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The political psychology of democracy promotion, or how democracies democratically promote democracy promotion
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1
The Political Psychology of Democracy
Promotion, or How Democracies
Democratically Promote Democracy
Promotion
BY
Simon Wyn Radford
A Dissertation Submitted to the University
of Southern California Graduate School in
Partial Fulfillment for the Conferral of a
Doctor of Philosophy (POLITICAL SCIENCE
& INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS)
University of Southern California
August 2016
2
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 3
The Political Psychology of Democracy Promotion, or How Democracies
Democratically Promote Democracy Promotion 8
The Democratic Promotion Bureaucracy in the United States 12
The Democratic Personality 14
The Unstable Fable 15
Just the Facts, Please! 16
The Democratic Personality: How Personality Shapes Attraction to Democracy
Promotion and Democracy Assistance Projects 22
Abstract 22
Introduction 23
The Political Psychology Turn in International Relations 25
What Do We Mean by “Personality”? 27
Personality and Political Outcomes 31
Personality & Democracy Promotion 34
Experimental Design 34
Hypotheses 36
Experimental Results 40
Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Research 42
“Just the Facts, Please!” Or “Having an Episode”? Thematic vs. Episodic Framing in
Arguments For Democracy Promotion 59
Abstract 59
Introduction 60
U.S. Commitment to Democracy Promotion 61
Framing: Episodic vs. Thematic 63
Framing: An Experiment 69
Hypotheses 71
Results 73
Conclusions and Proposals for Further Research 75
The Unstable Fable: Framing Arguments Against Democracy Promotion 104
Abstract 104
Introduction 104
Which Frame Wins? 106
A Framing Study & Some Hypotheses 112
Hypotheses 121
Results 123
Conclusion 125
3
Acknowledgements
It is almost impossible to know where to begin in thanking people for their support
during this process. In one of my first ever seminars at USC, I was told “no one gets
out of grad school alone, alive”. Six and a half years has more than proven the
wisdom of this adage. No one bears responsibility for this dissertation but me, but
so many deserve credit in ushering me to complete it and making it far better than it
would have been without their intellectual and personal support. I have received so
much more than I have put into this process, and the accumulated debt of gratitude
can never be adequately repaid. The thanks here serve not just as an
“acknowledgement” of gratitude, but also an I.O.U. One, I fear, that I might never
adequately repay.
Let me start with those at USC who had the most direct input into making this
dissertation far better than it might have been: Robert English has been a Chair of
my dissertation committee, but most importantly he has been a mentor and a friend.
Intellectually omnivorous, the range and depth of his knowledge has been
something I can only hope to ape in my own intellectual life; Rob has also served as
a wise head, a warm encourager of projects past, present and (hopefully) future, and
a tremendous cook. Nothing I can write could reflect how his and his family’s
presence during my time at USC made me feel looked after and valued.
Gerry Munck, the Co-Chair of my committee, is responsible as much as anyone for
helping me to deepen and become more rigorous in how I think about the world. His
seminar on democratization changed the course and content of my intellectual
endeavors in a way that the title of my dissertation ably reflects! In a world with
such glib pronouncements in the world of politics, Gerry’s emphasis on the
carefulness of theory-building, the importance of tightness of fit between this and
one’s hypotheses, and then the difficulty and importance of testing these hypotheses
in the real world, served as a model as to how to transition from the loquacious
rhetorical peacocking of Cambridge supervisions to the unfinished journey which I
have set off towards skepticism and going where the evidence, rather than my
priors, leads me.
Pat James and Nick Cull bravely volunteered to fill out the rest of my committee. Pat
James is loved by pretty much all who meet him. This is with good reason. Pat is a
man of unfathomable learning with the ego so often lacking in those with none. His
love of life shows that one can be a scholar of the first rate without monkish
solipsism and jettisoning a sense of humor. It has been my honor to benefit from
such close intellectual proximity. Being an outside member on a PhD committee is of
no benefit (especially to professors with tenure long in their rearview mirror) to
those silly enough to serve on them. Nick Cull did so from the goodness of his heart.
However, far from doing the bear minimum of being a warm body in an empty, cold
seat, Nick contributed no little insight and avenues to pursue from the world of
4
Public Diplomacy. I hope that this yields future bounties as well as adding some
much-needed intellectual scaffolding to the current volume.
The metaphor that grad school is like “drinking from a firehose” is perhaps so
ubiquitous as to be hoary cliché. It is no less true for it. The USC experience has been
most exhilarating when pushed in seminars by the professors leading us to range
widely throughout the field. Nick Weller’s research design class changed my
life. Thinking “scientifically” changed radically the way that I see the world. His
words of wisdom on how academia really works, coupled with a sardonic wit loved
by all of his students, oriented how I saw myself viz-a-viz the confusing world of
political science as a discipline. USC’s loss is UC Riverside’s huge gain.
Ann Tickner’s seminar taught the limits of thinking “scientifically” and a clear-eyed
skepticism towards a discipline that she so deservedly is widely feted by, and was a
model of intellectual bravery where the field sees so much pandering.
Anthony Kammas’ seminar in political thought may have started in an
undistinguished classroom on campus, but has continued informally in backyards,
campus benches, and by barbecues and zoo animal enclosures. When outside forces
threw my work and life into a state of some confusion, Anthony’s and his family’s
generosity and love overwhelmed me and stood me right side up. Next time we
meet, I’ll provide the whisky.
Listing all the seminars that I have learned so much from would only needlessly try
the patience of the reader. I know that they are much more meaningful for those of
us taking these classes than it must be for those leading them. I only leave out
acknowledging them individually because there exists a similar gap in appreciation
of this meaning between those leading them and those reading about them in an
Acknowledgments section. That makes the author’s keen appreciation no less
profound. Thank you.
I have also learned a great deal from shadowing and assisting some wonderful
teachers. The professors who I have TA’d alongside probably didn’t know how much
they were teaching their TAs as well as their undergrads. And I didn’t have to pay
those extortionate tuition fees! Thank you to Profs Lynch, Kammas, Renteln and
others. Prof Lamy was my longest-tenured teaching mentor with two testing but
rewarding semesters in his charge, and a life-changing teaching trip to the Arctic in
his company. His generosity and guidance has been warmly appreciated and are
beyond my ability to convey.
The base of USC’s political economy, whose corresponding superstructure the
administration and upper reaches of its professoriat so often ungratefully
constitute, is the staff. The Departments of Political Science and International
Relations, as well as that of the Center for International Studies, make the place run.
The work of booking rooms, organizing TA assignments, handling tsunamis of
needless paperwork generated to justify a blizzard of administrative jobs, and
5
gently handling the egos of entitled professors and grad students so often goes
under-appreciated. Not by this grad student. Three deserve particular quick
mention here: Karen has served as an able consigliere as I negotiated library
fines; Veri has been a cheerful and tremendous advisor in light of our negotiating of
USC and UK Student Loans Company provocations; and Linda has always pointed
me in the right direction on the scent for funding that allowed for research, living
without need for taking extraordinary financial measures, and occasionally being
able to see my family. I thank them.
Cathy Ballard has been the epitome of Christian example during my time at USC. She
has met every dark moment with love and dedication. She has been a trusty advisor
in navigating the shoals of grad school life. And she has been both a friend and a
surrogate mom during my time in Los Angeles. I can’t thank her enough. And we
can’t but wish that others everywhere might learn from examples of people like
Cathy. I know that I could.
There might be no one that I have learned from more than my fellow students at
USC. We spend hours of our days at our workplaces. Largely, most of us don’t get to
choose who we spend this huge percentage of our time with. I certainly didn’t to be
sure! But, in retrospect, I couldn’t have asked for a more inspiring group of
comrades in arms. I can’t mention everyone here but that should not reflect on any
lack of love. My cup never failed to runneth over. However, it would be amiss of me
for not mentioning a few people individually:
• Dave Bridge- For spiritual, romantic, and sporting guidance without peer.
Your Dolphins still suck, though.
• Nicolas de Zamaroczy- For late nights (and some early mornings) putting the
world to rights. Sorry for always being the butt of Dave and my jokes.
Actually sorrynotsorry…
• Justin Berry- the ginger ninja. It was my honor to share a residence and to
found a computer lab with you. You deserve all good things. Thank you for
your friendship.
• Thomas Jamieson- Stop eating so much pizza! And keep sending me more
new music to listen to. Love ya, man.
• Mark Paradis- I blame you for lots of this dissertation. But credit you with
making grad school infinitely more enjoyable without your sarcastic, fellow
movie nut presence. May my Boston Bruins continue to rub your Montreal
nose in it! Also, see Dave’s note (above) about the Dolphins sucking.
• Ron Osborne- Thank you for expanding my horizons and that the Search did
not appreciate Wendell Berry as much as we all should have done. Keep
“searchin” my friend….
• Parker Hevron- Friday Night Lights, Townes van
Zandt, LBJ biographies, BBQ…. Add the Hevron family to the long list of
reasons to love the state of Texas.
6
• Fabian and Rebecca- You only earned a PhD, a tenure-track job, and a
Pulitzer Prize since I met you both. Basically, you’re welcome. To many more
years of friendship.
• Whitney and Joe- The karaoke sessions have not ended, they’ve just been
paused. You know your Bee Gees impression is on point, Whit!
• Youssef- I hope that I taught you some British tea party game. Tell the little
ones that Uncle Simon will bring some of his own teacups next time.
• Tyler- the 'other' Tay-Tay in my life...
• Comrade Knaack- for road trips, beach ceremonies, and jam sessions. It was
an honor to be one of your co-best men.
• Mickey P and Jillian- A real POIR love story! To many Irish bars in the City of
Angels and the occasional one in the Bay too.
• Jamie Simcox- A little bit of English eccentricity in the California sunshine.
Very proud of all that you’ve gone through and what you’ve achieved.
• Josh Jacobson- Honorary POIRer. The Derby, too many trivia sessions, Jim
Rome, and your floor space and blow-up mattress. You were the KC to
my Jojo.
• Juve Cortes- For being a great friend. And an unstinting encourager. Come
back to London and visit again, will you? And bring Mexican food.
• Tony & Liz- Golf? Coach and Horses? I will miss your dinner hosting skills like
crazy…
• Cynthia, Erin, Lauren… Thank you for being far too cool to have associated
with us geeky grad students and deigned to do so anyway.
• To all my other POIRers- too many to name, too much credit to adequately
bestow. I’ll miss those group outings to the beach and for amazing Asian
food!
• Phil Wilcox- Miracles do happen. You epitomize the true meaning of “fight
on”. I am lucky to have played a role in your life, and blessed that you
continue to play one in mine.
I had my Los Angeles family and my London family halfway across the world, always
ready to catch me if I were to fall and come home with my tail between my legs. It
was because of your steadfast support that I never had to.
• Peter Sebastian- You’ll always look like Rodney Bewes to me.
• Tom Kibasi- For keeping me ambitious and engaged. And for being a grown-
up while I continued being a grown-up kid. And for being Yuri Manoukin.
• Ella Fitzsimmons- a foxhole buddy par excellence. We’ll be celebrating your
PhD next!
• Louis, Liisa, Adam & Hannah, Rich, Dan, Fishburns, G-
Dogg, Bungle, Andy Andy Paterson and his better half, the Green Dot crew,
Will Bland Ahoy, and others too numerous to name: thank you for
everything.
Finally, the ultimate blame for this dissertation must rest with those who bore me:
my parents. When you know that risks you take will always be encouraged,
7
supported, and underwritten with love and support, both intellectual and financial,
by your parents and their unconditional love, it makes it far easier to close your eyes
and jump…. In this case, USC and being an impecunious grad student has proved
amongst the most happy experiences and choices of my life. And it couldn’t have
happened without you. Siblings of mine, Giorgio my nephew, brother-in-law P…. You
can’t escape me now! I hope and look forward to spending much more time hanging
out with you than I’ve managed over the last six and a half years. You may have been
far away, but you were never far from my thoughts.
I’d like to dedicate this dissertation to the love of my life, Madeleine Davies. I never
dreamed that I could, or deserved to be, loved like you love me. Let this mark the
start of a beautiful adventure together. I couldn’t be more excited about what comes
next….
8
The Political Psychology of Democracy Promotion, or How
Democracies Democratically Promote Democracy Promotion
Simon Radford
Democracy promotion is the organized effort by governments and NGOs to help
overseas states transition to democracy. Although often purposefully elided with the
more idealistic voices backing the 2003 Iraq war or the occupations of Germany and
Japan after the Second World War, academics and practitioners use “democracy
promotion” generally to refer to the programs and public diplomacy used in
government-to-government, government-to-society, or society-to-society aid aimed
at helping states democratize. Although practiced by governments and
organizations around the world, the United States government is by far the most
influential donor and advocate of democracy promotion activities globally.
There is no single author of American democracy promotion; no one wellspring
from which today’s strategy inevitably flows. Democracy promotion has been
contested, contingent, and controversial throughout its history. Those who try to
pinpoint a start date or identify “the” founding document of democracy promotion
run the risk of mistaking something muddy for something clear and easily
discernable. To unravel a knot, however, one has to start pulling on some
identifiable part of string. We might, therefore, if moved to do so, identify Kant as
the main philosophical inspiration, Woodrow Wilson as its political progenitor, and
the launch of the National Endowment for Democracy [NED], following Reagan’s
Westminster speech, as democracy promotion’s beginning, programmatically. Of
course, singling these events out suggests linearity in what might best be described
as zig-zagging, but few deny their importance as landmark events in how the United
States arrived at the form and extent of its current democracy promotion strategy.
Kant provides the liberal, universalist DNA of a teleological account of America’s
ability to bring states out of depths of authoritarianism into the sunlit uplands of
“progress”; Woodrow Wilson’s cri de coeur marked the United States’ entry into the
ideological battles of the 20
th
century on the side of democracy against rival visions
of imperialism, fascism, and communism; and Ronald Reagan’s launch of a
permanent democracy promotion infrastructure allowed programmatic path
dependence to set the democracy promotion impulse in constant action. All three of
these events might be termed “critical junctures” by political scientists: crucial
events that irrevocably altered how it was that we came to experience the present.
The Enlightenment gave democracy both a liberal hue and an individualist focus:
sovereignty no longer focused simply on the prerogatives of the state, but also the
rights of individuals to dissent from, or contribute to, the state itself. Immanuel
Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Kant and Reiss) gave theoretical flesh
to the universalist urge of the day: only by promoting a global commonwealth of
republics could world governance and perpetual peace be reached. Napoleon, the
embodiment of “the Enlightenment on horseback”, would try and instigate by the
9
bayonet what Kant did with his pen. Napoleon’s armies may have been beaten back
by anti-revolutionary Britain and the autocracies of Eastern Europe, but the idea of
individual rights took hold even in the ranks of the victors
1
. Kant’s focus on the
internal nature of the state determining its outside behavior was the forerunner to
today’s International Relations debate over the democratic peace theory: the idea
that democracies do not go to war with one another. The supposedly pacifying
combination of free trade, international institutions, and democratic government
has become known as “the Kantian triangle” in academic debate (Russett and
Oneal).
With America’s rise to global power player, and the interplay of nationalism,
imperialism, and authoritarian ideology throwing Europe into confusion, the messy
realities of balance-of-power politics were refracted through a lens that saw the
world through the Manichaeism of democracy versus dictatorship. So it was that
Woodrow Wilson pledged that America’s intervention into the First World War was
to “make the world safe for democracy”. Although denounced by E.H. Carr as the
progenitor of a soft-headed “idealism”, Wilsonianism fired the starting gun in a
debate about what type of foreign policy would characterize the United States as it
emerged as the world’s major industrial power: would it seek glorious isolation
behind the comforting moats of two great oceans? Use force only when it clearly
served the country’s material interests to do so? Or follow a missionary zeal and
newfound ability to project power and influence in order to re-shape the world
according to American values as well as interests? Wilsonian idealism was a clear-
throated rallying cry for those who sought to found international organizations,
bind peoples together through trade and commerce, and help subjects of
dictatorships throw off their shackles and take ownership in running their own
societies.
