Striving for greatness: status aspirations, rhetorical entrapment, and domestic reforms

Abstract

How do leaders use external events or pressures as political levers to facilitate domestic reforms? In this article, we build a theory of aspirational politics to address this question. We show that aspirations to improve a country’s international status can help leaders justify the implementation of their preferred domestic policies. For instance, the aspiration of wanting to join prestigious international organizations or agreements creates focal narratives that reformers can use to highlight the need to catch up and rhetorically constrain domestic actors who oppose reforms. We illustrate this mechanism through the Chinese leaders’ counterintuitively positive statements towards the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) from 2013 to 2016. By framing the TPP as an aspiration through which China can enhance its international status, Chinese leaders were able to justify domestic economic reforms. Unlike conventional explanations, this was done without the onset of crises or actually signing the TPP. We substantiate this claim using evidence from computer-assisted text analysis of Chinese news coverage of the TPP from 2008-2018 (N = 10189) and process-tracing of the establishment of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone.

Keywords:

• Status concerns
• rhetorical entrapment
• economic reforms
• free trade agreements
• Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
• China
• Asia Pacific

Acknowledgements

We thank Pablo Barberá, Therese Anders, Brett Carter, Erin Baggott Carter, Gabrielle Cheung, Victoria Chonn Ching, Ronan Tse-min Fu, Benjamin Graham, Patrick James, David Kang, Xinru Ma, Suzie Mulesky, Shahryar Pasandideh, T.J. Pempel, Mingmin Yang, audiences at the University of Southern California’s Center for International Studies, the 2018 International Studies Association Annual Meeting, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. We also thank Yvonne Ziying Li, Shirley Xiaohang Lu, Kirby Wang, Yuni Ye, and Jocelyn Zhao for helping with the validation of our text analysis.

Disclosure statement

Saori N. Katada is currently a member of the RIPE Editorial Board. However, this manuscript was under review four months before she assumed the position. Since then, she has been recused from the review process.

Notes

1 As of June 2020, discussions of China possibly joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) have intensified again, with Premier Li Keqiang claiming in May 2020 that China continues to have an ‘positive and open attitude’ (Caixin News, 2020). These trends merit further observation.

2 An important debate in international political economy is between the inside-out paradigm of open economy politics (Lake, 2009) where domestic politics define a country’s economic policy, versus the outside-in paradigm of ‘second image reversed’ (Gourevitch 1978), analyzing how external events can heavily influence policymaking.

3 This definition of aspiration applies to risers and decliners: these countries pursue status markers either to complete their rise or prevent their decline. While their reference points are different, the observed behavior (pursuit of status markers) is the same. Future research should examine how different domains of gains or losses (due to their positions as risers or decliners) might affect the elites’ risk preferences or how much cost they are willing to pay to secure status markers. For a recent exploration, see Krickovic & Zhang (2020).

4 We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that we should conduct sentiment analysis to better validate our theoretical expectations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex Yu-Ting Lin

Alex Yu-Ting Lin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California, and a Research Fellow with the International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on status and prestige in international politics. His work has appeared in the Journal of Global Security Studies.

Saori N. Katada

Saori N. Katada is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California. She is a co-author of The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2017), Taming Japan’s Deflation (Cornell University Press, 2018), and the author of Japan’s New Regional Reality: Geoeconomic Strategy in the Asia Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2020).