Audience Beliefs and International Organization Legitimacy

Abstract

Recent work suggests that multilateral security institutions, such as the UN Security Council, can influence foreign policy through public opinion. According to this view, authorization can increase public support for foreign policy, freeing domestic constraints. Governments that feel constrained by public opinion may thus alter their foreign policies to garner external authorization. These claims challenge traditional realist views about the role of international organizations in security affairs, which tend to focus on direct enforcement mechanisms and neglect indirect channels of influence. To examine these claims, this article investigates the first link in this causal chain—the effect of institutional statements on public opinion. Strategic information arguments, as opposed to arguments about the symbolic legitimacy of specific organizations or the procedural importance of consultation, posit that the effect of institutional statements on public opinion is conditional on public perceptions of member states' interests. This article tests this conditional relationship in the context of changes in presidential approval surrounding military disputes, using a measure of preference distance between the United States and veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council. Findings indicate that short-term changes in presidential approval surrounding the onset of military disputes in the United States between 1946 and 2001 have been significantly larger when accompanied by a positive resolution for a Security Council that is more distant in terms of foreign policy preferences. The article also discusses polling data during the 1990s and 2000s that support the strategic information perspective.

Recognition Matters!

“…Even scholarship on the role of the UN in international politics tends to implicitly overlook the impact of the UNGA. The large literature that examines the impact of UN decisions tends to focus on the decisions of the UNSC rather than of the UNGA (see, e.g., T. L. Chapman 2007Chapman , 2009Thompson 2006;Voeten 2005). Those studies that are concerned with the UNGA usually focus on the information about states' preferences conveyed by UNGA votes rather than on the impact of UNGA decisions themselves (see, e.g., Gartzke 1998;Voeten 2000).…”

“…First, in contrast to the perception of an irrelevant UNGA, we show that the UNGA powerfully shapes the attitudes of publics involved in struggles for self-determination. A growing body of research persuasively demonstrates that the UNSC can influence domestic public opinion toward the use of force (T. L. Chapman 2007Chapman , 2009T. L. Chapman and Reiter 2004;Thompson 2006;Voeten 2005).…”

All Policies Are Glocal: International Environmental Policy Making with Strategic Subnational Governments

“…18 Morrow 1991Schneider and Weitsman 1996;Smith and Hayes 1997. 19 Bechtel and Tosun 2009;Chapman 2009;Voeten andBrewer 2006. 20 Milner andRosendorff 1997.…”

International Organizations as Policy Advisors

“…The economic literature on information transmission between a principal and an agent finds that the information content of messages declines as interests become 7+ Barnett and Finnemore 2004+ 8+ Fearon 1995+ 9+ See Sartori 2005andKydd 2005+ 10+ See Vreeland 2003;Dreher and Vaubel 2004;andWoods 2006+ 11+ See Dai 2005;Fang 2008;and Chapman 2009+ more conflictual+ 12 A related literature on third-party mediation in political science finds that biased mediators are more effective than unbiased ones, because biased mediators can credibly convey information that is contrary to their own biases+ 13 Similarly, a literature in economics explores the conditions under which governments can credibly convince voters that the state of the world justifies policy change, and concludes that such arguments are credible only when they run counter to the government's known policy preferences+ 14 All of this literature suggests that persuasion should be difficult for IOs because conflicts of interest frequently arise between IOs and the governments that they attempt to coordinate+ Moreover, the problem may be intractable in crisis situations because in those cases IOs have to convince skeptical governments to heed their alarms, in spite of the fact that they have incentives to send warnings even in good times+ In other words, in order for IOs to be effective information providers, they need to gain trust even when their information seems to confirm their biases+ Under what circumstances can persuasion succeed in spite of the fact that governments know that international institutions have different objectives than they do?…”