Akin to the usual boast of an impending life-changing diet, Wilson’s promise to live
up to America’s greatest ideals was observed as much in the breach as it was in
deed. American foreign policy alternated between lofty rhetorical promises and the
eschewal of utopian scheming for a realism that put American interests ahead of its
stated values. Lend-lease saw the United States pay for the “arsenal of democracy”
before entering the war, whilst the Allies held the hand of Stalin’s Red Army while
fighting Hilter’s troops. The post-war Bretton Woods settlement created an open
economic order; but Harry Dexter White faced down Keynes’ more internationalist
plan for an International Clearing Union in exchange for one that cemented
American economic hegemony with the “exorbitant privilege” of having the dollar as
the de facto dominant international reserve currency (Eichengreen).
1
For example, the Decembrist uprising in Tsarist Russia can be traced back both to
the experience of the Russian officers in metropolitan, occupied Paris and the forced
interaction and unforced communion with the formerly mysterious Russian
peasantry.
10
This bouncing between ideals and interests was thrown into even sharper relief
during the Cold War. Kennan’s idea of containment, dividing up the world into its
main industrial centers and stopping the Soviet Union from dominating a majority
of them, was militarized by Paul Nitze’s NSC-68 (Gaddis). The United States still
used the language of democracy promotion, but increasingly the main criterion for
American support was a government that was reliably anticommunist. Just as
Truman launched the Doctrine named after him in reaction to the Greek Crisis,
American support for anti-communist forces in Greece kept the country out of the
Soviet-supporting column, but also implicated Washington in indifference to human
rights at best and complicity at worst.
2
Critics of American foreign policy during the
Cold War were keen to point out the gap between what they saw as professed
American values of democracy promotion and human rights and the grubby realities
of Great Power politics. In the zero-sum world seen from Washington think tanks,
human rights were often seen as a “nice to have” rather than a sine qua non of
American statecraft. However, the power of the idealist urge and of a liberal
internationalism which saw a preference for democracy and individual rights could
be seen in both the covert nature of Washington’s deviation from these ideals and
the rhetoric deployed against the “people’s democracies” which failed these self-
same standards. A powerful Washington lobby still chided administrations for
preaching democracy and practicing cold-hearted realism. Liberals would point to
American support for Diem in Vietnam or Pinochet in Chile as moral and strategic
failings, neoconservatives would denounce President Ford for refusing to meet with
Solzhenitsyn or criticize Carter for being excessively pliant to entreaties from
Moscow. While the Cold War so often saw deals brokered with regimes of dubious
moral standing – a ragbag collection of generals, right-wing populists, tribal tough
men, and crypto-fascists – these deals with the devil were always subject to
criticism back home that they undermined America’s moral standing and
commitment to democratic values.
The turn within the Republican party away from Kissingerian realism towards a
harder ideological and military line against the Soviet Union saw a ramping up in
public diplomacy every bit as impressive as the growth in Casper Weinberger’s
military budget at the Pentagon. Rather than Wilsonianism being seen as a childish
indulgence necessary to keep the public happy as Washington hard-headedly
pursued only its “national interest”, the Reagan administration sought a
confrontation with Moscow on the sphere of ideas too. The Soviet Union was
denounced as “an Evil Empire”; paeans to free enterprise and the American way
were compared to the stultifying greyness of socialism, as Reagan saw it; and
standing in the House of Commons, Reagan issued what came to be known as his
“Westminster speech”. Quoting the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Ronald Reagan
argued that freedom was universal and inalienable. Following the speech Congress
founded and funded the National Endowment for Democracy [NED] and two party-
based organizations, the International Republican Institute [IRI] and National
2
Yanis Varoufakis recounted life under the Generals who ruled Greece in “And The
Weak Suffer What They Must?” (Varoufakis)
11
Democratic Institute [NDI] that were to work with the NED and sister parties
throughout the world. While Reagan often fell well short on his own public
commitments to individual rights and the supremacy of democratic institutions –
his critics on support for Apartheid South Africa, military incursions in Central
America, and lack of support for civil rights at home remain voluble to this day
3
–
Reagan’s speech was a necessary launching point to a bipartisan consensus and
infrastructure used to promote democracy overseas on an ongoing, programmatic
basis.
Reagan’s importance to the democracy promotion story can be seen by the NED’s
survival – and even its strengthening – through successor administrations. Brent
Scrowcroft’s foreign policy worldview bore much closer resemblance to Kissinger’s
than Paul Wolfowitz’s, but the NED’s work was endorsed both by the Bush
administration and by a bipartisan assortment of legislators in the House and
Senate. By his own admission, President George H.W. Bush often lacked “the vision
thing”, a contrast that candidate Clinton was keen to draw with his own foreign
policy prospectus. The Cold War had been won. Containment had worked, as
Gorbachev and his team of liberal reformers had dismantled the confrontational
posture of the Cold War for cooperation abroad and reform at home. The
contradictions of the Soviet regime, as Kennan had predicted, had seen the USSR
implode in a phantasmagoria of nationalisms, led by entrepreneurial apparatchiks
keen to cleave apart their own republics and assume their own presidencies;
socialist reformers; market liberals; and communist revanchists. The task of
rebuilding whole societies from the rubble of the Warsaw Pact was a boom time for
democracy promoters, from the NED to bodies such as the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] and the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development [EBRD].
The task of filling the conceptual hole in American foreign policy where containment
used to be was dubbed the “Kennan sweepstakes”. Sandy Berger’s entry for the
competition was dubbed “democratic enlargement”. The Clinton administration saw
open markets and democratic institutions as mutually reinforcing, and America’s
role as the world’s “indispensible nation” (in Madeleine Albright’s unforgettable
phrase) gave it an obligation to support the spread of both. Democratization had
proceeded in waves, with geographically proximate and culturally similar countries
proceeding with their transitions in bunches, but America had found herself
unrivalled in terms of power with the sole task of midwifing the laggards into
3
The two-dimensional view of neoconservatives as militant liberals is also
undermined by some of their own writings, most notably Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s
arguments that American support for authoritarian, non-democratic but non-
communist regimes was laudable because they were prone to evolve more easily
into liberal democracies.
12
Fukuyama’s “End of History”. Clinton’s globatopia had its critics
4
, but elite
consensus remained in favor of a democracy promotion budget funding work with
activists and civil society groups in non-democratic countries.
Where Governor Bush had criticized Clinton for his “nation-building” in the Balkans,
the Bush administration quickly launched an aggressive “freedom agenda” that
vowed to support democrats throughout the world. In speech after speech,
President Bush and his surrogates argued that there was no trade-off between
promoting democracy and protecting national security. Only “draining the swamp”
in the Middle East, removing leaders who presided over autocracies that served as
pressure cookers for terrorism, and fixing failed states would ultimately keep
Americans safe.
The Iraq war tarnished the democracy promotion brand dramatically. Authoritarian
leaders around the world joined the critics of democracy promotion in alleging that
such practices fomented chaos and, flipping the democracy promotion script, too
often served as a conspiracy to subvert the popular will. Leaders started their own
nationalist, authoritarian groups that mirrored the tactics and branding of popular
pro-democracy groups (Thomas Carothers). While advocates of democracy
promotion funding are quick to distance themselves from being too easily lumped
together with the military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the same
skepticism of intervention and “what comes next?” that President Obama
demonstrated in a recent look back at his own foreign policy thinking has arguably
also been leveled against democracy promotion programs more generally during his
tenure (Jeffrey Goldberg). While critics of democracy promotion maintain that the
price of instability is too high compared to such programs’ putative effect in steering
a state’s political trajectory towards liberal democracy, advocates of such programs
have been asked to pen studies in the hope of showing their effectiveness (Steven E.
Finkel, Anibal Perez-Linan, and Mitchell A. Seligson). Whether due to a tarnished
brand or simply a lack of fiscal headroom, budgets for democracy promotion are
currently at a low ebb, albeit still vouchsafed by a bipartisan consensus that such
efforts should be maintained.
*
The Democratic Promotion Bureaucracy
5
in the United States
Democracy promotion activities are delivered through a smorgasbord of programs
commissioned by an alphabet soup of government and non-government agencies.
6
4
The most telling critique may have been issued by Andrew Bacevich in American
Empire, although the protests over the WTO in Seattle and Genoa saw a deluge of
critiques of globalization at a general level.
5
The term is taken from the title of a report by a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
with purview in this area (Thomas O. Melia).
13
In 2014 democracy promotion projects saw funds totaling $2.4bn spent across the
globe.
7
The trend line for democracy aid is pointing up: investment in projects to
promote democracy overseas has risen from $520m in 1995 and $1.08bn in 2000 to
2014’s figure, despite the Great Recession. Non-profit democracy assistance takes
two main forms: grant-based agencies that give money to partner organizations, or
field-based organizations that deliver democracy assistance directly.
By far the largest amount spent by the U.S. government is through USAID, who
contract with both not-for-profit and for-profit partners to run activities in the field.
USAID itself does not deliver projects. Melinda A. Haring (2013) comments that
“examples of non-profit organizations that implement USAID programs include the
International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, Counterpart
International and dozens of others. For-profit contractors that specialize in
democracy and governance programs include Chemonics International, Democracy
International, Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) and many others”. Instead,
USAID funds field organizations directly. Field organizations tend to work through a
hub and spoke model, with an office in Washington D.C. usually setting overall
strategy and connected to an array of local offices which provide local knowledge
and execute projects on the ground. The field-based model has been criticized for
having large overheads and, therefore, inefficiency; together with being seen as
complicit with the sins of host governments for being allowed to work within the
country unhindered (Ibid).
A smaller amount of money is dispersed through the NED. This money is split into
two pots: money that flows directly to core groups such as the IRI, NDI, Solidarity
Center, and the Center for International Private Enterprise; and small grants
awarded to NGOs indigenous to the countries that the NED wishes to work in.
International groups also spend additional monies, such as the United Nations, the
International Institute for Democracy, and Electoral Assistance, but these funds
constitute a small amount of the United States’ overall spend on democracy
promotion.
USAID’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Strategy has long been broken
down into assisting the “core components” of democracy: civil society, rule of law,
governance, and electoral processes.
8
USAID’s “goal statement” is to “support the
establishment and consolidation of inclusive and accountable democracies to
advance freedom, dignity, and development” (USAID 14). For over 20 years, field-
6
For a non-exhaustive sample of agencies and their approaches, see
https://secure.palgrave-
journals.com/development/journal/v50/n1/full/1100329a.html [Accessed 23 June
2016]
7
All statistics used in this Introduction come from the OECD’s Creditor Reporting
System (CRS) dataset available at their website.
8
These competencies have been reassembled and rebadged into new categories to
reflect actions rather than achievements (USAID).
14
based organizations have been granted money to deliver projects under the former
four headings to support USAID’s overarching goal.
*
Increased aid for democracy promotion overseas, however, is not without
controversy; many conservatives and liberals feel uneasy about the practice. On
education, healthcare, social issues and the economy, we see a broad sorting of
views into two main ideological camps. Knowing that someone is a Democrat allows
us to guess with some accuracy their views on a whole range of topics: equally,
Republicans show less heterogeneity of opinions than in previous decades. Why
does the topic of democracy promotion elude such elegant partisan heuristics? What
persuades people to support spending on democracy promotion? Does calling
attention to the risks of democracy promotion erode support for funding such
projects? The sources of support for democracy promotion have been under-
interrogated in the political science literature. We know what people feel about
democracy promotion, but we know far less about why they feel that way.
This dissertation looks at these questions in three separate papers. The first looks at
the political psychology of “personality” and how progress on the scientific
understanding of personality has allowed political scientists to make better
predictions of attitudes to political issues, compared to the standard battery of
demographic variables so commonly used to try to elicit such insights. The paper
uses a survey of American citizens to show how personality differences affect
support for democracy promotion, both in respect of increased funding and support
for different types of democracy promotion projects. The second and third papers
outline survey experiments designed to get leverage on how democracy promotion
is framed by elites in order to persuade the mass public to back democracy
promotion initiatives. One looks at how a competitive frame of possible instability in
backing democracy overseas fares when tested alongside typical pro-democracy
rhetoric. The other looks at whether self-interested motivations for promoting
democracy fare better than those that concentrate on the benefits which flow to the
recipient country, and whether rhetorical frames that use “thematic” framing (i.e.
statistics-heavy, writing from an “objective” viewpoint, aiming to persuade with
“reason”) work more effectively than those that frame the democracy promotion
argument “episodically”, with use of individual characters and their potential fate to
garner an emotional reaction and secure consent to more funding.
*
The Democratic Personality
Five aspects of our personalities – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,
Agreeableness, and Neuroticism – have been shown to persist across time and
culture. Personality research in psychology coalesced behind this “Big Five” model
15
of personality traits during the 1990s (Mondak). Since then it has been used to
predict everything from voter choice of political parties and candidates to public
policy preferences, with more powerful predictive ability than standard
demographic models utilizing variables like gender, income and age.
This paper collects an original dataset of c.2000 American respondents and seeks to
test whether those who are low on Openness to Experience and high on
Conscientiousness and Extraversion traits are more likely to favor the promotion of
democracy abroad than those with the opposite profile. These hypotheses are borne
out in the data, as well as a negative, significant link between Agreeableness and
support for democracy promotion. As well as examining these variations in support
for democracy promotion spending in general, the paper also tests specific
hypotheses about which personality traits might be associated with different types
of democracy promotion projects. Those high in Extraversion were found to be more
likely to support projects aimed at electoral assistance.
*
The Unstable Fable
Frames, simplified representations of reality that influence the choices audiences
make, are often studied in isolation: does framing a controversial campus speaker as
exercising their “free speech”, for example, persuade more people to back him when
not presented with such a way of understanding the issue? However, framing
theorists like Dennis Chong and James Druckman have called for studies that bring
in more “competitive” framing experiments: those that look not just at common
frames that advocate for an issue but the framing counterpoints or competitive
frames often deployed on that same issue. With the media often asking both sides on
an issue to give their take, framing experiments that test how frames “compete”
with each other give a more accurate reflection of how real-life policy debates play
out. Rather than just looking at “free speech”, we can test support by also pairing it
with a frame that looks at “student welfare”, for example.
In this paper the author outlines a survey experiment that looks at common frames
for democracy promotion and sees how they fare when paired with the common
“competitive” frame that democracy promotion only fosters instability. Using a
sample of over 2,000 Americans, the paper finds that there is no change in
willingness to increase USAID’s democracy promotion budget, even when exposed
to a frame that emphasizes the possibility for instability and unintended
consequences. However, the makeup of democracy promotion budgets does see a
difference when the instability frame is entered into the mix, with rule of law
programs seeing more favor, and electoral process and governance programs seeing
a decline in popularity.
*
16
Just the Facts, Please!
Using a sample of over 2,000 Americans, this paper outlines a framing experiment
that tests arguments for democracy promotion in terms of (a) episodic appeals
using stories of individual cases versus (b) thematic arguments that tend to appeal
to “objective facts” about the upside of promotion democracy overseas. The
experiment tests four different common types of frame (as well as control frames
containing no democracy promotion information): episodic frames using the logic of
self-interest and altruism, and thematic frames with the same two frames on who
benefits..
