Diverting Domestic Turmoil

Abstract

When faced with intense domestic turmoil, governments may strategically engage in foreign interactions to divert the public's attention away from pressing domestic issues. I test this hypothesis for a globally representative sample of 190 countries, at the monthly level, over the years 1997-2014. Using textual data on media-reported events retrieved from the GDELT database, I find robust evidence that governments resort to diversionary tactics in times of domestic turmoil and that such diversion takes the form of verbally aggressive foreign interactions, typically targeted at 'weak' countries and countries closely linked along religious, linguistic and geographic dimensions. Strategically important trade partners are unlikely to be victimized. These findings suggest that diversionary foreign policy is, in fact, systematically practised by governments as a strategic tool, and that such diversion is exercised in a manner that may not lead to large scale costs or risks of retaliation.

Public sentiment towards economic sanctions in the Russia–Ukraine war

“…Hence, information about this war will diverge in a variety of independent sources, which are more likely to form the heterogeneous beliefs of the public. Although public sentiment lies on the centric literature of economics with issues such as domestic violence (Amarasinghe, 2022), political views (Bursztyn et al, 2020) are different, and an understanding of the information‐gathering behaviour by individuals about the Russia–Ukraine war, particularly in the era of Internet, has not been answered yet. Given the growing momentum of literature in quantifying the sentiment based on newspapers (Aguilar et al, 2021; Hoang et al, 2022) and books (Saltzman & Yung, 2018), our study sheds a new light on the textual analysis approach by using social media posts regarding the recent war.…”

Diversionary Politics and Territorial Disputes: Evidence from Turkish Airspace Incursions

“…"activate ingroup identity […] [and] improve their ratings without incurring the substantial risks of militarized interstate disputes" (Carter 2020:165; see also Amarasinghe 2020).…”