Does Public Opinion Affect the Preferences of Foreign Policy Leaders? Experimental Evidence from the UK Parliament

Chu, Jonathan; Recchia, Stefano

doi:10.1086/719007

Cited by 52 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…The patterns of asymmetric polarization noted in these findings have implications for collective action and coalition-building to address environmental problems in the U.S. While political actors are reactive to changing voter preferences, either via longer-term thermostatic mechanisms (73,74) or more ephemeral updating of political behaviors (75,76), environmental governance regimes remain particularly sticky institutions. Institutionalist perspectives suggest that a substantial shift in public opinion dynamics (77), or the development of new voter coalitions (78), would be required to implement meaningful climate actions.…”

Section: Policy Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Polarization of Climate and Environmental Attitudes in the United States, 1973-2022

Smith¹,

Bognar²,

Mayer³

2022

Preprint

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Since the early 1990s, political polarization has been the largest determinant of individual-level environmental and climate change attitudes. But several patterns remain unclear: whether polarization has been largely bimodal or is rather asymmetrical, how polarization patterns have changed over time, and if these patterns are generalizable across different environmental and climate change attitudes. We harmonized four unique sets of historical pooled cross-sectional survey data from the past 50 years to investigate shifts in seven distinct measures of citizen environmental and climate change attitudes for evidence of asymmetric polarization. We find evidence of two distinct historical patterns of asymmetric polarization: first, with Republicans becoming less environmentally-minded, beginning in the early-1990s, and second, a more recent greening of Democratic environmental attitudes since the mid-2010s. These polarization patterns diverge across seven measures of environmental and climate change attitudes, and are robust against sociodemographic, period, and birth cohort factors

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Section: Policy Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Polarization of Climate and Environmental Attitudes in the United States, 1973-2022

Smith¹,

Bognar²,

Mayer³

2022

Preprint

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“…A weaker, negative version of this argument holds that public opinion constrains elite actions in cyber operations (Schulzke, 2018). Recent work in cognate research areas suggests a stronger claim that officials are influenced directly by public opinion when considering the use of force (Chu and Recchia, 2022;Lin-Greenberg, 2021;Tomz et al, 2020). Gomez and Whyte (2021: 124) report that US officials have said during wargames that the severity of a initial response to a cyberattack would depend on the reaction of the American public.…”

Section: Why Study Public Opinion About Cyber Operationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent research suggests that abstract manipulations may be equivalent to particular ones (Brutger et al, 2022). Nevertheless, given the emphasis that scholars have placed on actor-specific characteristics and on perceptions of international rivals (Gomez, 2019; Schulzke, 2018), we believe that testing whether there is variation among an attacker's origin country is appropriate. One particular origin country that studies have overlooked, moreover, is the USA itself.…”

Section: Why Public Opinion Matters For Cyber Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Hitting back or holding back in cyberspace: Experimental evidence regarding Americans’ responses to cyberattacks

Leal

Musgrave

2022

Conflict Management and Peace Science

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Theorists offer many predictions about how Americans will respond to significant cyberattacks but systematic evaluations of American public opinion regarding these issues remain rare. We present results from a conjoint experiment and find that the public supports retaliation-in-kind against cyberattacks but is willing to escalate as the economic damage and human casualties of a hypothetical attack mount. Respondents support harsher retaliation after attacks carried out by terrorist groups or state agencies rather than those conducted by individuals or civilian hackers. Finally, the dynamics of the public's judgment regarding responses to a domestic or an international cyber attack are broadly similar.

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“…First, public attitudes represent microfoundations for how those drivers end up impacting public policy, especially when attitudes are polarized [13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Second, public attitudes can influence how elites view important policy issues surrounding AI-enabled autonomous systems [20][21][22], thus influencing policymaking. Third, for salient AI-enabled autonomous systems such as autonomous vehicles, public acceptance will determine whether the technology succeeds in the marketplace [23][24][25][26][27].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and public support for autonomous technologies—Did the pandemic catalyze a world of robots?

et al. 2022

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By introducing a novel risk to human interaction, COVID-19 may have galvanized interest in uses of artificial intelligence (AI). But was the pandemic a large enough catalyst to change public attitudes about the costs and benefits of autonomous systems whose operations increasingly rely on AI? To answer this question, we use a preregistered research design that exploits variation across the 2018 and 2020 waves of the CCES/CES, a nationally representative survey of adults in the United States. We compare support for autonomous cars, autonomous surgeries, weapons, and cyber defense pre- and post-the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that, despite the incentives created by COVID-19, the pandemic did not increase support for most of these technologies, except in the case of autonomous surgery among those who know someone who died of COVID-19. The results hold even when controlling for a variety of relevant political and demographic factors. The pandemic did little to push potential autonomous vehicle users to support adoption. Further, American concerns about autonomous weapons, including cyber defense, remain sticky and perhaps exacerbated over the last two years. These findings suggest that the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and the adoption of many of these systems is far more nuanced and complex than headlines may suggest.

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Does Public Opinion Affect the Preferences of Foreign Policy Leaders? Experimental Evidence from the UK Parliament

Cited by 52 publications

References 13 publications

Polarization of Climate and Environmental Attitudes in the United States, 1973-2022

Polarization of Climate and Environmental Attitudes in the United States, 1973-2022

Hitting back or holding back in cyberspace: Experimental evidence regarding Americans’ responses to cyberattacks

COVID-19 and public support for autonomous technologies—Did the pandemic catalyze a world of robots?

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