The paper finds that appeals to self-interest [i.e. appeals to national or personal
benefit] do in fact boost support for promoting democracy overseas, which lends
credence to the theory that attaching the language of national interest might well
help sell a policy of democracy promotion overseas, compared to appeals that
simply cite the benefits to the target country. While episodic and thematic frames do
not seem to alter the public’s relative appetite to allot a bigger budget to USAID’s
democracy promotion efforts, the paper does find that episodic frames are more
likely to make respondents favor those projects that aim to construct and maintain
the rule of law, compared to the other types of projects that USAID routinely carries
out.
*
Democracy Promotion is a controversial activity. Many on the Left find it
condescending and hectoring when donor countries’ democracies themselves are in
serious need of renewal and repair. Some on the Right emphasize the sanctity of
sovereignty, the need to spend money at home first, and the power of example
rather than direct engagement. Empirical arguments for the efficacy of investment
in democracy promotion activities are not as convincing as its advocates might
hope. Theorized effects would be severely lagged at best from when investments are
made; academics who focus on democratization furiously debate the relative
importance of agency versus structure versus democratic culture, and so the
mechanisms that push states towards democratization are disputed; and “waves” of
democratization often seem to catch even close observers unawares. The concept of
democracy itself is the subject of centuries of theoretical debate and many regard it
as “essentially contested”, with no side having a monopoly on conceptual clarity.
Since the Great Recession in 2008, government budgets throughout the West have
come under huge strain. Allocations to government budgets are being cut without a
firm evidence base that doing so would create more problems than it might solve.
Democracy promoters are in a vulnerable position when it comes to justifying
historically larger budgets in historically tough times. Indeed, prominent figures in
the democracy promotion world have already complained that their budgets are
under siege (Carothers).
17
It is unsurprising, then, that USAID and other funders take pains to demonstrate the
value for money that their funding provides, commissioning academic reports on
the supposed macro-effects of investment in democracy promotion (Steven E.
Finkel, Anibal Perez-Linan, and Mitchell A. Seligson), providing project evaluations
hoping to burnish the case for their effectiveness, and collecting evidence of the
positive spillover effects of democratic governance in terms of promoting American
interests and values. However, if democracy promoters want to guard their funding
and not short-change their mission, they have to first start with an understanding of
how their audience perceives their activity and what makes them see it in such a
way. Fine sentiments and warm words help, but an intimate understanding of one’s
audience cannot be a luxury.
Attitudes towards democracy promotion are not the subject of extensive polling.
The public is rarely interrogated on less-high-profile public policy issues, with the
presumption that opinion is subject to extensive variation and is unanchored in the
immediate lived experiences of most respondents (Converse). We do know,
however, that public opinion matters when it comes to deciding foreign policy
priorities and aid budgets in particular (Milner and Tingley). Specialist
organizations, perhaps because of this, do occasionally take temperature checks on
the state of public opinion on the topic (Tures; DeBartolo etc.). Ignoring for a
moment the relative variation in the performance of pollsters on high-profile events
like elections, and what that might mean for confidence in lower-profile outfits
looking at more nuanced subjects, polling is limited by nature to only being able to
tell us how the public feels and not why they feel the way they do.
Two revolutions in political science can be harnessed to help understand what
makes the public tick with respect to their views on a topic like democracy
promotion: the strides made by political psychology in understanding the decision-
making structure of the brain; and the experimental turn in social science
methodology to test how our environment alters our perception. Political
psychology has dug into how our emotions, cognitive processes, and our genetic
endowments affect the decisions we make. Experiments have married our ability to
understand our nature with variations in how nurture and our environment might
alter our decision-making calculus. Political psychology can tell us that different
people see the world differently, while experiments can show us that changes in
how information is presented to us can change how we react to commonly evoked
prompts in the real world..
Strategic communications has also undergone something of a revolution, in that this
growth of knowledge has changed how it can best do business. Political campaigns
relentlessly segment their electorate and have generated an almost Maoist
appreciation for constant experimentation in how they address their publics.
Advertising and marketing firms A/B test batteries of messages and tweak targeted
ads to increase company bottom lines. Government agencies, and public diplomacy
aimed at internal and external audiences, have been slow to catch up. This
18
dissertation is the first piece of political science to apply the Big Five Personality
traits to democracy promotion. And, while Brancati should be applauded as the only
political scientist to use a framing study to understand whether appeals to values or
interests yield more support, this is the first dissertation to test whether types of
frame alter support and whether contending frames undermine democracy
promoters’ case for public support.
So what do we find? We now know about, or at least have started to uncover, links
between different personality types and support both for democracy promotion and
the different types of democracy promotion activities carried out by the largest
funder of such work, USAID. Political psychologists have replicated studies across
the globe showing that Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness have profound
links to our ideology or worldview. Those high in Openness, for example, are more
likely to vote for left-wing parties, whereas those high in Conscientiousness are
more apt to favor parties of the Right. It is interesting to see the importance of those
two traits to attitudes towards democracy promotion found in this study. Those
high in Openness are likely to see democracy promotion as a straightjacket to
varieties of development pathways, a high-handed lecture on the “right” way to do
things. Those high in Conscientiousness, however, respond to the idea that
dictatorships are openly flouting democratic norms. The link between turnout and
participation and those high in Extraversion is well known among political
psychologists, so it might come as no surprise to us that those high in this trait
should favor projects aimed at political parties and popular participation. The data,
however, confirms this finding clearly in the democracy promotion context.
The implications for practitioners and public policy are clear: democracy promoters
should emphasize different messages to different audiences. Those on the left
should be reassured that while people are making the same dish, they are using
homegrown recipes for doing so. American funding is being matched with partners’
thinking and doing. When seeking compliance from those on the Right, emphasizing
the importance of democracy as a global norm, and how a given state is standing in
defiance of that norm, will likely strengthen resolve to assist groups within that
state. Donors, however, and those who actively show up to events planned by
funders, are likely to be highly extrovert, focusing on popular participation, pro-
social activities like elections and developing parties, and other ways that
democracy promoters are working to bring people together. Support for the aims
and activities of democracy promoters can be maximized by knowing the rhetorical
music that stirs different souls. Tailoring messages to different audiences based on
the audiences’ personality profiles can shore up support much more effectively than
a single message that might speak past some groups.
What about the timeless battle of interests versus values? What should democracy
promoters emphasize if trying to get public support? The evidence in this study is
clear: appeals to self-interest work a whole lot better than aiming at the better
angels of our character. Messages aimed at our heads and our hearts (in political
science terms, “thematically” and “episodically”) might work equally as well, but
19
support for projects targeted at buttressing the rule of law fare better when a face
and a name is put behind them rather than statistics and studies alone. Again, the
lessons for practitioners seem evident: spell out how democracy promotion budgets
benefit America, not just those overseas. For those projects which might seem more
staid, like rule of law projects, telling a story of who benefits and what it means to
them will be the most effective strategy.
Finally, what happens when we acknowledge that all of our strategic messaging is
not going uncontested? Democracy promotion and its link to creating instability has
been widely alleged by many – from friends at home to foes with an interest in
keeping democracy promotion activities out of their own backyard. The study finds
reason to be cheerful for the democracy promotion community: either the threat of
instability does not move opinion, or the threat of such an eventuality is already
sufficiently baked into our calculus that any such argument suffers from diminishing
returns. However, an increased threat of instability does provide opportunities to
fund certain types of projects more than others. Under a cloud of uncertainty there
is a premium for projects that address the rule of law, largely at the expense of
projects seen as a luxury in such circumstances, such as governance and electoral
support.
A surprising null result might seem to be of no practical help, other than to lower
collective blood pressures, but this is not necessarily the case. There is no point
actively countering frames that are unpersuasive to begin with. Organizations have
finite bandwidths to communicate and the positive case is much better promoted
with undivided attention rather than split with time and effort spent on rebuttal.
When times seem uncertain to the public, funders might need to lean against the
wind when it comes to funding projects other than those aimed at the rule of law,
although opportunities abound for those seeking to sell the efficacy of such projects
as part of a democracy promotion program portfolio.
These three papers together make a start in answering an important question: why
do people feel the way they do about democracy promotion? We think of decision-
making as a complex interactive mechanism that combines our genetic inheritance,
our cognitive processing, and our emotional state. These papers look at how
personality shapes views on democracy promotion; how we choose between
competing ways of framing democracy promotion; and whether “objective”
thematic frames are more influential than those which baldly appeal to an emotional
connection with individuals who might be affected by our support for a policy. The
papers outline findings across all three of these dimensions of decision-making.
Political science has been enjoined to engage more with the policy community, make
more realistic models that look at how individuals actually make decisions rather
than relying on more elegant and less messy rational-choice models, and design
experiments that can more closely examine the variables being theorized as
causative rather than rely on the non-randomized and uncontrolled laboratory of
observational data. This dissertation aims to take these three challenges in hand to
20
say something of note about a democracy promotion industry that is only likely to
grow in the years ahead.
While one hopes that the contribution of this dissertation might be obvious for
academics and practitioners alike, another (perhaps bigger) hope might be that it
serves as a launching point for further research on this topic. Findings are
underlined when data replicates the results that inform it. We can have more faith in
what we know to be true when different research designs, data collection
techniques, and study pools come to similar conclusions. But with greater funding
and more time, the study here could be improved and extended in some fascinating
ways: what happens when we combine personality and framing studies? Do Open
people, for example, react with greater alacrity to episodic appeals? Do
Conscientious folk favor careful, thematic outlines of studies and academic
authorities on a topic? One could easily hypothesize both of these cases to be more
likely than not, which might allow for even more careful tailoring of democracy
promotion messaging to more granularly segmented audiences. Do people respond
differently when roused into different emotional states?
We know that individuals see the world through the lens of personality, cognitive
processes, and emotional states, and that the combination of these three elements
feedback and loop onto each other through different neural pathways. Identifying as
many combinations of these pathways, and combining them with a battery of
different frames and messages – as well as testing what messages have short-term
and which lasting effects – would optimize the fidelity to the myriad ways we
encounter the world. This would, however, demand the money, scope, abilities, and
time to carry off such a large-scale operation.
Until that time when the mantle can be taken up, these three studies will have to
suffice in shedding new light on how the public sees democracy promotion, why it
sees it the way it does, and how democracy promoters can best persuade them of
the righteousness of their cause. The studies may not be perfect, but like Winston
Churchill said about democracy as a form of government, they might be “the worst
apart from all of the other ones that have been tried”.
Bibliography
Carothers, Thomas. “Why Is the United States Shortchanging Its Commitment to
Democracy?” Washington Post Opinion 22 Dec. 2014. Web.
Converse, PE. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” Ideology and
Discontent. Ed. DE Apter. New York: Free Press, 1964. 206–61. Print.
DeBartolo, D.M. “Perceptions of US Democracy Promotion, Part Two: American
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Eichengreen, Barry J. Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the
Future of the International Monetary System. 1. paperback publ. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2012. Print.
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Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American
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and Political Psychology.
Russett, Bruce M., and John R. Oneal. Triangulating Peace: Democracy,
Interdependence, and International Organizations. New York: Norton, 2001.
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Steven E. Finkel, Anibal Perez-Linan, and Mitchell A. Seligson. Effects of U.S. Foreign
Assistance on Democracy Building: Results of a Cross-National Quantitative
Study. USAID, 2006. Web. 20 June 2016.
Thomas Carothers. “The Backlash against Democracy Promotion.” Foreign Affairs
(2006): n. pag. Web.
Thomas O. Melia. The Democracy Bureaucracy: The Infrastructure of American
Democracy Promotion. Princeton, N.J: Princeton Project on National Security,
2005. Web.
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Threat to Global Stability. London: The Bodley Head, 2016. Print.
22
The Democratic Personality: How Personality Shapes Attraction
to Democracy Promotion and Democracy Assistance Projects
9
Simon Radford
Abstract
Democrats favor increased welfare spending, Republicans want less. Democrats
have a more progressive approach to social issues whereas Republicans are more
traditional. When it comes to most major political issues, one major party tends to
line up against the other, and we can guess someone’s views on many issues simply
by asking which party they tend to support. This is not the case for democracy
promotion: the records of presidents, and the feelings of the public, divide both the
political parties and the country as a whole. Scholars argue that public opinion often
affects foreign policy decision-making (Foyle; Knecht; Milner and Tingley) – a view
affirmed by those who study democracy promotion (Brancati) and who study
foreign aid spending (Milner and Tingley) – but we do not know the source of this
puzzling disagreement about whether, and to what extent, the U.S. should promote
democracy beyond its shores. This paper argues that the study of personality in
political psychology is a fruitful place to start.
Five aspects of our personalities – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,
Agreeableness, and Neuroticism – have been shown to persist across time and
culture. Personality research in psychology coalesced behind this Big Five model of
personality traits during the 1990s (Mondak). Since then it has been used to predict
everything from voter choice of political parties and candidates to public policy
preferences, with more powerful predictive ability than standard demographic
models utilizing variables like gender, income and age.
This paper collects an original dataset of c.2000 American respondents and seeks to
examine whether those who are low on Openness to Experience and high on
Conscientiousness and Extraversion traits are more likely to favor the promotion of
democracy abroad than those with the opposite profile. These hypotheses are borne
out in the data, as well as a negative, significant link between Agreeableness and
support for democracy promotion. As well as examining these variations in support
for democracy promotion spending in general, the paper also tests specific
hypotheses about which personality traits might be associated with different types
of democracy promotion projects. The paper concludes with suggestions for further
research in this area, in particular examination of a seeming link between religious
9
I would like to thank Prof Nicolas Weller and Mark Paradis for their support in
writing this chapter: both served as incredibly useful sounding boards. Any
mistakes remain mine alone.
23
observance and support for both democracy promotion and specific types of
projects.
Introduction
Why do people disagree about democracy promotion? Some people feel that it is not
just something America can do, but a deep moral responsibility to those not lucky
enough to live in the sunlit uplands of democratic progress. However, others think
that America already does rather too much in promoting democracy overseas: there
has long been a constituency on the Left that views American democracy promotion
efforts with suspicion, equating democracy promotion to a kind of imperialistic
attitude towards countries with other political traditions; on the Right, too, we see
foreign policy realists like Kissinger and Scowcroft – and more isolationist
candidates like Buchanan and Trump – downgrade democracy promotion for other
priorities and view “nation-building” as a mistake.
Democracy promotion has, however, been a consistent part of American
presidential rhetoric. From President Wilson’s aim to “make the world safe for
democracy” to President Obama’s 2015 General Assembly speech arguing for
democracy’s ability to fulfill individuals’ potential, presidents and policymakers
have given voice to democracy being, as Amartya Sen put it, a “universal value”
(Sen). The canon of great American political speeches, from John Winthrop’s
“shining city on a hill” to Abraham Lincoln’s “last best hope of mankind”, underlined
a sense of American exceptionalism that painted a picture of the U.S. forging new
ground that the rest of the world might learn to follow. Democracy might be a
universal value, but it was the United States’ role to help tutor the world in how an
experiment in self-government might succeed beyond the shores of North America.
However, this rhetorical consistency has masked a variation in how consistently
these principles have been applied and how many resources have been dedicated to
their effort. Old debates over the likes of Mossadegh’s overthrow in Iran in the
1950s and Allende’s overthrow in Chile have sparked again in presidential primary
debates between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Neoconservative veterans of
the Bush administration, meanwhile, are threatening to support Secretary Clinton
above presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump because of the latter’s lack
of fidelity to President Bush’s “freedom agenda”. The Obama administration’s
support for General al-Sisi in Egypt, lukewarm support for the Green movement in
Iran, and official condolences upon the death of the Saudi King, has led many to
conclude that President Obama’s support for democracy fails to live up to his
rhetoric (Makhmalbaf; Dettmer; Amnesty International; Carothers, “Why Is the
United States Shortchanging Its Commitment to Democracy?”).
