Published

Democratic Backsliding Damages Favorable U.S. Image Among the Global Public. with Benjamin E. Goldsmith, Yusaku Horiuchi, and Kathleen E. Powers. Forthcoming at PNAS Nexus.

U.S. democracy appears to have weakened during the 21st century. Scholars have raised concerns that this democratic backsliding will reduce favorable views of the U.S. among foreign citizens in other democracies. In turn, observers predict that the eroded global image of the U.S. will undercut its ability to win foreign policy cooperation from international partners. We assess these views using three multinational survey experiments fielded in twelve countries with 11,810 respondents. The results show that information about U.S. democratic backsliding indeed decreases respondents' favorability toward the U.S. However, in our exploratory analysis, we find little evidence that it decreases support for cooperating with the U.S. While America's global image may suffer from international reporting focused on the degradation of its longstanding democratic system, its ability to garner support for critical policies seems resilient in some important partner countries.

Militarized Statebuilding Interventions and the Survival of Fragile States. Journal of Peace Research. (2023) with David Lake.

Download pre-print here.

What is the effect of armed statebuilding on the survival of previously failed states? Do military interventions by great powers or international organizations during periods of state failure increase the subsequent durability of “rehabilitated states”? Fearing ungoverned spaces, the international community responds to failed states by funneling aid, experts, peacekeepers, and military forces in various guises into conflict zones with the ambition of rebuilding effective states. There has been relatively little research, however, on whether such interventions – especially in their most ambitious and extreme forms as indicated by armed interventions – are effective. Using multiple definitions of state failure, and the set of military interventions by great powers or international organizations, we develop a model of state failure with baseline covariates from the Political Instability Task Force model. We examine all states that have failed and their subsequent durability in the period 1956-2006. Under most model specifications, armed statebuilding has no significant effect on later state survival. However, we find that military interventions can prolong the time to the next failure when a failed autocracy democratizes and when the statebuilder does not move the failed state’s policies closer to its own. These results challenge current statebuilding practices.

Harnessing Backlash: Why do leaders antagonize foreign actors? British Journal of Political Science. (2023).

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Leaders nearly always claim that their diplomatic campaigns are intended to attract foreign support. However, many diplomacy campaigns fail spectacularly in this regard. While these events have largely been explained as diplomatic failures, I argue that alienating the apparent target of an international diplomatic campaign can be a deliberate strategy leaders use to win domestic support. Under certain conditions, a costly backlash from a foreign actor can be a credible signal that the leader shares the domestic audience’s preferences. Therefore, by intentionally provoking a backlash from a valuable foreign actor, leaders can exchange foreign condemnation for an increase in domestic support. I support this argument with evidence from Netanyahu’s 2015 speech to the U.S. Congress. I show that, as expected by this theoretical framework, Netanyahu’s efforts resulted in a significant backlash among American Democrats and a corresponding increase of support among right-wing Israelis, a crucial constituency for his upcoming election.

Does Public Diplomacy Sway Foreign Public Opinion? Identifying the Effect of High-level Visits. American Political Science Review. (2021). with Benjamin E. Goldsmith and Yusaku Horiuchi.

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Although many governments invest significant resources in public-diplomacy campaigns, there is little well-identified evidence of these efforts' effectiveness. We examine the impacts of a major type of public diplomacy: high-level visits by national leaders to other countries. We combine a dataset of the international travels of 15 leaders from nine countries over 11 years, with worldwide surveys administered in 38} host countries. By comparing 32,456 respondents interviewed just before or just after the first day of each visit, we show that visiting leaders can increase public approval among foreign citizens. The effects do not fade away immediately and are particularly large when public-diplomacy activities are reported by the news media. In most cases, military capability differentials between visiting and host countries do not appear to confer an advantage in the impact of public diplomacy. These findings suggest that public diplomacy has the potential to shape global affairs through soft power.

