Travel to and from the United States and Foreign Leader Approval

Abstract

A growing literature examines the motivations and outcomes of high‐level public diplomacy, the international visits of top‐level leaders. That literature looks primarily at the impact of visits from major leaders, like U.S. presidents, on their approval from voters in the host country. This article asks, instead, whether visits to and from the United States can affect the approval of the foreign leader among their voters back home. Using monthly data from the Executive Approval Project for 32 nations from 1991 to 2020, results suggest that foreign leader travel to the United States improves their approval, but neither presidential nor secretary of state visits impact foreign leader approval.

Determinants of Leader Visits: A Review and Future Directions in Scholarship

“…Unlike the U.S., interactions with other developing states demonstrate no significant influence on China's travel decisions (Li, 2015: 498-9 and 501). Cohen (2022) proposes another causal mechanism linking the status of a great power with the motivations behind state visits. According to him, meetings with the U.S. President are likely to increase the approval ratings of foreign leaders due to the perception that "the U.S. President is the most prestigious and powerful leader in the world" (Cohen, 2022: 493).…”

“…Of those studies, only Koliev and Lundgren's study investigates the motivations of other countries in visiting the U.S. Studies approaching leader visits as an independent variable are much more diverse. Despite the dominance of the U.S. (Simon and Ostrom, 1989;Brace and Hinckley, 1993;Smith, 1997;Nitsch, 2007;Goldsmith and Horiuchi, 2009;Malis and Smith, 2021;Goldsmith et al, 2021;Eichenauer et al, 2021;Cohen, 2022) and China cases (Fuchs and Klann, 2013;Lin, Yan, and Wang, 2017;Hoshiro, 2020;Chen, 2023;Stone et al, 2022), other countries such as Turkey (Kuşku-Sönmez, 2019;Tepeciklioğlu, Tepeciklioğlu, and Karabıyık, 2023), Brazil, South Africa (Mesquita andChien, 2021), Slovakia (Šandor, Gurňák, andBilka, 2023), Croatia (Peternel, and Grešš, 2021), Russia (Papageorgiou and Vieira, 2023) and Iran (Bazoobandi, Heibach, and Richter, 2023) have been investigated to understand the influence of foreign visits on trade, foreign investment, and legitimacy. Although studies taking leader visits as an independent variable do not provide global visit data of countries in question, they clearly prove the possibility of collecting data for smaller countries.…”