As well as variation in high-level strategic support for specific instances of
supporting democratic outcomes, we can also observe differences in commitment to
funding democracy promotion projects overseas. It was only the last decade of the
24
Cold War that saw American commitment to promote democracy overseas
institutionalize into a permanent political program. President Reagan’s
“Westminster speech” in 1982 argued that an infrastructure was needed to actively
foster democracy throughout the world. The Reagan administration gave a grant of
$300,000 to the American Political Foundation (itself inspired by the creation of the
German Stiftungen) that led to a report recommending the establishment of what
became the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (Goldman and Douglas 21).
The growth of official democracy assistance quickly followed. USAID started
sponsoring election observation programs, as well as projects aimed at
strengthening the rule of law and related themes. By the end of Reagan’s second
term, government-funded programs were underway in places like Chile, Paraguay
and Haiti where anti-communism could not be said to be the main animating
motivation (Carothers, In the Name of Democracy). Where Latin America started as
the locus for American democracy assistance, Asia and other regions soon followed
(Cox 184).
After the end of the Cold War, President Clinton maintained a commitment to
funding democracy promotion programs, buoyed by a burgeoning academic
literature that backed the president’s refrain that democracies did not go to war
with one another (Doyle; Cox; Russett and Oneal; Maoz and Russett). The NED and
the related National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican
Institute (IRI) continue to enjoy bipartisan support, with the United States spending
billions of dollars on democracy promotion through projects funded through the
NED and USAID,
10
targeting a variety of democracy assistance-related mechanisms.
If one removes the high-profile, special cases of Iraq and the Af-Pak policy area of
Afghanistan and Pakistan projects, USAID spent upwards of $850 million on
democracy, rights and governance projects in 2014 (Carothers, “Why Is the United
States Shortchanging Its Commitment to Democracy?”).
This permanent institutional commitment to democracy promotion, however, has
seen variation in the degree of resources put behind it. Funding has varied among
both presidential requests and congressional allocation. This is, perhaps,
unsurprising, as the split in ideological views among the elites is not confined to
them but reflects a broader disagreement among mass opinion. Public attitudes in
the United States vary substantially, with some much more likely to favor
democracy promotion while others favor a more isolationist approach. Again, these
splits persist across ideological categories and party affiliation (Program on
International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks). We have long
understood that public opinion is an important factor in understanding foreign
policy decision-making (Foyle; Knecht; Milner and Tingley), and the literature on
foreign aid supports the view that public opinion reflects levels of foreign aid across
countries (Milner and Tingley). The importance of public opinion is certainly
evident for democracy promotion too (Brancati 706).
10
Latest figures for spending can be found at http://www.usaid.gov/results-and-
data/budget-spending [Accessed July 13 2015].
25
While we know that public opinion is important, and studies on public opinion
towards democracy promotion are welcome (Tures; Program on International
Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks; Knecht), much less work has
been done on the determinants of public opinion. Why do certain people favor
democracy promotion more than others? And why do elite cues affect some parts of
public opinion much more easily than others? This paper argues that we would do
well to start our investigation at the very start of the process: the personalities of
voters themselves.
The sub-field of political psychology has been brought to bear on international
relations issues from the role of trust in forging international institutions (Rathbun)
to the effect of reputation on intrastate and interstate conflict (Tingley and Walter).
Political psychology has also given us leverage on mass political behavior, from the
influence of our social networks to how people process political information. One of
the most powerful insights in political psychology in recent years has been research
on “personality”, deep-seated traits and structures in the brain that influence how
we see the world and combine with our cognitive processes and environment to
explain our actions and choices.
Psychologists have cohered around a model of personality called “The Big Five”: five
personality traits that have proved to be stable across time and culture. Using this
model, researchers have yielded insights into party voting (Barbaranelli et al.), why
certain people participate in elections (Gallego and Oberski), and attitudes towards
economic and social policy topics (Gerber et al.).
This article starts by looking at political psychology’s contribution to recent IR
scholarship before explaining what political scientists and psychologists mean by
“personality”; looks at how personality has been an important explanatory variable
in predicting variance on a host of different political outcomes; and covers the
details of a survey experiment that looks at respondents’ personalities and tests
hypotheses about how specific personality traits might correlate with both an
overall support for increased spending on democracy promotion, and support for
specific democracy assistance projects. It concludes with specific proposals for
further research in this direction.
The Political Psychology Turn in International Relations
Political psychology has emerged just as the analytical usefulness of two different
traditions has waned: rational choice models, and levels of analysis. The prominence
of game theory and rational choice modeling in the 1990s was greeted with a flurry
of claim and counter-claim from the leading lights of international relations and
political science. Prominent scholars of American politics called the emergence of
rational choice theory a “pathology” (Green and Shapiro) while one of leading lights
of international relations theory asked whether “rat choice” should be associated
26
with “rigor” or “rigor mortis” (Walt). The debate within political science paralleled a
similar one within economics, where mathematically dense but empirically
untestable models were sprouting in the leading journals. Elegance of form was
quickly proving more alluring than models that lent themselves to real-world
application. Studies based on hypothesis testing using aggregate macro-data were
being rejected if authors could not show “micro-foundations” based on individual-
level rationalist models. Neo-classical economics on steroids was the order of the
day.
Even before the Great Recession, economics had started to incorporate more life-
like modeling of individual decision-making through the behavioral economics
revolution. Post-2008 saw the old way of things besieged by those who blamed it in
part for the blind spot that allowed such an economic disaster to happen. Scholars
and journalists spoke of “irrational exuberance”, students and academics
complained of the “autism” of neoclassical theory, and the Keynesian idea of “animal
spirits” went from being seen as a literary flourish to having Nobel Prize winners
dedicating books to its study (Akerlof and Shiller).
So too, across the social sciences, academics have been keen to find insights into
real-life decision-making mechanisms in order to make better models. To do so they
have found rich seams of extant research to build upon. Political psychology has
spanned intellectual inquiry within international relations, from polyheuristic
theory (Mintz and DeRouen) to perception and misperception (Jervis) and
evolutional biological reasons for aggression (McDermott, Fowler, and Smirnov).
Five or six decades ago, when political psychology and international relations [IR]
was in its infancy, psychologists often used concepts without regard to specific
foreign policy contexts. As Jack Levy explains in a review essay which looks at the
sweep of political psychology’s influence on the study of IR: “International relations
theorists were beginning to develop political decision-making frameworks that
incorporated a potentially important role for psychological variables, but they did
not construct specific testable hypotheses or explore their underlying psychological
mechanisms” (Levy 320). However, since the 1970s political scientists have realized
the importance of psychological variables in constructing cognitive models of how
people make decisions.
Political psychological insights have been used across the whole panoply of IR
methodological approaches, from comparative case studies to surveys, aggregate
data analysis and experiments. Challenges to these various methodologies have
raged across political science: the qual/quant wars, the critiques of the external
validity of experiments etc. However, political psychology variables often have the
merits of being testable as a mechanism in a lab setting, and being incorporated as a
variable in hypothesis testing with case studies or quantitative data analysis.
The development and testing of political psychological theory and hypotheses has
seen progress on multiple fronts: theory has been imported from psychology; cues,
27
vignettes, and contexts have been designed with foreign policy applications in mind;
and insights have been used as variables in testing hypotheses on aggregate data.
Lab experiments have increasingly been used in order to isolate key dynamics of
individuals’ decision-making processes.
The best studies in political psychology have some common features: strong
conceptual foundations from psychology; an awareness of political context; and
adequate data and hypothesis testing. By cleaving close to this gold standard,
political science avoids the pitfalls of entrepreneurs taking concepts from another
discipline and applying it in a wooly fashion to help fit data that did not quite fit
previous attempts at explanation. Rather than levering in some amorphous
psychological variable as a final ingredient in a long-boiling broth (as, arguably,
neoclassical realism often does), scholars should start by clearly detailing the
concept being used, before showing how it can be used to make fruitful out-of-
sample predictions about observable outcomes.
What Do We Mean by “Personality”?
One of the most fruitful concepts borrowed from psychology has been that of
“personality”. Based on a solid consensus amongst psychologists as to its main
dimensions and its measurement, applicable to both individual decision-makers and
the variety of worldviews existing in the mass public, and with useful and replicable
applications to political science, personality has been a political psychology success
story.
Personality has been of interest to psychologists since the dawn of the discipline
itself. By “personality”, psychologists refer to deep-seated structural traits that
influence our behavior in consistent ways to the extent that they provide the
grounding for our own conceptions of identity. While, of course, our behavior varies
based on time, context, our thoughts and our feelings, psychologists and lay people
have long rooted explanations for our behavior in structures of our brain. Indeed,
our individual personalities can explain a great deal of why we make certain choices.
Researchers have found personality traits and values to be “more influential than
traditional socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, age, educational level,
occupation and income in explaining ideological orientation and political
preferences” (Caprara and Vecchione 589).
Perhaps the first landmark psychological study on personality was Theodore
Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al.). Adorno and his co-authors
pointed to early childhood as the incubation period for traits that might
unconsciously point people towards support for fascism. Although rightly criticized
for political bias and a lack of methodological rigor (Eysenck), The Authoritarian
Personality inspired a wave of researchers who used other approaches to studying
personality: from psychobiographies to historiographical analyses and in-depth case
studies.
28
The outcome of this shift was sophisticated studies of the personality of leaders
(see, for example, Cocks; Hermann and Milburn; Erikson; Barber) and the
emergence of nomothetic studies that connected observed political behaviors with
differences in individual-level characteristics, such as “alienation” (Seeman) and
“dogmatism” (Rokeach). The cognitive revolution of the late 1960s also saw theories
abound about how individuals sort and process information in order to make
decisions. Landmark studies continue to point to differences in complexity and
cognitive sophistication in leading to outcomes that can often prove sub-optimal
(Kahneman and Tversky; Tetlock; Lupia, McCubbins, and Popkin; Simon). Research
on personality has followed the evolution of psychology in grounding theories in,
first, psychoanalysis, then social learning and finally cognitive theories. We now
think of political psychology as a complicated mix of underlying traits alongside
emotional and cognitive processes, which can, and do, feedback on each other.
Despite widespread development in the field of political psychology, researchers
still lacked an undergirded theory of personality. It was only in the 1990s that the
field saw a growing consensus on the use of The Big Five personality traits to
capture a holistic sense of personality. This consensus has endured as researchers
have delved further into conceptual development and advances in brain science
while also using the model to discover more empirical regularities. Robert McCrae, a
leading personality psychologist, puts the matter bluntly:
There is little doubt that the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality traits (the
‘Big Five’) is currently the dominant paradigm in personality research, and one
of the most influential models in all of psychology. Digman’s 1990 review on the
topic has become the most highly cited article in the history of the Annual
Review of Psychology, with over 1,200 citations. (McCrae 148)
The “Big Five” was discovered thanks to lexigraphical analysis: personality traits
were “so important in human affairs that common words would have been invented
to name them all; an unabridged dictionary ought to provide an exhaustive listing of
traits, which could be sorted into a basic structure” (McCrae). As researchers went
in search of these underlying traits, studies converged on five similarly named
personality-based concepts. Researchers who took a different approach, like self-
report techniques, found a strikingly similar result. These five traits were found to
be enduring, with all five factors remarkably stable over time (Caspi, Roberts, and
Shiner). When tested across languages and cultures, the same five traits came to the
fore. Studies that looked at the genetic provenance of personality, looking at
heritability, twin studies, and family relatives, showed that personality was
grounded in our biological make-up (Van Gestel and Van Broeckhoven).
Scholars agree on the five basic factors (albeit sometimes with slightly different
verbiage): (1) Openness to Experience, (2) Conscientiousness, (3) Extraversion, (4)
Agreeableness, and (5) Neuroticism (or emotional stability). Openness refers to an
interest in new cultural experiences and curiosity about novelty, and is conveyed by
29
adjectives like “creative” and “imaginative”. Conscientiousness is a trait held by
individuals who seek order and value fulfilling obligations, and can be associated
with adjectives like “reliability” and “dependability”. Extraversion can be applied to
individuals who value sociability and get energy from being around others.
Adjectives for those low in extraversion might be “quiet” and “introverted”.
Agreeableness is a trait for those concerned with loyalty, generosity and being
sympathetic. Neuroticism (or emotional stability) concerns control of impulses and
tends to be associated with a sense of calm and patience. Researchers have come up
with a variety of surveys to measure personality scores that vary primarily by
length and, therefore, time to administer.
One of those surveys is the IPIP, which asks people to rank themselves high or low
on a variety of questions that aim to get at various facets related to the Big Five
traits. The table, below, shows the facets associated with each trait, and sample
questions used to score participants on each. In bold we can see the trait associated
with their facets.
30
IPIP Scale Name High/low example item from IPIP
Conscientiousness
Self-efficacy complete tasks successfully/misjudge situations
Orderliness like order/leave a mess
Dutifulness follow the rules/break rules
Achievement-striving work hard/do just enough to get by
Self-discipline get chores done right away/waste my time
Cautiousness avoid mistakes/rush into things
Neuroticism
Anxiety worry about things/relaxed most of the time
Anger get angry easily/rarely get irritated
Depression often feel blue/feel comfortable with myself
Self-consciousness am easily intimidated/am not embarrassed easily
Immoderation often eat too much/easily resist temptations
Vulnerability panic easily/remain calm under pressure
Extraversion
Friendliness make friends easily/am hard to get to know
Gregariousness love large parties/prefer to be alone
Assertiveness take charge/wait for others to lead the way
Activity level am always busy/like to take it easy
Excitement-seeking love excitement/dislike loud music
Cheerfulness radiate joy/am seldom amused
Agreeableness
Trust trust others/distrust people
Morality would never cheat on taxes/use flattery to get ahead
Altruism make people feel welcome/look down on others
Cooperation am easy to satisfy/have a sharp tongue
Modesty dislike being center of attention/ think highly of myself
Sympathy sympathize with the homeless/believe in an eye for an eye
Openness
Imagination have a vivid imagination/seldom daydream
Artistic Interests believe in the importance of art/do not like poetry
Emotionality experience emotions intensely/seldom get emotional
Adventurousness prefer variety to routine/dislike changes
Intellect like complex problems/avoid philosophical discussions
Liberalism tend to vote for liberals/believe in one true religion
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Table 1: IPIP Scale for Big Five
11
The Big Five traits have been found by psychologists to be significantly linked with
various behaviors: personality disorders have been associated with respondents
high in Neuroticism (Costa and Widiger), Extraversion is associated with happiness
(Ozer and Benet-Martínez), low Conscientiousness has been found to be associated
with a higher level of non-medical drug usage (Sattler and Schunck), and
“personality is a reliable predictor of health behavior patterns” more generally
(Booth-Kewley and Vickers). As studies piled up using personality traits as
significant predictors of behaviors, replicated over time, it was not long before
political scientists starting asking whether the Big Five personality model might not
also yield important insights in political attitudes and behaviors. Much has been
discovered, but there is little doubt that there are many more interesting puzzles
that the psychological understanding of personality might still shed some light upon.
