The Effects of Autocratic Characteristics on Public Opinion toward Democracy Promotion Policies: A Conjoint Analysis

Abstract

Does the level of public support for democracy promotion policies vary with the characteristics of potential autocratic targets? We conduct an experimental study with a conjoint design on a sample of 1,464 US citizens that manipulates several core characteristics of potential autocratic targets. We then compare citizens’ preferences with the cross-national evidence testing the determinants of democracy promotion success. We find that respondents support the use of coercive measures (military action and sanctions) precisely in contexts where, according to comparative research, these instruments are unlikely to foster democratization: oil-rich, exclusionary, personalistic regimes with no elections, and with no ties to the United States. Conversely, the characteristics driving public support for the use of democracy aid are more consistent with those favoring effectiveness: autocratic regimes with multi-party elections and with links to the United States. These findings have important policy implications by contributing to understand the micro-foundations of target selection.

The Meddling American Voter? How Norms, Interests, and Great Power Rivalries Affect U.S. Public Support for Partisan Electoral Interventions Abroad

“…Indeed, one common criticism of the covert U.S. actions against Chile in the 1970s highlighted that Chilean democracy was venerable. Recent experimental evidence suggests that Americans favor more aggressive forms of democracy promotion (including military interventions and economic sanctions) against older authoritarian regimes compared to younger ones (Escribà-Folch, Muradova, and Rodon 2021), supporting this intuition that regime age may matter.…”

“…The field has recently turned toward experimental methods (Bush and Prather 2020; Tomz and Weeks 2020), a turn we follow. We chose to explore American voters’ opinions regarding foreign electoral interventions with several vignettes rather than alternative approaches, such as the conjoint experimental approaches that other scholars have recently employed in the foreign policy literature (Escribà-Folch, Muradova, and Rodon 2021; Leal and Musgrave 2022). Given the indeterminacy of the literature, the resources that conjoint experiments require, and the fact that a conjoint can only explore one type of scenario at a time (even though they can explore many different aspects within that scenario), we believed that a series of related but distinct scenarios would be more productive at this stage of the literature’s development.…”

“…Challengers in competitive authoritarian states frequently face rigged elections in which the incumbents mobilize significant structural or resource advantages to remain in power (Levitsky and Way 2002). Research has found heightened U.S. public support for democracy promotion in competitive authoritarian regimes (Escribà-Folch, Muradova, and Rodon 2021). Representatives of the U.S. government have often justified their democracy promotion actions in such contexts in terms of working to “level the playing field” (e.g.…”

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

“…This experimental technique allows researchers to simultaneously vary many factors (Hainmueller et al, 2014;Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2015). The approach is increasingly popular in foreign policy analysis (Clary and Siddiqui, 2021;Escribà-Folch et al, 2021;Kohama et al, 2022). Conjoint designs return useful information even when respondents are asked to complete many tasks or tasks with many different features (Bansak et al, 2018(Bansak et al, , 2019.…”

“…By collecting data on the dependent variables in the invariant training vignettes, we also collected information to allow us to control for different respondents’ baseline levels of severity in an approach inspired by the anchoring vignette method of King and Wand (2007), since all respondents took the same test. Finally, the training vignette demonstrates some face validity of our approach.…”