The Authoritarian Wager: Mass Political Action and the Sudden Collapse of Repression. Comparative Political Studies. (2020). with Branislav Slantchev

Authoritarian rulers tend to prevent political action, but sometimes allow it even if it leads to social conflict. The collapse of preventive repression is especially puzzling when rulers have reliable security forces capable of preventing protests. We develop a game-theoretic model that explores the incentives of authoritarians to repress or permit political contestation. We show that rulers with the capacity to fully repress political action create despotic regimes, but rulers with more moderate capacity might opt to allow open contestation. The status quo bias that favors regime supporters weakens their incentive to defend it. Rulers take the authoritarian wager by abandoning preventive repression and allowing opposition that threatens the status quo. The resulting risk gives incentives to the supporters to defend the regime, increasing the rulers’ chances of political survival. Even moderate changes in the structural capacity to repress might result in drastic policy reversals involving repression.  

Working Papers

Failure by Design: Leveraging International Snubs for Domestic Gain. with Branislav Slantchev.

Foreign policies frequently hinge on expectations about whether another country will behave cooperatively. Domestic political actors sometimes disagree about these expectations, with some believing the foreign actor to be cooperative and others believing that it is not. We contend that leaders can benefit by making public cooperative gestures --- such as requesting policy support or making a state visit --- even when they expect to be rebuffed: the foreign actor's refusal to cooperate can undermine domestic opposition to the leader's preferred policy by exposing flaws in the opposition's expectations. Through this mechanism, a leader's diplomatic outreach “screens” foreign actors in the eyes of domestic audiences. We use a formal model to describe the conditions and incentives that rationalize this strategy. We illustrate this mechanism using three examples: Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s 2007 visit to the United States, U.S. President Bush's 2003 request for UN endorsement of the Iraq invasion, and Venezuelan President Chávez's 2005 offer of discounted oil to the United States.

Does Public Diplomacy Sway Domestic Public Opinion? Presidential Travel Abroad and Approval at Home. with Benjamin E. Goldsmith and Yusaku Horiuchi.

[SSRN]

Political leaders travel abroad to attend bilateral and multilateral meetings, engage in public diplomacy, and send signals of commitment or deterrence. However, their incentive to use this foreign policy tool depends on how it is received domestically. We leverage a powerful dataset of daily surveys administered by Gallup during the Obama administration to examine whether U.S. presidential trips abroad change domestic public approval. Specifically, we compare the presidential approval of 374,715 respondents interviewed just before or after each of Barack Obama’s 51 diplomatic trips to 59 countries during his presidency. We find a small and short-term decrease in approval and increase in disapproval. We observe a similar pattern or no effect in more sparse monthly surveys available during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. Our results suggest that contrary to the common assumption made by scholars and practitioners, it is unlikely that presidents can leverage foreign travel for an immediate increase in a key indicator of their success—domestic public approval

Revisiting Audience Costs in International Relations: Reintegrating International Audiences. with Weifang Xu and Yusaku Horiuchi.

A primary explanation for domestic audience costs—the decrease in approval leaders face for backing down from a previous threat—is that domestic audiences want to avoid a damaged international image. We propose a novel theory of international audience costs articulating expectations for how and why foreign publics within allies will react to leader enacting policy that is inconsistent with their commitments. First, we argue that international audiences in allied countries, like their domestic counterparts, impose “inconsistency costs” on leaders who say one thing and do another. Second, some international audiences within allies reward leaders who issue threats and follow through with force, a phenomenon we term a “belligerence boost.” This dynamic contrasts with the belligerence costs identified in domestic audience cost theory, which emphasizes that domestic audiences penalize leaders for issuing threats in the first place. Third, the magnitude of both the belligerence boost and inconsistency costs varies across segments of international audiences, depending on their perceptions of entrapment, abandonment, and external threats. Preliminary findings from a pilot survey experiment in Japan strongly support our theoretical expectations. This paper advances audience cost theory by uncovering distinct mechanisms through which international and domestic audiences evaluate leaders. It also highlights the trade-offs leaders face in balancing domestic support with the need to reassure international partners during military crises.