Personality and Political Outcomes
As old class loyalties have faded in post-industrial economies, politics is increasingly
bemoaned as being based on “personality politics”, where voters express their
identity through the ballot box and would-be leaders are sized up in terms of their
personal characteristics more than detailed policy prescriptions. To that extent,
perhaps it is relatively unsurprising that “recent findings show significant co-
variations of ideological self-placement with meaningful psychological differences in
the domain of personality in both voters and politicians” (Barbaranelli et al.;
Caprara, Barbaranelli, and Zimbardo; Jost; Caprara and Vecchione). As political
science research has tried to go beyond rational-choice models in order to ground
theories in psychological insights related to decision-making, personality has been
seized upon as a particularly fruitful explanans for political choices of both
politicians and voters.
Openness to New Experience: Openness can be described as a respondent’s
appreciation of new scenarios and experiences, and openness to fantasy and
feelings, due to being creative, imaginative and aesthetically sensitive (Caspi,
Roberts, and Shiner; Terracciano et al.; Caprara and Vecchione). Openness’
association with political liberalism and support for left-wing parties has been
widely replicated (McCrae; Barbaranelli et al.; Caprara et al.). McCrae argues that
psychological conservatism is linked to political conservatism with the latter being
associated with social conformity, low acceptance of novel sensation, and behavioral
rigidity (McCrae 325). One scholar even finds a significant link between those who
identify with Right-Wing Authoritarianism [RWA] (Altemeyer) and a low score on
openness (Trapnell).
11
This table is adapted from one formulated by ETS which can be found at
https://www.ets.org/s/workforce_readiness/pdf/21332_big_5.pdf [Accessed
March 4 2016].
32
Conscientiousness: Conscientiousness refers to the ability to repress impulses and
delay gratification in order to pursue longer-term goals, following norms and rules,
and a need for structure, planning, and organizing (Sattler and Schunck; Caspi,
Roberts, and Shiner). Conscientiousness is negatively associated with liberalism and
positively with conservatism (Gosling, Rentfrow, and Swann); scholars have found
positive correlations with voting for right-wing parties in the United States (Carney
et al.), Germany (Schoen and Schumann), and Italy (Caprara, Barbaranelli, and
Zimbardo).
Extraversion: Extraversion denotes one’s tendency to gain energy and fulfillment
from social activity (Caspi, Roberts, and Shiner; Terracciano et al.; Mondak).
Evidence on partisanship and extraversion is mixed, with some components of
extraversion being negatively associated with conservatism (Jost et al.), and center-
right voters tending to be more extraverted in one other study (Caprara and
Vecchione). We do know that those who are extraverted tend to be more likely to
participate in political events (Gallego and Oberski).
Agreeableness: Agreeableness is associated with modesty, considerate, altruistic and
pro-social behaviors. It is often seen as applying to people who favor community
over individual needs. Studies on partisanship are often inconclusive, but recent
studies on the use of social proof to enhance turnout might be particularly fruitful
for those people who are highly agreeable. One study finds that one element of
agreeableness (compassion) is associated with liberalism, while another
(politeness) correlates with conservatism (Hirsh et al.).
Neuroticism: Neuroticism is high in those prone to depression, mood swings, and
emotional instability. While conscientiousness is often associated with high RWA
and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), researchers find an association between
high neuroticism and those ideological dispositions in North American samples
(Sibley and Duckitt). However, Gosling et al. find a higher level of emotional stability
with conservatives than liberals, while Jost et al. hypothesize a link between the
fearfulness associated with neuroticism and conservatism but find no empirical link
in their own analysis. In the end, we can not really link neuroticism with any regular
political outcome (Caprara and Vecchione).
Recently, scholars have starting diving into how Big Five personality traits might
help shape reactions to more specific attitudes towards ideological concerns:
individuals use left-right self-placement as a useful heuristic for a bundle of different
issues and dimensions, but teasing this out allows for more exactitude in how
personality shapes the way we see certain issues. For example, following up on
previous work that has looked at the relationship between personality and
dimensions of liberalism in both economic and social spheres (Carney et al.),
researchers have shown that while openness is associated with liberalism on both
social and economic dimensions, and conscientiousness with conservatism across
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the board, different traits have varied outcomes on the two dimensions of economic
and social liberalism (Gerber et al.).
12
Table 1, below, gives a summary of how personality affects likelihood to identify as
a liberal/conservative, and how likely someone is to agree with the social/economic
aspects of liberalism/conservatism, turnout at an election, be interested in politics,
and have a high degree of political knowledge. It shows the effects of all five traits
and also shows education and income as useful comparisons.
Table 2: Effect of Big Five Personality Traits, as well as Income and Education,
on different dimensions of Ideology and Partisanship. (Source: Gerber at al.
270)
A review of the political psychology literature shows that personality traits have
been useful in predicting political outcomes and that these findings have been
replicated across contexts. However, much less work has been done on the Big Five
with respect to specific political and foreign policy issues. One might think that a
good place to start might be areas of public attitudes where traditional heuristics of
partisanship or theoretical worldviews fall short. So it is that democracy promotion
12
The two dimensions are constructed by (a) looking at abortion and civil unions on
the social liberalism/conservatism axis, and (b) raising taxes on those earning over
$200,000 together with government involvement in healthcare on the economic
axis.
34
is both virgin territory for personality research and an area that might yield new
insights.
Personality & Democracy Promotion
Do personality differences explain different attitudes to the support for, and level of
support for, democracy promotion projects overseas? And do certain democracy
promotion projects find support from different people according to their differences
in personality? In order to test these questions, the author undertook a
questionnaire that measured respondents’ personality traits according to the Big
Five personality scale, and then sought out any correlations with two different
measures relating to democracy promotion: whether respondents would budget a
higher or lower amount than the current United States budget for democracy
promotion projects (excluding Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), and, secondly, which
of the different kinds of democracy promotion project respondents might be more
likely to favor with higher funding.
A sample of 2006 respondents was collected through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
(MTurk) program. MTurk is a program, hosted by Amazon, which boasts 3 million
people worldwide who perform short online tasks for small amounts of money.
Researchers have found that MTurk respondents recruited are often more
representative of the U.S. population than in-person convenience samples, which is
widely used in political science research (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz). Prior research
in social science has been shown consistent with replicated studies using MTurk
study pools (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz 366). As such, MTurk has been widely used
in the social scientific community for easy and cost-effective experiments.
Experimental Design
The experimental design was simple in that personality is temporally and causally
prior to anyone’s views on political issues. Therefore worries about reverse-
causality are easily combatted. As such, the design called for respondents to answer
basic demographic questions (with question phrasing borrowed from the American
National Election Survey (ANES)), asked people to fill in the personality battery
questions, and then asked them their views on democracy promotion issues.
When asking people for their views on democracy promotion, it was important that
asking people about their personality did not prime them to answer the questions
about democracy differently. In order to make sure that there was no priming effect,
a selection of respondents were asked to answer a pre-test on the two democracy
promotion questions. There was no statistically significant difference between the
means for the pre- and post-test answers to the democracy promotion questions.
Additionally, respondents’ answers were screened for a minimum time to take the
35
survey, in order to screen out anyone who might have selected randomly and added
noise to the statistical results.
Personality was measured using a widely used ten-question battery that compares
well to the much lengthier batteries used when no constraints of time or attention
are present (Gosling, Rentfrow, and Swann). Called the Ten Item Personality
Instrument (TIPI), it has high test-retest reliability and has been used to replicate
studies using the longer instrument. It is widely used in experiments such as these
due to its convenience and length. The full text can be found in Appendix A.
To measure support for democracy promotion, it was necessary to inform
respondents of what we meant when using the term. Democracy promotion itself
carries positive connotations and asking people whether they supported it or not
was likely to generate a false positive. Therefore, to better ascertain people’s true
feelings, it was important to associate democracy promotion with its attendant cost
to the taxpayer as well as its end purpose. Therefore, using USAID’s own words as to
its mission, participants in the experiment were asked to read the following before
being asked the question:
As described on their website “USAID is the lead U.S. Government agency that works to end extreme global
poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential.”
USAID works in over 100 countries to:
• Promote broadly shared economic prosperity;
• Strengthen democracy and good governance;
• Protect human rights;
• Improve global health,
• Advance food security and agriculture;
• Improve environmental sustainability;
• Further education;
• Help societies prevent and recover from conflicts; and
• Provide humanitarian assistance in the wake of natural and man-made disasters.
USAID is allocated approximately 1 percent of the total federal budget. USAID’s budget, therefore,
amounted to $20.4 billion in Fiscal Year 2014.
Thus informed on USAID’s mission, respondents were asked to answer the following
question using a seven-point Likert scale from “Much Too High” to “Much Too Low”:
Leaving aside Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, USAID spent $860 million on democracy, rights and
governance projects in 2014.
Do you think this amount was too low or too high?
Much too high Too high Slightly too high Just right Slightly too low Too low Much too low
After asking this question, the survey moved on to the composition of the budget
itself. So that there was no cross-contamination between the two questions, the use
of a slider was preferred so that 100% of the funds had to be allocated to different
types of project. Money could not be “saved” or “overspent” so that confusion
36
between the two questions would not arise. The types of projects funded, and the
description for each, were again taken from the USAID website. The question asked
was as follows:
USAID funds various types of projects with the aim of assisting democracy in other countries. Below is a list
of the type of projects that they fund and their strategic aims.
Elections and Political Processes
Activities oriented towards electoral assistance, support for the development of political parties, and
legislative representation.
Rule of Law Programs
Funding for human rights programs and for legal and judicial development.
Civil Society Programs
Programs oriented towards the promotion of independent mass media, civic education, and labor
organization.
Governance Programs
A very diverse category, this variable covers transparency and anti-corruption projects, decentralization,
local government, and legislative assistance programs.
What percentage of USAID’s budget for these projects should be assigned to each type of project? Please
make your choices by sliding the bars to the desired level. The total must add up to 100.
Once you've set your initial positions, you may need to adjust some of the bars in order for the total to be
100. If you've reached a total of 100, you won't be able to add any more to any of the programs. You would
need to decrease the value of some programs in order to increase the others.
Respondents then used the slider to answer what percentage of USAID funding
should be allocated to each of the four types of project.
In this way, the study aimed to demonstrate both personality’s potential link to
support for democracy promotion overall, as well as support for the various
different types of project that typically make up the democracy promotion portfolio.
Hypotheses
When proposing hypotheses to be tested, personality scholars have largely based
those to be tested on “the results of the studies... and on theoretical reflections on
the behavioral implications of global personality traits in situations [of a given
political context]” (Brandstätter and Opp 520). Champions of personality research
also underline the fact that personality is refracted through different environmental
contexts in leading to particular behaviors (Mondak et al.). With a dearth of research
on personality and democracy promotion, hypotheses can best be generated
through reflection on how personality traits might translate into the context of
democracy promotion and by reviewing previous studies that might suggest their
results could translate over into this new political context.
- Support for Democracy Promotion Overall
37
Openness: People who score highly on openness tend to have a high tolerance for
change and respond favorably to novel stimuli (Mondak). People who score highly
on openness tend to like variety, get bored by repetition and homogeneity, and have
a tendency to dream and fantasize about alternatives. In the political realm they are
likely to be open to different ways of living the good life and think that there is no
“one size fits all” answer to political questions. We know that a high score in
openness has repeatedly been correlated with voting for left-wing parties across
countries. We also know that very left-wing groups tend to oppose international
intervention and treat democracy promotion with suspicion. As such, we might
hypothesize that they are more likely to tolerate regime types different from
Western liberal democracy and might buck at the homogenizing instinct of
democracy promotion strategies.
Therefore, Hypothesis 1 would be:
Higher in openness, lower support for democracy promotion.
Conscientiousness: Conscientious people tend to like plans, structure, order and
routine (Jost). They display characteristics like “thinking before acting, delaying
gratification, following norms and rules, and planning, organizing, and prioritizing
tasks” (Gerber et al. 113). Therefore, it is not a large jump to suppose that
conscientious people would likely favor longer-term democratic capacity building.
Plans to do so should probably be thought-out, structured, and undisruptive using
solid building blocks rather than contingent, political and short-term struggles for
change. We might suppose that long-term support for democracy promotion, the
emergence of rule of law, and the demise of personalistic rule would suit those high
in this trait. Conscientious people might also see undemocratic regimes as bucking a
global norm towards democratic governance with non-democracies flouting a
generally agreed standard. Democracy promotion projects would, therefore, find
favor with conscientious people as long-term, structured working towards the
enforcement of a global democratic norm.
Therefore, Hypothesis 2 would be:
Higher in conscientiousness, higher support for democracy promotion.
Extraversion: Extraverted people get enjoyment from pro-social activities
(Avshalom Caspi, Roberts, and Shiner; Terracciano et al.; Mondak). In terms of
political behaviors, we know that those high in extraversion are more likely to
turnout at an election or for a protest (Gallego and Oberski). Other scholars also see
extraversion as linked to the likelihood of political protest due to the pro-social
nature of collective activities (Brandstätter and Opp).
On the one hand, the inability for those in other states to do such things, and a
proactive response to stop this inability, should see a positive relationship between
extraversion and democracy promotion spending. However, we suppose that a link
between extraversion and pro-social activities will hold when looking at support for
others to engage in similar activities. The vast majority of testing has been on
38
reported involvement with pro-social activities and the individual’s score in terms
of extraversion, but we extend this relationship to individual’s support for others to
be able to do the same kind of social activities.
Therefore, Hypothesis 3 would be:
Higher in extraversion, higher support for democracy promotion.
Agreeableness: Agreeableness is associated with a small, negative effect on
attitudes towards social liberalism (Gerber et al.) but restrictions within other
countries are unlikely to be seen as a source of outrage. Indeed, the reasoning for
this small negative effect is probably a communitarian versus individual rights lens
in seeing the issue and changes in culture might well have eroded even this result. I
can think of no theoretical relationship between agreeableness and democracy
promotion.
Therefore, Hypothesis 4 would be:
No relationship between agreeableness and support for democracy promotion.
Neuroticism: There have been no stable relationships between neuroticism and
political variables that have been replicated enough times to get us confidence. Thus
one scholar even describes this trait as functionally independent from political
concerns (Caprara and Vecchione). I can think of no theoretical relationship
between neuroticism and democracy promotion.
Therefore, Hypothesis 5 would be:
No relationship between neuroticism and support for democracy promotion.
- Support for Specific Democracy Promotion Programs
Elections and Political Processes: We know that those high in extraversion are
more likely to participate in elections, fundraisers, rallies and other social aspects of
the political process (Gallego and Oberski). Similar results have been found for
participation in protests (Brandstätter and Opp). Due to the pro-social nature of
elections and political participation, we should expect to see a link between those
higher in extraversion and those who supported a higher percentage of spending on
these types of projects.
Hypothesis 1: Those higher in extraversion will favor elections and political process
projects.
Rule of Law Programs: Rule of law projects might well see universal approval, but,
if anything, we would expect those who score higher in conscientiousness to favor
the rational, ordered nature of promoting the rule of law, rather than the hurly-
burly nature of untrammelled red-blooded politics. “Conscientiousness includes a
basic dispositional sense of dependability, measured with terms such as ‘organized’
and ‘reliable,’ and a volitional component captured by terms such as ‘hard working’
39
and ‘industrious’ ” (Mondak et al.). Considering the long-term nature of building the
rule of law, and its promise of organization, rational application of force according
to rules, and the dependability of law for other things like contract and
entrepreneurial undertaking, it is no surprise that we might associate the rule of law
with conscientiousness.
Hypothesis 2: Those higher in conscientiousness will favor rule of law projects.
