mean that respondents are less likely to support increasing penalties on Russia when they are informed of Russia’s insincere motives.) Put differently, our hypothesis of \(b_2 - b_1 > 0\) does not preclude the possibility of a backlash effect. In contrast, stating our Insincerity Hypothesis as \(b_2 > 0\) would make a strong assumption about the backlash effect.

Section D of the Supplementary Materials includes a table showing OLS regression results. It also includes ordered probit regression results, which are substantively similar. In Section E of the Supplementary Materials, for our exploratory analyses, we make subgroups of respondents based on each of the four binary pre-treatment covariates used for block randomization and examine heterogeneity in treatment effects. We find that prior attitudes towards the donor, partisanship, and perceived urgency do not make someone more or less likely to change their opinions, but that education does seem to matter.

This additional robustness test is not part of our pre-registration. Since we delete these observations after treatment assignment (Montgomery et al., 2018), we must interpret results with reservation.

As we discuss earlier in the paper, we think future work should disentangle and identify the independent and conditional effects of both public diplomacy efforts and media coverage of these efforts on domestic public opinion. The continued expansion of domestic outlets (e.g., Breitbart) and foreign outlets’ increased ability to reach audiences abroad (e.g., Russia Today) raise the question of how domestic publics evaluate multiple, competing narratives about foreign countries. Future research should provide competing frames about public diplomacy actions, varying not only frame content but also whether the sources are foreign or domestic.

Mattingly and Sundquist (2022), in a natural experiment, show that messages emphasizing Chinese generosity have modest positive effects on Indian perceptions of China even during one kind of dramatic event (a battle between the two countries and higher geopolitical tensions). Related questions for future research are how long opinion changes induced by public diplomacy last, and whether they occur during periods of crisis or not.

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Titel: Perceived Motives of Public Diplomacy Influence Foreign Public Opinion
verfasst von: Kasey Rhee
Charles Crabtree
Yusaku Horiuchi
Publikationsdatum: 02.01.2023
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 1/2024
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09849-4

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