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Abstract
The role of source cue effects in transnational persuasion (in which a foreign actor attempts to persuade an audience in another jurisdiction) is largely unexplored in both the political communication and international relations literatures. This article investigates transnational source cue effects using two source cue experiments that test the persuasiveness of German chancellor Angela Merkel and UK prime minister David Cameron in a Canadian context. The experiments were embedded in an online survey administered to student participants at a Canadian university in January 2011. As might be expected, the foreign leaders exerted positive source cue effects among participants who held positive impressions of the leaders and backlash effects among those who held strongly negative impressions. These effects, however, were moderated by participants’ level of political awareness, with the largest effects observed among participants who had an intermediate level of awareness. It is argued that this nonlinear moderating effect can be attributed to the countervailing effects of attitude stability and source familiarity (both of which are associated with political awareness) on individuals’ susceptibility to source cue effects. Finally, cueing David Cameron had approximately equivalent source cue effects on participants’ attitudes towards government spending on foreign aid and welfare, suggesting that foreign leaders may be able to move opinion on domestic as well as on foreign policy issues. Overall, these results validate existing models of source cue effects in a transnational context and point to the scope and limitations of national leaders’ ability to engage in direct public diplomacy.
[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resources: Appendix: Question Wordings for Survey Experiments; Table A1: Balance Tests for Afghanistan and Cameron Cue Experiments; and Table A2: Underlying Salience of Domestic and Foreign Policy Spending.]
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Fred Cutler, Benjamin Goldsmith, Alan Jacobs, Brian Job, Richard Price, and Paul Quirk for comments on earlier versions of this article. This research was supported by the University of British Columbia's Security and Defence Forum (SDF) Program.
Notes
1. Two exceptions are CitationJohnston (2001) and CitationBusby (2010), though the former is an exclusively theoretical treatment and the latter focuses on the influence of domestic message sources on American attitudes towards transnational policies, rather than on transnational persuasion, which is the focus of this article.
2. See “Freedom in the World 2012: The Arab Uprisings and Their Global Repercussions” (http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2012).
3. Admittedly, these efforts can backfire if the president in question is deeply unpopular (CitationSigelman & Sigelman, 1981), and the literature is decidedly skeptical about the ability of presidents to move the U.S. public in a politically advantageous direction through the use of major speeches (see CitationEdwards, 2009, for example).
4. While the credibility of a message source has multiple effects on the cognitive processing of a persuasive message—only one of which is the heuristic effect (CitationBrinol & Petty, 2009; CitationMondak, 1990)—and scholars have identified a variety of source-related heuristics (CitationLau & Redlawsk, 2001), a major effect of source cues in a political context does appear to involve the use of general opinion or affect towards the source as a cognitive short-cut.
5. CitationDelli-Carpini and Keeter (1996), for example, find high correlations between the 10 subsets of political knowledge they examine, including familiarity with specific political figures and the policy positions of political parties.
6. As CitationMcGuire (1968, p. 1141) notes, the reception stage in his simplified model involves both attention to and comprehension of the message.
7. Other issue characteristics, such as issue complexity (CitationCoan et al., 2008), may influence the likelihood of observing source cue effects, but since this applies to all types of sources and is not specific to foreign sources, this type of characteristic is not directly relevant to my objectives here and is therefore left to future research.
8. This phenomenon results from the same logic that underpins CitationLupia and McCubbins's (1998) argument that sources will be more credible when they argue against their self-interest or when they take counterintuitive positions.
9. Audience members with a negative image of the leader, however, are unlikely to perceive him or her as credible in any case, so increased perceived self-interest is unlikely to change the magnitude of a potential negative source cue effect. This being the case, if there is any difference in the magnitude of negative source cue effects across issues, one should expect a greater effect for the less salient foreign policy issue.
10. Random assignment in both this experiment and in Experiment 2 was conducted automatically using the randomization functions available on Fluidsurveys.com, the Web-survey host used to field the survey. Balance tests on a range of demographic variables for both experiments indicated successful randomization.
11. Figures showing predicted effects for neutral or hostile audiences are available upon request. The weak negative source cue effect predicted for individuals with an extremely negative impression of Merkel is likely the result of a floor effect, since participants in this sample were overwhelmingly opposed to the extension of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, with only 15% supporting (“strongly” or “somewhat”) the position attributed to Merkel.