Civil Society Programs: Programs which aim to empower civil society groups to
hold governments to account, educate the citizenry, and mobilize citizens in cross-
cutting networks could well be associated with both extraverts and those who score
higher in openness. Extraverts, again, are keen to participate in pro-social activities
and those who are high in openness like creativity and change (Mondak et al.). Civil
society programs tend to involve person-to-person networking, meetings, lobbying
etc. which would appeal to those more inclined to pro-social interaction. Civil
society organizations tend to favor changes to the status quo and imagine a different
way of doing things (there are not many lobby groups to maintain the status quo!).
Therefore, one would think that those open to change and who score highly on the
openness scale would also favor civil society programs.
Hypothesis 3: Those higher in extraversion will favor civil society projects.
Hypothesis 4: Those higher in openness will favor civil society projects.
Governance Programs: The patient building of capacity to govern effectively should
appeal intuitively to those who score higher on conscientiousness. Like scholars
who favor stability and institution-building before supporting political freedom and
elections (Zakaria; Huntington and Fukuyama), conscientious people will likely
think in terms of long-term structural change rather than immediate agential
change, and favor adherence to social norms and impulse control (John and
Srivastra; Jost et al.; Jost). Governance is associated with order, bringing self-
organization under some kind of central plan or control, and long-range planning.
These are all qualities that we know should appeal to those who exhibit high
conscientiousness.
Hypothesis 5: Those higher in conscientiousness will favor governance projects.
- Modeling Strategy
In addition to the Big Five personality traits, the paper looks at a model that includes
age, race, and gender, and then a third model which adds in religiosity and
education as well. The reason for having two separate models with controls is that it
is worth separating controls that are biologically based from others that are
environmental and socially based. The question wording for the controls was taken
from ANES and can be found in the Appendix.
40
(1) DV = B0 + C∗Personality
(2) DV = B0 + C∗Personality + D∗Controls
(3) DV = B0 + C∗Personality + D∗Controls + E*Controls2
Experimental Results
Budget
[Table 2 HERE- Currently in Appendix]
As we can see from the table above, openness is strongly significantly associated
with a decrease in democracy promotion spending as hypothesized. This continues
even when we introduce controls into the latter models. Strong and significant
positive results were also seen for conscientiousness and extraversion, as with
higher democracy promotion spending in our last model. Religious observance is
also associated with more support for democracy promotion, and education is
linked to a lower level of support for democracy promotion.
This suggests that support for democracy promotion overall is because
dictatorships might be seen by many as flouting international democratic norms.
Those more open to difference might feel less bothered by different regime types,
while conscientious members of the public see different regime types as an
abrogation. Extraverted people are more likely to be pro-social and engaged in ideas
of civic action, from protests to voting. Therefore projects which seek to encourage
voting, social movements, and democratic protest might seem more exciting to
people who score highly in this personality trait. It would be interesting to see
whether this is dependent on democracy promotion per se, or whether introverted
people tend more towards isolationism tout court.
The level of support overall for raising the budget given to democracy promotion
projects is also, perhaps, surprising. Where 5 meant “much higher” in terms of a
budget, the average score for respondents was 4.5 in Model 3: a convincing
argument that politicians should be bolder in allocating money to this area, if they
seek to follow the public’s wishes.
Types of Program
Elections and Political Processes
[Table 3 HERE- Currently in Appendix]
When it comes to seeing which personality types are most likely to support aid
towards elections and the political process, the hypothesis on extraversion is borne
out again here. Again, this was taken from analogous studies that showed that those
41
higher in extraversion were more likely to take part in the political process itself.
Therefore it is pleasing to see that extraversion is highly and significantly associated
with support for programs that support electoral processes at the 99% level.
13
Religion is also highly associated with support for elections at a similar level.
Interestingly, electoral support was the lowest supported of the four types of
projects tested. The third model, with the controls all added, saw only just over 16%
of the average budget allocated to it. This was considerably below the other
categories, which scored more highly but in a broadly similar range (between c. 25
and 32).
Rule of Law Programs
[Table 4 HERE- Currently in Appendix]
By way of contrast, as the table above clearly shows, rule of law projects scored a lot
higher on average than projects aimed at electoral processes. However, Hypothesis
2, which suggested that those who scored highest on conscientiousness would
demonstrate higher support for rule of law programs, was not borne out in the data.
Civil Society Programs
[Table 5 HERE- Currently in Appendix]
Again, our hypotheses for civil society programs were not shown in the data. The
only significant result was a negative, but highly significant, relationship between
those higher in religious observance and support for civil society projects. As to why
this would be, no obvious explanations present themselves, other than perhaps the
suggestion that religiously observant people might fear that taxpayer money would
be being funneled to other faith groups found in the target country. This theory
deserves further study in future research in this area.
It is also worth pointing out that civil society projects saw the highest overall score
for the budget question, with over 30% of the proposed budget being allocated to it.
Governance Programs
[Table 6 HERE- Currently in Appendix]
13
It is, perhaps, also interesting to ponder the relationship between those activist-
intellectuals who propose a more agential theory of democratic change, and more
traditional academics who focus on long-term structural change. It would be
interesting to find out if this theorizing is, in some way, a projection of their own
personality traits.
42
Again, the proposed link between conscientiousness and support for long-term,
structural programs did not emerge in the data. Governance saw the second-highest
amount allocated to it, but none of the variables in the models were significantly
associated with support for these projects.
However, interestingly, governance scored second-highest in terms of what type of
project the public wanted to see funded, scoring over 27% of the budget allocated to
it.
Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Research
This article represents the first attempt to explore the link between personality and
support for both democracy promotion and specific democracy promotion projects.
This adds to a growing literature that looks at the Big Five as a powerful
determinant of political attitudes. The significant results for four of the five
personality traits in terms of the size of the budget allocated to democracy
promotion provides powerful testimony that the role of personality has so far been
overlooked. Hypotheses, generated from the personality literature and from general
trait and facet tendencies, proved a good guide in predicting support for a higher
budget overall. While those scoring higher on openness had less of a wish to
interfere in other countries’ internal regime considerations, those who scored
highest on conscientiousness and extraversion were much more willing to support
higher spending.
The support for our hypotheses when it comes to the budget for democracy
promotion reflects well on the Big Five as a theoretical approach to understand why
some people feel the way they do about democracy promotion. Those who have
opposed democracy promotion have not fallen neatly into one party or another, but
tended to be divided between the extreme ends of the ideological continuum. As
such, those who are most open to changing the status quo domestically are also the
least likely to favor the homogenization of regimes across the world too. The fact
that non-democratic regimes flout norms also explains why those high in
conscientiousness might favor a healthier democracy promotion budget. We also
know that openness and conscientiousness have been the two most salient
personality traits when it comes to uncovering the link between personality and
politics. Finally, we know that those who score highest on extraversion are more
likely to engage in pro-social activities like voting and protests. We hypothesized
that this would increase support for others to engage in pro-social political
activities, and this was borne out in the data.
When it comes to types of project, the hypothesized link with extraversion was the
only one that was supported by the data. One would think that conscientiousness
would be highly linked to rule of law projects, for example, but perhaps the seeming
closeness between “governance” and “rule of law” projects prevented this
43
relationship from emerging. It would be good to try and replicate this finding using a
different research design to interrogate this proposed link in similar data.
Follow-up work on the reasoning offered by those high in these traits would be
interesting: is it that conscientious people see democracy as a global norm being
flouted? And do extraverted respondents paint a picture of brave protestors and
long lines of first-time voters when asked? Structured post-survey follow-up
interviews might uncover whether there is a common way of seeing the subject
matter or not.
We know that public attitudes help influence foreign policy outcomes (H. V. Milner
and Tingley) and foreign aid in particular (H. Milner and Tingley), so what do the
results mean for policymakers’ room for maneuvering when it comes to democracy
promotion budgeting? Republican administrations might well feel more answerable
to their own constituency, and we know that highly conscientious people are both
more likely to favor democracy promotion and are also more likely to find
themselves on the right of the political spectrum. Republican administrations
certainly faced greater pushback from their party when they employed a more
realist approach to foreign policy and saw democracy as more of a luxury good than
something that should be actively promoted. Republicans might well favor cutting
the democracy promotion budget compared to liberal administrations whose base
would be higher in openness.
Findings in terms of different types of democracy promotion project were less
overwhelming. Hypotheses aimed at teasing out a link between conscientiousness
and long-term structural projects in fact did not find such a link. However, the
different levels of support for different types of project – and the continuing link
between extraversion and support for the practice of democracy in the form of
elections and the political process – were striking to note.
This project stands as the first of what, it is hoped, will be many studies that look at
the link between personality and support for democracy promotion. The next
frontier, beyond confirming these results and exploring the internal reasoning
peculiar to those with specific personality types, would be to see if different types of
persuasive frames work better or worse with different personality types. The rise in
microtargeting – even in firms that use personality as another layer in large
databases to better target messaging, or alter the messaging itself to seek greater
compliance – suggests that we need not only to look at frames aimed at the general
public (although that, of course, is extremely important for mass media messaging
and broadcast, rather than narrowcast, persuasion), but also at how messages
tailored along different dimensions can have outsize effects compared to broader
frames.
Another element to explore would seem to be the role of religious conviction in
support for democracy promotion. Religion was found to be negatively correlated
with support for civil society projects, positively linked to electoral projects, and
44
was significantly and positively associated with increased support for raising the
democracy promotion budget. It has been argued that whiggish or teleological views
of the possibility of universal democracy are a kind of secularized palimpsest of an
almost-forgotten eschatological religious worldview. It is not impossible that those
people who hold this view more strongly are more likely to claim a commitment to
religious faith, above and beyond some more non-religious commitment to
spreading ideology beyond one’s borders. It would be intriguing to see whether this
commitment to liberal democracy is more strongly held in, say, denominations with
an eschatological worldview than those with a doctrine of predestination or a tragic
sense of man’s imperfectability.
This study looked at the role of personality in influencing the attitudes of the
American public. It would be useful to see whether these results can be replicated in
other national contexts. While personality studies have a good record of replicability
across borders, some results seem to disappear when tried in different national
contexts.
Finally, while this study was aimed at mass attitudes, we should expect similar
relationships when looked at through the lens of elite decision-making. Senior
USAID mandarins high in conscientiousness should display the same tendencies as
those we identified in the mass public: however, we would expect different contexts
for those decisions which might mute the role of personality due to expert
knowledge, education etc. Testing elite decision-makers and attitudes would also be
an interesting project to pursue in broadening our understanding of this policy area.
Our nature sounds like an echo through a miasma of cultural and familial
impressions. This interaction of personality, cultural cues and impressions defines
us far more than any one element of this equation alone. The role of personality has
been underexplored in understanding public perception of democracy promotion
and foreign policy more generally, but a more complete picture of how we
understand the world is the next challenge for scholars in this area.
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Appendix A
TEN-ITEM PERSONALITY INVENTORY (TIPI)
Here are a number of personality traits that may or may not apply to you. Please
write a number next to each statement to indicate the extent to which you agree or
disagree with that statement. You should rate the extent to which the pair of traits
applies to you, even if one characteristic applies more strongly than the other.
1 = Disagree strongly
2 = Disagree moderately
3 = Disagree a little
4 = Neither agree nor disagree
5 = Agree a little
49
6 = Agree moderately
7 = Agree strongly
I see myself as:
1. _____ Extraverted, enthusiastic.
2. _____ Critical, quarrelsome.
3. _____ Dependable, self-disciplined.
4. _____ Anxious, easily upset.
5. _____ Open to new experiences, complex.
6. _____ Reserved, quiet.
7. _____ Sympathetic, warm.
8. _____ Disorganized, careless.
9. _____ Calm, emotionally stable.
10. ____Conventional, uncreative.
TIPI scale scoring (“R” denotes reverse-scored items):
Extraversion: 1, 6R; Agreeableness: 2R, 7; Conscientiousness: 3, 8R; Emotional
Stability: 4R, 9; Openness to Experiences: 5, 10R.
Appendix B
Democracy Promotion Budget I
Please read the following:
WHAT IS USAID?
As described on their website “USAID is the lead U.S. Government agency that works
to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize
their potential.”
WHAT DOES USAID DO?
USAID works in over 100 countries to:
• Promote broadly shared economic prosperity;
• Strengthen democracy and good governance;
• Protect human rights;
• Improve global health,
• Advance food security and agriculture;
• Improve environmental sustainability;
• Further education;
• Help societies prevent and recover from conflicts; and
50
• Provide humanitarian assistance in the wake of natural and man-made
disasters.
WHAT IS USAID’S BUDGET?
USAID is allocated approximately 1 percent of the total federal budget. USAID’s
budget, therefore, amounted to $20.4bn in Fiscal Year 2014.
DEMOCRACY, RIGHTS AND GOVERNANCE
Leaving aside Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, USAID spent $860m on democracy,
rights and governance projects in 2014.
Do you think this amount was too low or too high?
Much Too High
Slightly Too High
Just Right
Slightly Too Low
Much Too Low
Please advance to the next screen.
Democracy Assistance Projects
USAID funds various types of projects with the aim of assisting democracy in other
countries. What percentage of USAID’s budget for these projects should be assigned
to each type of project?
Elections and Political Processes
Activities oriented towards electoral assistance, support for the development of
political parties, and legislative representation.
Percentage-
Rule of Law Programs
Funding for human rights programs and for legal and judicial development.
Percentage-
Civil Society Programs
Programs oriented towards the promotion of independent mass media, civic
education, and labor organization.
Percentage-
51
Governance Programs
A very diverse category, this variable covers transparency and anti-corruption
projects, decentralization, local government, and legislative assistance programs.
Percentage-
Please advance to the next screen.
Demographic Background
Please answer the following questions.
What is your gender?
Male / Female
How old are you?
What race do you consider yourself to be? (Select the option that best applies)
Black / African American White / Caucasian Hispanic / Latino(a) / Other Asian
Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, Democrat, or as
an independent? (Select the option that best applies):
Strongly Republican / Republican / Independent but lean Republican / Independent
Independent but lean Democrat / Democrat / Strongly Democrat
Below is a scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from
“extremely conservative” to “extremely liberal.” Where would you place yourself on this
scale?
Extremely Liberal / Liberal / Slightly Liberal / Moderate / Slightly Conservative
Conservative / Extremely Conservative
What is your highest level of education?
Some high school / High school graduate / Some college / College graduate
Which of the following best describes the total pre-tax income earned by everyone
in your household last year?
Up to $20,000
$20,000 to $35,000
52
$35,000 to $50,000
$50,000 to $75,000
$75,000 to $100,000
$100,000 to $125,000
$125,000 to $150,000
$150,000 and over
Please advance to the next screen.
Personality Type
Here are a number of personality traits that may or may not apply to you. Please
write a number next to each statement to indicate the extent to which you agree or
disagree with that statement. You should rate the extent to which the pair of traits
applies to you, even if one characteristic applies more strongly than the other.
Disagree Strongly 1
Disagree 2
Disagree Moderately 3
Neither Agree nor Disagree 4
Agree Moderately 5
Agree 6
Agree Strongly 7
I see myself as:
1. _____ Extraverted, enthusiastic.
2. _____ Critical, quarrelsome.
3. _____ Dependable, self-disciplined.
4. _____ Anxious, easily upset.
5. _____ Open to new experiences, complex.
6. _____ Reserved, quiet.
7. _____ Sympathetic, warm.
8. _____ Disorganized, careless.
9. _____ Calm, emotionally stable.
10. ____ Conventional, uncreative.
53
Please advance to the next screen.
54
Table 2
55
Table 3
56
Table 4
57
Table 5
58
Table 6
59
“Just the Facts, Please!” Or “Having an Episode”? Thematic vs.
