Objective Why do some Americans trust the World Health Organization (WHO) during the COVID‐19 pandemic, but others do not? To date, there has been no examination of trust in the WHO. Yet the global nature of the pandemic necessitates expanding our scholarship to international health organizations. We test the effects of partisanship, ideology, the cooperative internationalist foreign policy orientation, and nationalism on trust in the WHO and subsequently examine how this trust relates to preventive health behavior. Methods Multivariate analysis of original survey data from a representative sample of Americans. Results Democrats, liberals, and those with a strong cooperative internationalist foreign policy orientation are more likely to trust the WHO's competence and integrity in responding to the COVID‐19 pandemic while Republicans, conservatives, and nationalists are less likely. Even though trust in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has the largest impact on preventive health behaviors, trust in the competence of the WHO is also an important factor. These results remain robust after controlling for other covariates. Conclusion Pandemic politics in the United States is polarized along party and ideological lines. However, our results show that a fuller understanding Americans’ political trust and health behaviors during COVID‐19 requires taking the international dimensions of the pandemic seriously.

Linguistic style refers to how individuals put their words together. This study offers the first application of linguistic style analysis to international multilateral diplomatic negotiations. We hypothesize that agreement in multilateral negotiations is characterized by convergence of diplomats’ linguistic styles whereas disagreement associates with divergence of linguistic styles. We test our claim using original data from the plenary sessions of the Constitutional Convention on the Future of the European Union (2002–2003). We evaluate linguistic style convergence by linguistic style matching (LSM) using the text analysis program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). We find that linguistic style convergence among negotiators was higher in discussions on the legal personality of the European Union that ended with agreement and lower in negotiations on the definition of qualified majority voting that ended with disagreement. This study facilitates a richer understanding of how negotiators’ language use influences negotiation dynamics in international multilateral diplomacy and encourages negotiation and conflict resolution scholars and practitioners to pay attention to how diplomats express their policy position in addition to what they say.

Common knowledge, also called intersubjectivity, is a core theme in the study of international cooperation and diplomacy. Yet International Relations (IR) lacks a method to systematically measure the degree of common knowledge. Drawing from research in computational linguistics, psychology, and communication, we introduce latent semantic analysis (LSA) to measure common knowledge in specific communicative exchanges between actors. We argue that the extent to which speaking partners use words in the same way and get in synch linguistically can be used to measure the degree of common knowledge, and this can be measured by the LSA method. We outline several ways LSA can be valuable to IR scholars and provide an empirical illustration of using this method in the case of Bretton Woods negotiations. The LSA method promises to help IR scholars seize the research opportunities offered by the digital age and build a bridge between qualitative and quantitative methods.

The negative impact of populist anti-aid rhetoric on public opinion has been based on anecdotal reports to date. Here, we take a systematic and empirical look at this inquiry. We hypothesize that even though populist rhetoric decreases support for foreign development aid in donor publics, this effect is conditioned by individuals’ preexisting beliefs about populist leaders. Using data from original survey experiments conducted with representative samples of American and British adults, we find that exposure to different variants of populist frames decreases individuals’ willingness to support their government providing development aid through an international organization. However, this effect is moderated by whether people think populist leaders stand up for the little guy or scapegoat out-groups. Connecting foreign aid and populism literatures, our results suggest that the future of global development might not be as bleak as previously feared in the age of populism.

The use of negative visual imagery of the poor to conjure feelings of pity, guilt, and empathy (also called “poverty porn”) is premised on an emotional mechanism that is supposed to elicit compassion and giving behavior, and yet the very emotional nature of the response to this kind of negative imagery can have the exact opposite effect by evoking compassion fatigue and psychological numbing. Our study interrogates this puzzle. Leveraging original data from survey experiments, we show that exposure to negative and personalized images of aid recipients in despair actually increases support for foreign development aid. In contrast, descriptive statistical information about global poverty moves people very little, or not at all. Our findings have implications for understanding the role imagery plays in shaping public opinion on foreign aid and for development communication. This study builds a bridge between research on foreign aid and humanitarian communication.