Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis research note investigates whether external military crises, short of war, in the neighbourhood of the European Union (EU) affects attitudes toward the EU. Specifically, I explore whether the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 fostered higher levels of trust in the EU and support for deeper integration among European citizens. Methodologically, I exploit the coincidental timing of the Russian annexation of Crimea on 18 March, 2014 with the fieldwork of the Eurobarometer survey (81.2) conducted in the spring of that year. The quasi‐experimental evidence establishes that European citizens who were surveyed after the Russian annexation became more trusting of the EU and presented a greater willingness for further European integration, particularly so among EU‐15 members. Moreover, the treatment effects were strongly moderated by individuals' education levels, with the intervention exerting its greatest effect among the higher educated.

Abstract
This paper scrutinizes the effect of social media use on institutional trust in the European Union (EU) among European citizens. Fixed-effects regression models on data from the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2019, the year of the most recent European Parliament (EP) elections, demonstrate that higher social media use is associated with lower trust in the EU. More importantly, social media usage habits exert particularly detrimental effects in regions with wider and faster internet connections. In such high-information environments, those who more frequently use online social networks, tend to trust those networks, and receive information on EU affairs from these networks have less faith in the EU compared to those in regions with lower-quality internet access. In contrast, in regions with lower broadband access, receiving EU information from social media fosters political trust.

AbstractThis paper scrutinizes the role of the principal policy objective of military intervention in conditioning citizen attitudes for the use of force. Extending the scope of analysis beyond the independent effects, it next assesses how the effects of two core variables of intervention, namely international organizations' approval of the operation and the regime type of the target country, vary for interventions with differing mandates. The results of the conjoint experiment in two dissimilar cases, the US and Turkey, show that despite substantial changes in relative support for different types of operations, policy objective is still a highly potent determinant of individual attitudes. The results also concur that compared to foreign policy restraint and humanitarian missions, individuals are more sensitive to international organizations' endorsements of the use of force for peace and internal political change operations. Finally, individuals are significantly disapproving of operations that seek internal political changes in democratic targets, though in contrast to the democratic peace theory, for other types of interventions, they are indifferent to the regime type of the opponent.

This paper scrutinizes the role of the principal policy objective of military intervention in conditioning citizen attitudes for the use of force. Extending the scope of analysis beyond the independent effects, it next assesses how the effects of two core variables of intervention, namely international organizations' approval of the operation and the regime type of the target country, vary for interventions with differing mandates. The results of the conjoint experiment in two dissimilar cases, the US and Turkey, show that despite substantial changes in relative support for different types of operations, policy objective is still a highly potent determinant of individual attitudes. The results also concur that compared to foreign policy restraint and humanitarian missions, individuals are more sensitive to international organizations' endorsements of the use of force for peace and internal political change operations. Finally, individuals are significantly disapproving of operations that seek internal political changes in democratic targets, though in contrast to the democratic peace theory, for other types of interventions, they are indifferent to the regime type of the opponent.

This study investigates the driving forces of public endorsement of two major intergovernmental organizations—the UN and NATO. More specifically, I scrutinize the effects of two sets of independent variables on individual support for security intergovernmental organizations: respondents' subjective evaluation of the domestic economic conditions and the gap between the home country's foreign policy preferences and the mean preference within the said intergovernmental organization. For the empirical analysis, I employ cross-sectional survey data acquired from Pew Global Attitudes Surveys covering a sample of 37 countries and 10 waves spanning 2007–2017. The statistical analyses lend strong support for both hypotheses. Specifically, citizens who are dissatisfied with the national economic conditions are less likely to be in favor of intergovernmental organizations. The negative correlation between the perceptions of domestic economic performance and attitudes toward intergovernmental organizations is particularly compelling in countries that contribute more to the budget of that intergovernmental organization. Second, in countries where the foreign policy preferences converge with the other members of an intergovernmental organization, public opinion is more favorably disposed toward that intergovernmental organization.

This paper explores the diverging electoral impact of instigating high-hostility militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) on the votes shares of hawkish, right-wing and dovish, left-wing incumbents, respectively. More specifically, I propose that deploying troops electorally harms doves and benefits hawks. I test this hypothesis via two studies. Study-1 presents a macro-level analysis of an incumbent's electoral performance in a dataset covering 389 elections in 27 democratic countries between 1950 and 2010. With the objective of capturing heterogeneity of individual voting behavior at the appropriate level, Study-2 scrutinizes cross-national survey results from Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) covering 19 elections in 6 democracies. Multilevel models across both studies concur that in times of conflict, voters become significantly less supportive of dovish, left-wing incumbents and slightly more so of hawkish, right-wing ones compared to times of peace. The results also suggest that doves lose particularly substantial support from their co-partisans and ideologically left leaners.

This paper investigates the change in the Greek position from an ardent critic to an enthusiastic supporter of supranational cooperation in the Common Foreign and Security Policies of the European Union (EU) during the negotiation process (2003–2004) for the Constitutional Treaty. It proposes that the change was largely due to the imminent security threat perceived from its neighbour, Turkey. As unilateralist, confrontational responses, which had been in effect since Turkey's Cyprus intervention in 1974, had largely failed to curb the level of threats perceived from the eastern side of the Aegean, Greek policy-makers started to develop a radically new security strategy based on a cooperative and integrationist partnership with the EU.

How do citizens respond to their government's decision to accept or reject foreign assistance in the face of a natural disaster? While the increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters necessitate international cooperation for effective response, there have been numerous instances where states have declined foreign assistance offers due to reputation concerns. In this article, we focus on the domestic audience dynamics of such behavior. Drawing on experimental survey data from Turkey and India, two middle-income countries with geopolitical ambitions and recent experience in refusing foreign assistance, we find that accepting foreign assistance during natural disasters leads to higher evaluations of government performance, though this positive effect is driven by opposition voters only. Incumbent voters, conversely, solidify their support for the government regardless of its decision toward foreign assistance. The domestic political effects of government decisions in response to aid offers are largely independent of the identity of the country offering assistance.