Episodic Framing in Arguments For Democracy Promotion
14
Simon Radford
Abstract
Mass opinion is less ideologically structured and consistent than elite opinion
(Converse). Elites often, therefore, deploy certain “frames” in political debates in
order to gather support for a policy position (Entman; Chong and Druckman, "A
Theory of Framing"). For example, recent debates over protests on college
campuses have seen the question framed as one of “free speech”, on the one hand, or
“combatting racism and hate speech” on the other; running budget deficits can be
seen as “investing to grow the economy” or “putting debt on the national credit
card”. Frames are best described as simplified representations of reality that
influence the choices audiences make to process that information and act on it.
While previous studies have looked at the framing of democracy promotion in self-
interest motivations compared to appeals aimed at democratic values (Brancati)
and have built on that work to include the role of competitive frames in arguments
about democracy promotion (Radford, forthcoming), this paper furthers the work of
scholars who investigate the efficacy of so-called “episodic” and “thematic” frames
(Iyengar; Gross).
Using a sample of over 2,000 Americans, this paper outlines a framing experiment
that tests (a) arguments for democracy promotion in terms of episodic appeals
using stories of individual cases, against (b) thematic arguments that tend to appeal
to “objective facts” about the upside of promoting democracy overseas. The
experiment tests four different common types of frames (as well as control frames
containing no democracy promotion information): episodic frames that appeal to
both self-interest and the benefit to the country being aided, and the same two types
of frame, given in a thematic style.
The paper finds that self-interest appeals (i.e. appeals to national or personal
benefit) do in fact boost support for promoting democracy overseas, which lends
credence to the theory that attaching the language of national interest might well
help sell a policy of democracy promotion overseas compared to an approach that
simply appeals to the benefits to the target country. While episodic and thematic
frames do not seem to alter the public’s relative appetite to allot a bigger budget to
USAID’s democracy promotion efforts, the paper does find that episodic frames are
more likely to make respondents favor those projects that aim to construct and
14
I would like to thank Prof Nicolas Weller and Mark Paradis for their support in
writing this chapter, as both served as incredibly useful sounding boards. Any
mistakes remain mine alone.
60
maintain the rule of law compared to the other types of project that USAID routinely
carries out.
Introduction
How often do we read about the timeless tussle of head versus heart? These
categories seem to speak to something elemental about human nature and it is,
perhaps, then, no wonder that academics have long-tried to tease out the
relationship between these two seemingly incongruous modes of experiencing. Carl
Jung wrote of the opposition between eros and logos. Eros was drawn from the
Platonic concept to represent a “feminine” wish for interconnectedness, while logos
represents a more “male” rationality (Jung). This dichotomy can be seen in
psychology today, in theories like Simon Baron-Cohen’s idea that autism represents
a clustering at one point of the “empathizing-systematizing” dimensions (Baron-
Cohen); or, in a critical light, in feminist debates about the gendered understanding
of “science” (Harding; Tickner). In the qualitative-quantitative debates within social
science research, quantitative research is characterized with adjectives such as
“objective” and “scientific”, while qualitative research is deemed “subjective” and
“non-scientific”, having the effect of devaluing the latter. Some feminists, like
Germaine Greer, have tried to reclaim the superiority of feminine “understanding”
over the male urge to “explain” the world (Goldstein). Other scholars advocate a
more tolerant pluralism of epistemological approaches based on “ontological bets”
grounded in different traditions of philosophy of science (Jackson). How should we
best understand the world? And seek to explain it to others? Head, heart, objective,
subjective, stories, facts… when it comes to advocating for promoting democracy
overseas, however, political advocates show no such intellectual sectarianism in
deploying rhetorical “frames” to convince the public. Some deploy heartfelt stories
of individuals and their families who could benefit from upending a status quo that
seems unfair; others delve into detailed statistics and the promise of tightly
developed academic theses to create objectively better conditions. Stories of the
once-benighted beneficiaries of American activism vie for attention with wonky
statistic-strewn paeans to the harmony of interests and values. A thousand flowers
bloom.
Political scientists refer to frames as a simplified representation of reality, used by
elites in order to help audiences come to some conclusion (Entman; Chong and
Druckman, "A Theory of Framing"). Scholars in political communication have long
studied the effects of frames on public opinion, with one dimension of difference
among frames being the distinction between “episodic” and “thematic” frames. The
former uses individual case studies to talk about a subject, while the latter uses
“objective” facts and studies to educate the reader on a topic (Iyengar). Episodic
frames tend to tell the story of one person or family and use that example to
generalize out to the wider topic. For example, Ronald Reagan’s use of the story of
Linda Taylor to tell the story of “welfare queens” was meant to delegitimize welfare
61
spending whereas policy wonks of the time, like the economist Glenn Loury, would
write less personal and more macro and substantive surveys on such issues (i.e.
what framing scholars call “thematic”) with a similar advocacy end in mind.
One area of politics where these two types of frame are often deployed is in the
arena of democracy promotion. We must promote democracy overseas, we are told,
because it is objectively a good policy based on X number of reasons. Equally, we
often see case studies of individuals who would stand to benefit from democracy
being the governing regime of their state. For instance, the UK’s Daily Telegraph will
run a story on the life of Malala Yousafzai (“The Extraordinary Life of Malala
Yousafzai”), while an academic like Shadi Hamid will pen a policy piece on
democracy promotion using the persuasive power and techniques learned in the
academy, focused on claims that are both theoretically grounded and using real-life
examples – not to persuade emotionally, but as data to back up those causal claims
he makes (Hamid). But which technique better persuades citizens to back increased
resources aimed at promoting democracy overseas? And how much do these
appeals matter?
In this paper the author will outline an experiment to test the efficacy of episodic
versus thematic frames. The author further tests whether there are differential
effects when these two types of frames are further customized to appeal to the
national self-interest of the audience, or whether it is better received when aimed at
the likely beneficiaries in the target country where programs aim to promote
democracy. The paper starts off by looking at the scale of democracy promotion
projects currently carried out by the United States, proceeds to review the literature
on framing and the difference between episodic and thematic frames, outlines the
methodology of the experiment, examines possible hypotheses, and then dives into
the results, before ending with conclusions and proposals for further research.
U.S. Commitment to Democracy Promotion
Democracy promotion has increased in prominence since the end of the Cold War
but first found its institutional footing under President Reagan (Goldman and
Douglas). The creation of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International
Republican Institute (IRI), funded partly through the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED), saw a step-change in American commitment to fostering
democratic transitions overseas. The fall of the Soviet Union and the “unipolar
moment”, far from seeing a wavering in commitment to democracy promotion due
to perceptions of ersatz Cold War scheming, actually saw increased budgets.
Promoting democracy became a rhetorical staple of American strategic intent, and
how it saw its role in the world. Both admirers (Russett and Oneal) and skeptics
(Bacevich) saw democracy promotion as being a central part of American
diplomacy, and one very much in its self-interest.
62
Certainly, from the Nixon administration’s dealings with President Allende in Chile
to the Obama administration’s quiet support for the coup against the democratic
government in Egypt after the Arab Spring, American strategic self-interest has
often overruled her stated ideals to “make the world safe for democracy”. Yet both
rhetorical and practical support for democracy promotion remains strong. One way
to measure America’s programmatic commitment to democracy promotion projects
is in cold, hard cash: “The President’s request for democracy and human rights
funding in FY 14, found under the heading Governing Justly and Democratically
(GJD), totals $2.87 billion, roughly the same as allocated for FY 12 and requested for
FY 13” (Trister). USAID’s projects focus on help with electoral processes,
governance and rule of law projects, and direct civil society engagement.
However, while the United States’ record on democracy promotion is marked more
by continuity than change, President Obama has often seemed more lukewarm to
democracy promotion than many of his predecessors:
U.S. assistance to advance democracy worldwide is in decline. Such spending
has shrunk by 28 percent during Barack Obama’s presidency and is now less
than $2 billion per year. The decline has been especially severe at [USAID],
which traditionally funds the bulk of U.S. democracy assistance and established
itself in the 1990s as the largest source of such aid worldwide. According to
data provided by the agency, USAID spending to foster democracy, human
rights and accountable governance abroad has fallen by 38 percent since 2009.
(Carothers)
If one removes the exceptional cases of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, USAID
spending on democracy, rights and governance in 2014 totaled only $860 million
(Carothers ). While this has irked democracy promotion practitioners, it could be
suggested that this was unlikely to have equally upset the public, concerned, as they
might well be, that government should spend less if necessary while the country
faces choppy economic waters
15
. Public opinion on democracy promotion might
well give President Obama headroom to cut when otherwise he might expect more
pushback. Equally the record of President George W. Bush’s time in office, although
seen in a rosier hue in retrospect (like all ex-presidencies), has tarnished the
democracy promotion “brand”:
Analysis shows that while Americans generally support the concept of
democracy promotion, there are a series of concerns for this proposition.
Americans rarely express passionate views on the subject; only a minority
express strong preferences for democracy promotion, or list it as a top priority.
Support for exporting freedom may be recently waning, given the problems
associated with democracy-building adventures around the world. (Tures)
15
While the “economy as household” analogy is fundamentally flawed to those who
have studied economics, it has proved stubbornly difficult to dislodge from the
public imagination.
63
Just as domestic public opinion often influences foreign policy decision-making
(Foyle; Knecht; Milner and Tingley, "Sailing the water's edge"), American public
support is often needed to promote democracy overseas. Dawn Brancati lists a
waning commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans in the 1990s, “leading
from behind” in Libya in 2011, and the circumscribed U.S. role in the Syrian civil war
as prominent examples of the key role public opinion plays in limiting U.S.
commitments to such endeavors (Brancati 706). While public opinion might set
broad constraints on legislative action (Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan), elite cues
are also cited as influential shapers of political possibility (Berinsky). Berinsky uses
a survey experiment to find that partisan cues are telling determinants of support
for a hypothetical military intervention in South Korea, while reports of possible
casualties has no statistically significant effect ("Assuming the costs of war").
Indeed, a review of the literature on public opinion and foreign aid argues that
politicians do not want to get too far out of line with prevailing public opinion, but
that elites nevertheless can and do shape that public opinion (Milner and Tingley,
"Public Opinion"). This helps explain why levels of public support for foreign aid
track broadly with actual foreign aid budgets across countries ("Public Opinion").
While there is plenty of academic coverage of public opinion and democracy
promotion (Tures; Faust and Garcia; McFaul), there is much less on how elites frame
arguments about democracy promotion (a notable exception is Brancati), and no
coverage of the important distinction within framing theory between episodic and
thematic frames as it applies to support for democracy promotion.
Framing: Episodic vs. Thematic
Rather than looking at opinion polling that simply takes a snapshot of how the
public feels about democracy promotion overseas, framing experiments interrogate
how public opinion can change given certain cues or frames. Framing experiments
have been used in international relations to interrogate such topics as the
mechanisms underlying the democratic peace (Tomz and Weeks), audience costs
(Tomz), the effects of reporting on casualties in support for war (Boettcher and
Cobb), conflict in the Middle East (Geva, Astorino-Courtois and Mintz), as well as
many other topics (Mintz and Redd). And frames can have very real effects, as Chong
and Druckman note: “To the extent that people do not have independent ideas on
the issues they are being asked to vote on, they can more easily be manipulated by
the framing of proposals. If people remain outside the political process, their
opinions are vulnerable to being shaped arbitrarily by how the issue is represented”
("Framing Theory", 121). Scholars have made contributions that suggest that
framing effects can prolong wars (Mercer) and that linking disaster aid to climate
change can make the public leerier of committing funds to relief efforts (Chapman
and Lickel).
64
However, democracy promotion as a topic has been given rather shorter shrift and
no studies have yet looked at the framing of democracy promotion in terms of the
performance of episodic against thematic frames.
A frame is “a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an
unfolding strip of events weaving a connection among them” (Gamson and
Modigliani 147). The intent of using a particular frame is the idea that, by doing so,
you will influence the audience towards an intended conclusion or action. For
example, Frank Luntz (a GOP pollster) earned renown for rebranding the estate tax
as “the death tax”. New Labour in the United Kingdom talked only of “public
investment” rather than “government spending” during their time in office. Welfare
can be seen as a “hand up” or a “handout”. Political actors use these ways of framing
an issue to secure more support for their side of ongoing political debates. Scholars
have long noted the effect of issue framing on public support for the issues that
political actors champion (Schaffner and Sellers; Druckman; Jacoby; Sniderman and
Theriault). Positive frames around democracy promotion, unless disastrously
deployed, should increase support for democracy promotion budgets and programs,
ceteris paribus.
An “episodic” frame can be defined as any frame that aims to cover an issue by
delving into a particular example, case study or event (e.g. looking at criminal justice
reform through the lens of one ex-convict’s story). A “thematic” frame is discovered
by seeing if an author covers an issue through looking at the wider context (e.g.
reporting on criminal justice reform by looking at the recidivism rates with analysis
from criminologists or policy wonks on the issue). To take a related example, the
Death Row Information Center has a long blog post about time on Death Row which
is littered with graphs, fulsomely footnoted, and draws on government statistics and
legal experts (Death Penalty Information Center). An episodic framing of the same
issue can be seen in Kevin Cooper’s article about his experience of almost being
executed and his time on Death Row from his own personal perspective (Cooper).
Journalists use both types of frames in covering an issue. Many use episodic frames
because the focus on a single person is meant to make the issue more relatable and
emotionally impactful. Equally, politicians and policy advocates often use episodic
framing in order to “sell” a policy, like President Obama hosting a Republican voter
who found coverage through Obamacare despite having a pre-existing condition
(Garunay) or President Reagan’s trend-setting seating of ordinary people in the
gallery during the State of the Union address. Obama’s selection of the man who told
his story at a rally was seemingly because it would give emotional permission for
Republicans to support the healthcare law’s survival, despite opposing the president
more generally.
Journalists and activists use thematic frames in order to win an audience over by
appearing to use dispassionate facts and appeals to authority. Organs like The
Economist call on data, testimony from policymakers and surveys of business
leaders when making a case for their preferred policy. While this might make the
65
subject matter more complex, it also allows for a more structural overview of the
issue. The first major study of the difference between episodic and thematic frames
(Iyengar) argued that exposure to different types of framing led to different policy
preferences. In Iyengar’s landmark study on the effect of episodic and thematic
frames, subjects who viewed stories about poverty that featured the homeless or
people out of work (episodic framing) were much more likely to blame poverty on
individual attributes, such as laziness, than were those who instead watched T.V.
stories about national unemployment statistics or poverty rates (thematic framing).
Those given thematic frames were much more likely to blame government or assign
responsibility to structures beyond individual agency or attribution (Iyengar).
But how should one identify frames to test? Scholars who study the identification
and deployment of frames recommend finding frames inductively from existing
literature about a topic (Chong and Druckman, "A Theory of Framing"). Does the
existing literature conform to the dichotomy of self-interest and humanitarian
motivations? And are frames commonly framed in both “thematic” and “episodic”
terms?
Locating frames inductively, as per Chong and Druckman’s advice, quickly threw up
common examples in articles, speeches, and explainers that looked at the issue on
the basis of both self-interest and humanitarian values. A review of the most
popular articles, papers, books, and periodicals addressing democracy promotion
shows advocates of democracy promotion largely filtering all arguments towards
two ends: to the benefit of those we stand to help through projects and funds, and
the self-interest that would flow back from any such expenditure we might make.
Democracy promotion speaks both to our values and our national interest.
