Cheap talk or policy lock? Nationalist frames and sympathetic audience costs in international territorial disputes

ABSTRACT

Failure by democratic states to resolve protracted international territorial disputes has often been traced to domestic politics. In seeking advantages at the bargaining table and to limit vulnerability versus domestic challengers, democratic leaders may assert hardline territorial demands to mobilize support from sympathetic publics. By staking their political credibility on such claims, they may become locked into extreme policy positions which render compromise untenable. To what extent, however, does expressed support by sympathetic publics actually imply audience costs for reneging? This paper argues that sympathetic publics’ demands for policy follow-through on revisionist territorial claims depend upon how they are framed. Building on the existing audience cost literature, it demonstrates that tangibly salient frames highlighting national security threats are more likely to consistently move sympathetic publics to demand policy redress than intangibly salient frames asserting national rights to defend heritage or cross-border kin. It does so using comparative survey experiments in Israel and Serbia – two democratic states with disputed international boundaries and strong domestic nationalist sentiment, but whose geopolitical contexts are dissimilarly conducive to territorial revisionism. Results contribute to a refined understanding of how domestic attitudes toward nationalist claims impact international conflict processes.

KEYWORDS:

• audience costs
• framing
• Israel
• issue salience
• territorial disputes
• Serbia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2016 Association of Israel Studies conference and the 2016 International Studies Association conference. The author thanks in particular Jonathan Fox, Hillel Frisch, Ifat Maoz, Jennifer Mitzen, Jonathan Rynhold, and the journal editors and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and critical suggestions given during the development of this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Variation between democratic publics regarding the use of force also supports these inferences, with publics who believe in ‘retributive justice’ to redress wrongdoing or who are more ‘vengeful’ being significantly more likely to support conflict militarization (Liberman, 2013; Stein, 2015).

2 These population statistics were drawn from the 2011 Serbian and 2008 Israeli population censuses (see http://popis2011.stat.rs/?lang=en and http://www.cbs.gov.il/census/census/pnimi_page_e.html?id_topic=11).

3 Although students account for a relatively large percentage of both experiments’ subject pools, mean student opinions were not significantly different from the rest of either sample for any treatment group.

4 Regarding the positive replicability of non-representative versus representative population-based survey experiments, see Mullinix, Leeper, Druckman, and Freese (2015).

5 Regarding the appropriateness of linear models in this context versus parametric non-linear measures, see Angrist and Pischke (2009, p. 197).

6 Limited participation by less educated voters in both experiments may have systematically biased the results toward observing weaker-than-commonly-expected influence from intangibly salient framings on demands for policy follow-through by sympathetic publics. This, however, cannot adequately explain why sympathetic participants more consistently demanded policy follow-through when presented with heritage versus kin frames.

 

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project was generously provided by the Dispute Resolution Research Center of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.