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How does information affect foreign policy? This dissertation explores the political dynamic of disclosure of classified information about national security and defense policy and its effects on foreign policymaking.In Chapter 1, I introduce the subsequent chapters by discussing their research questions.Chapter 2 confirms the prevalence of disclosure of classified information by anonymous sources in foreign policy reporting; 43.8 percent of all quotes in a corpus of news articles about drone strikes are attributed to anonymous individuals. Chapter 2 also shows that most of anonymously-sourced information is either neutral or supportive of the government's policies.Chapter 3 analyzes the puzzling credibility of disclosure of pro-government classified information (a "helpful leak"). I argue that credibility of unverifiable information leaked by anonymous sources stems from the perception that they may be leakers who reveal the truth and from the government's stronger incentive to punish leakers of true than false information. The mechanism hinges on a trade-off that the government faces between allowing positive information to leak irrespective of its veracity and the need to assert bureaucratic control by prosecuting unauthorized disclosures. I show that this trade-off causes the government to prosecute some, but not all, truthful leaks of pro-government information.Chapter 4 illustrates a dilemma for the government when punishing bureaucrats who disclose politically detrimental and classified information ("harmful leaks"). I argue the government's dilemma over bureaucratic and political incentives drives the government's sporadic punishment of harmful leaks. Although criminal punishment of harmful leakers establishes bureaucratic discipline, it deprives the government of maintaining plausible deniability of the damaging information. I show that this tradeoff between internal credibility and external credibility results in limited enforcement of secrecy.Chapter 5 examines a political consequence of harmful leaks. I argue that these harmful leakers can effect a change in public opinion about foreign policy when they reveal their own identity. The revelation strengthens the public's belief in the credibility of anti-government information provided by the leaker. This renders the government's policy proposal unpopular among the public.I conclude in Chapter 6.

Does treatment abstraction affect treatment effects in International Relations survey experiments in countries outside of the US? We assess whether treatment effects are conditional on the anonymity of country actors among respondents in Brazil, China, Sweden, Japan, and Ukraine. We examine whether the effects of the United Nations' approval of military force and regime type of the target country on support for war are moderated by respondents' compliance with our abstraction encouragement. We find that around 20% of the respondents across all samples think of specific countries and do not comply with our abstraction encouragement. However, we fail to find evidence of a change in the average treatment effects by non-compliance, implying that the treatment effects are not likely to be conditional on respondents' compliance (thinking of specific cases) or schema inconsistency (thinking of specific cases that are implausible given the context). At the same time, we find that treatment inconsistency (thinking of specific cases that are inconsistent with the assigned treatments) can affect the main treatment effects.

Recent research has shown that British and American respondents are less willing to advocate the use of force against fellow democracies than against non-democracies (TOMZ and WEEKS, 2013). These findings may contribute to understandings of the 'democratic bias'—unwillingness to attack democracies. A critical next step is assessing whether publics beyond the US and the UK have similar attitudes. To address the scope of popular preferences for peace with democracies, we conduct survey experiments using online panels in two emerging powers, one a democracy (Brazil) and one a non-democracy (China). Our survey randomly varies the hypothetical target's regime type and authorization by the United Nations for military action. We find that Brazilian respondents are significantly less likely to support the use of force against a democracy than a non-democracy. However, after controlling for UN approval, Chinese respondents do not appear to distinguish between democracies and non-democracies when considering whether force is justified. In addition, for both countries, UN approval has a larger effect than democracy on public support for the use of force.

Right after the 1936 election the Gallup Poll began probing party identification. From then on until 1952, when the National Election Studies entered the field, nearly 200 surveys produced measurements of partisanship in the American electorate. We exploit this largely unexplored data set to examine the partisan transformation commonly called the New Deal Realignment in real time. It turns out that it was not until the late 1940s that the Democratic Party secured an enduring hold on the American electorate. The New Deal and the Depression had less to do with this change than did World War II and the postwar prosperity. The lead cohort of the Democratic surge in party identification was the generation that came of age during the 1940s, not the 1930s. The findings suggest that a historic crisis or a new policy program may not be enough to realign partisanship in the electorate but that it takes the success of the ascendant party in mastering historic crises.

We introduce the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive) Database, a collection of over 3 million documents about state diplomacy. Substantively, our database focusses on the USA and provides opportunities to analyze previously classified (or publicly unavailable) corpora of internal government documents which include the raw—often full—text of those documents. We also provide within-country diplomatic records for the USA, UK, and Brazil. The full span of the data is 1620–2013, but it is mainly from the twentieth century. Our database allows scholars to view text and associated statistics online and to download and view customized datasets via an application programming interface. We provide extensive metadata about the documents, including the countries and persons they mention, and their topics and classification levels. The metadata includes information we extracted with domain-specific, customized natural language processing tools. To demonstrate the potential of this data, we use it to design and validate a new index for "country importance" in the context of US foreign policy priorities.