Sean Lynn-Jones, in a wide-ranging, thematically-framed report on the benefits of
democracy promotion, makes arguments that look to both the audience’s own self-
interest but also appeal to humanitarian values:
After a brief discussion of definitions of democracy and liberalism, the paper
summarizes the reasons why the spread of democracy—especially liberal
democracy—benefits the citizens of new democracies, promotes international
peace, and serves U.S. interests. (Lynn-Jones)
Other major scholars in this area similarly divide up their advocacy using the same
dichotomy of appeals: McFaul and Fukuyama talk about “American interests” and
“American values” (Fukuyama and McFaul); skeptics of Wilsonian approaches to
foreign policy still argue that the maintenance and promotion of democracy are in
American interests as well as making second-order claims to humanitarian benefits
(Rice); and USAID promotes its mission using both the language of global values and
the national interest: “We partner to end extreme poverty and to promote resilient,
democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity”(USAID). After
careful study of the existing literature on democracy promotion, it makes sense that
66
the only major framing study of democracy promotion tests frames using both these
dimensions of self-interest and humanitarian values (Brancati).
Certainly, American political speeches are full of explanations of why American
promotion of democracy is in the national interest. The “Clinton Doctrine”, also
known as “Democratic Enlargement”, saw democracy promotion framed as accruing
to America’s benefit (Brinkley; Søndergaard). In one of the key speeches outlining
the Clinton Doctrine, Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security Advisor, was quick
to connect the administration’s desire to promote democracy and American
strategic interest:
This is not a democratic crusade; it is a pragmatic commitment to see freedom
take hold where that will help us most. Thus, we must target our effort to assist
states that affect our strategic interests, such as those with large economies,
critical locations, nuclear weapons or the potential to generate refugee flows
into our own nation or into key friends and allies. We must focus our efforts
where we have the most leverage. (Lake)
Perhaps the pithiest summation was in the title of a piece in The National Interest by
Zalmay Khalilzad, a former permanent representative to the U.N. and ambassador to
Afghnanistan and Iraq: “Democracy Promotion Benefits the United States”
(Khalilzad).
From the left-wing radical Noam Chomsky to the most rock-ribbed
neoconservatives, it is common to point out that the United States often claims to be
acting in the interests of humanity and not just its own national interest. Whether it
is operating as the global provider of public goods as an international hegemon
(Kindleberger) or providing security guarantees to smaller countries, debate rages
about whether U.S. foreign policy can best be described as cooperative and public-
spirited, or competitive and self-interested. Certainly there are any number of public
statements to point to arguing for democracy promotion on either basis.
Brancati claims that the epitome of the humanitarian-interest approach is Wilson’s
public explanation of the reason for entering the First World War: “to make the
world safe for democracy.” Similarly, one can see a parallel refrain in public
comments from a former Obama official who refers to democracy as a “world value”
(McFaul). And evocations of the public-spiritedness of American foreign policy are
not limited to political officials but are also used by those who advise them, with one
prominent public intellectual pointing to American democracy promotion as
stemming from the moralistic urgings of the American people:
If one really believes that all people are created equal, and are endowed by
their Creator with inalienable rights, it becomes very hard to believe that by
“all people” we mean merely “all citizens of the United States of America.”
There is a sense in which the legitimacy of American domestic institutions rests
on a set of assumptions about what world society should be like, how all human
67
beings should live. We could not escape this universalism even if we decided we
wanted to (Mead).
It has long been argued by political scientists that democracy provides many
benefits to countries who transition to the form of government: democracies have
higher rates of economic growth (Przeworski and Limongi; Acemoglu et al); they are
said to alleviate ethnic factionalism (Burgess et al); and Amartya Sen famously
proposed that no democracy has ever suffered a famine (Sen). Democratic peace
theory states that democracies don’t go to war with other democracies (Maoz and
Russett; Cox). American policymakers will often point out such benefits for partner
countries when advocating for an increased American dedication to the promotion
of democracy. Indeed, the empirical regularities discovered by academics are
translated into a more messianic timbre in the advocacy of policymakers. In a letter
signed by a former Secretary of State, a Texas Congressman, a former under-
Secretary of State, a former Senator, and other eminences, the benefits of American
democracy assistance for other countries are given the status of a moral imperative:
A variety of countries are seeking to transition to democracy and are actively
seeking America’s help to establish free media; attack corruption; manage
public resources effectively; establish property rights; protect the rights of
individuals, religious groups, and minorities; ensure the right to petition their
elected officials; organize political campaigns; ensure free and fair elections;
and establish think tanks. Other newer democracies are trying to deliver on the
promise of democracy by governing justly and in ways that promote
meaningful economic opportunities and growth. If they fail, the cause of
democracy will be set back, and we will live in a darker world. Women,
minority, and religious groups are seeking our help to ensure that their voices
are heard. Finally, there are a number of countries that continue to repress
their own citizens in ways that are almost unthinkable in the 21st century. We
need to work with labor unions, church groups, civil society organizations, the
private sector, dissident groups, and diasporas to ensure that positive change
happens and that societies can create governments that are responsive,
accountable, and respectful of human rights. (Center for American Progress
and the Center for Strategic and International Studies)
Brancati finds no statistical difference between appeals to humanitarian values and
those based on self-interest. However, as Brancati herself acknowledges, this goes
against a welter of literature that predicts self-interest to be a more powerful
motivator. Scholars have explicitly argued that democracy promotion is favored
largely because the public see it as a way of promoting national interests overseas
(Drezner). Scholars in the realist tradition argue that states calculate their moves on
the international stage according to what might advantage themselves materially,
and therefore better safeguard their own security. She cites studies that show
appeals to the national interest affecting public opinion in topics from immigration
(Hainmueller and Hiscox) to trade (Lü, Scheve, and Slaughter). Brancati’s non-
finding buttresses an emerging literature that sees a formidable role for altruism in
68
experiments and dictator game simulations (Eckel and Grossman). George Stigler
once said that when “self-interest and ethical values with wide verbal allegiance are
in conflict, much of the time, most of the time in fact, self-interest-theory… will win”
(Stigler); Brancati’s experiment brings this declaration into further doubt. We can
and do see self-interest frames as well as paeans to the better angels of our nature,
but Brancati’s surprising finding suggests that we should not expect one frame to be
more persuasive than the other.
Self-interested and humanitarian reasons are prevalent in calls to boost
commitment to democracy promotion, but do advocates also use episodic and
thematic frames for their cause? Figures like Malala Yousafzai served as an example
of those who saw democracy promotion in “AfPak” as an American commitment to
girls like Malala throughout the region. As Malala (as she simply came to be known)
traveled through the United States, stopping in at the White House and TV studios
while promoting her memoir, articles used her story to talk in an episodic fashion
about America’s democracy promotion agenda. She became the embodiment of the
wider U.S. foreign policy agenda in promoting democracy in the region.
Indeed, the president himself is apt to use vivid examples of real activists on the
ground to “sell” his democracy promotion position. In a high-profile address at the
Clinton Global Initiative, President Obama called out specific examples of people and
groups as evidence of the righteousness of his administration’s cause:
They are the reason I can stand here today as President of the United
States. It’s citizens who, right now, are standing up for the freedom that is their
God-given right.
And I’ve seen it myself, in the advocates and activists that I’ve met all over the
world. I’ve seen it in the courage of Berta Soler, the leader of Cuba’s Ladies in
White who endure harassment and arrest in order to win freedom for their
loved ones and for the Cuban people. I’ve seen it in the determination of
Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg who speak up for rule of law and human
rights. I’ve seen it the passion of advocates in Senegal who nurture their
democracy, and young Africans across the continent who are helping to
marshal in Africa’s rise. I’ve seen it the hope of young Palestinians in Ramallah,
who dream of building their future in a free and independent state. I see it in
the perseverance of men and women in Burma who are striving to build a
democracy against the odds. (Obama)
Episodic frames, like most appeals for increased aid to those in other countries, are
commonly deployed to put a face and a name to American democracy aid.
However, just as episodic frames are often used to inspire Americans’ moral
commitment to aiding others, thematic frames are often deployed by academics and
policymakers to reassure the reader or listener that there is a solid evidence base to
suggest that money spent gets results, either for the United States or for the people
69
in the state targeted with American largesse. The majority of democracy promotion
reports cited above took a decidedly thematic overview of the need for American
commitment to promoting democracy. In reality, just as we see advocacy on this
issue speak in terms of interests and values, so too we can and do see both thematic
and episodic frames used commonly when it comes to talking about democracy
promotion.
In summary, scholars who study framing exhort us to find real examples of frames
inductively from surveying the literature, newspaper reports, and public speeches
on a topic. In looking at the democracy promotion literature – a topic under-studied
in framing analysis – we see the same dichotomy recurring over and over again:
democracy promotion serves American interests, on the one hand; equally, on the
other hand, it also has great benefits for people around the world and we have a
moral duty to pursue the policy for those ends. In shorthand, we might refer to these
two frames as “self-interest” and “humanitarian values” (or “other-interest”).
Further, framing scholars have often found that frames can be used with different
stylistic formats, thematic and episodic frames. In other studies the difference
between the two styles of frames has proved important for the action that it
inspires. Surveying the literature, we too see examples of episodic and thematic
frames when it comes to those advocating for democracy promotion.
Self-interest versus humanitarian, episodic and thematic, the following section
outlines a framing experiment to see whether the deployment of the content and
style of frame makes a difference to an audience when called upon to express their
support for a democracy promotion budget level and for the type of projects USAID
should pursue to foster democracy overseas.
Framing: An Experiment
16
Vignette-style experiments have been used to investigate a variety of different
topics ranging from tolerance for corrupt politicians in India (Banerjee et al.) to
immigration (Hainmueller and Hiscox), in order to tease out the mechanisms
underlying support for the issue and not just the level of that support. The design for
the experiment in this paper did not stray too far from the design in Brancati’s
experiment on self-interest and humanitarianism (Brancati).
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) program was used to collect a sample of 2006
American adults. MTurk is a program, run by Amazon, which hosts 3 million people
worldwide who, for small amounts of money, perform short online tasks. Scholars
have recommended MTurk as a favorable alternative to the in-person convenience
16
Because of the overlap in protocols and subject pool between this experiment and
another investigating the effectiveness of competitive framing by the same author,
much of this section draws on material used in that paper.
70
samples which are widely used in political science and international relations
research (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz). Prior research in social science has shown
consistency with replicated studies using MTurk study pools (Berinsky, Huber, and
Lenz 366). As such, MTurk is used widely in the social scientific community for
access to easy and cost-effective experiment pools.
Democracy promotion was not uppermost in the American imagination in May and
June of 2015 (the time the experiment was conducted). The Arab Spring was in the
rearview mirror of journalists and consumers of news, and coverage of Islamic State
and the shootings at Bataclan were still in the future. The vignettes were also
designed to be as non-attributable as possible in terms of the people, countries and
specific actions being discussed, otherwise this would weaken the effect of the cues
(Tversky and Kahneman).
The experiment started by asking respondents to read the consent information and
related terms and conditions of taking part in the experiment. As is usual in human
subject research, a pre-test of support for democracy promotion was issued.
Respondents were then informed of the mission and activities of USAID’s democracy
promotion projects
17
, as well as the amount of funding allocated to it, and were
asked whether this was much too little, slightly too little, just right, slightly too
much, or much too much (see Appendix I for wording). Respondents were also
asked to allocate democracy promotion funding to different types of USAID
projects
18
(also laid out in Appendix I) using a slider, such that the totality of the
budget was assigned. Respondents were also asked to fill out some demographic
information and complete a short personality test (see Appendix II). As funding
questions were asked as a pre-test before the vignettes as well as afterwards, this
also had the beneficial effect of being a distractor test that lessened the chances that
the pre-test would effectively prime the post-test.
There were four vignettes that were designed to resemble popular pro-democracy
promotion frames: national interest and episodic, national interest and thematic,
humanitarian-based and episodic, and humanitarian-based and thematic. Two
controls were created (vaguely resembling the other frames but devoid of the
democracy promotion cues). Finally, an instability frame was written. All of these
vignettes can be seen in Appendix III. Commentaries on how these vignettes were
composed and the sources for their content can be seen in another essay in this
dissertation. Respondents were randomly assigned to groups who received two of
the vignettes. After every vignette a compliance test (also in Appendix III) –
questions about the article that they just read – was given and those who scored
lower than two correct questions out of three were dropped from the study. Finally,
after the two vignettes, a post-test exactly the same as the pre-test was given again.
17
Information was taken directly from the agency’s website.
18
The titles and descriptions of these different types of project were taken from
USAID’s website.
71
Hypotheses
Brancati’s previous study suggested that there should be no real difference between
appeals to self-interest and humanitarian values. However, she did not test the
effect of the different types of appeal on which programs might be more likely to be
supported, or the effect of episodic and thematic frames on either. So we should
start with the hypothesis that we can replicate her original study in finding no
difference between appeals to self-interest and humanitarian appeals.
Hypothesis 1: those respondents who received self-interest frames (both thematic
and episodic) should not support a higher democracy promotion budget
significantly more than those who received a humanitarian frame.
The categories of democracy assistance are Elections and Political Processes, Rule of
Law Programs, Civil Society Programs, and Governance Programs. There is nothing
in the academic literature to suggest that self-interest or humanitarian frames
should make one favor one type of project over the others (as previous studies have
not looked at support for the mix of democracy promotion projects, only democracy
promotion tout court). We know, however, from Iyengar that thematic frames
should make an audience think of an issue in terms of assigning responsibility to
large, structural causes, whereas episodic frames are likely, on the other hand, to see
us thinking of personal contingency and agency as being a root cause. We also know,
from everything from the philosophical investigations of Peter Singer to the Milgram
experiments, that feelings of proximity are likely to increase our chances of acting in
a more altruistic fashion. Certain programs would seem to respond to threats to
immediate personal security more clearly than others.
For example, we might suggest that other-interest frames might make one more
likely to support rule of law projects in a target country, as appeals to the interests
of those within the state tend to be about the arbitrary and venal nature of state
power and the violence that might befall the average “citizen”. Indeed, the most
common critique of non-democracies in the Western media is the extra-judicial use
of executive power. The rule of law might see the immediate threat of extra-judicial
violence reined in.
Hypothesis 2: those respondents who received other-interest frames (both
thematic and episodic) should be more likely to support a higher democracy
promotion budget for rule of law projects than those who received a humanitarian
frame.
We might also hypothesize that civil society projects have a more tenuous link to
our own self-interest than they do for the target population. This might mean that
72
those exposed to humanitarian frames would be more likely to support such
programs than those who did not receive such a frame.
Hypothesis 3: those respondents who received humanitarian frames (both
thematic and episodic) should be more likely to support a higher democracy
promotion budget for civil society projects than those who did not receive one.
What about our investigation into the difference between episodic and thematic
frames? International Relations theorists who stress international decision-making
as a cost-benefit calculation would likely see thematic frames as yielding more
usable information than appeals to affect (Bueno de Mesquita 2010). The Realist
tradition in International Relations would think that those contemplating the
national interest would eschew calculations of benefit to others, especially those
rooted in emotion rather than a more hard-headed approach. Forsythe puts it
succinctly: “the wise policy maker [is] not moved by sentiment, only by hard-headed
calculations of power and security. The touchstone for realist politics was national
interest, not personal welfare and certainly not universal human rights” (Forsythe
48). Promoting democracy could be seen as a complicated, structural issue rather
than one more obviously about personalities. We should expect to see thematic
arguments – those that reflect the complicated nature of democracy promotion – be
more persuasive.
Hypothesis 4: Thematic frames will see a higher budget allocation for democracy
promotion than episodic frames.
Following a similar logic to Hypothesis 2, we might assume that those who receive
episodic frames about particular peril to specific people might spur respondents to
favor rule of law projects to try and clamp down on immediate violence
(Hypothesis 5). Following Iyengar’s thinking about agential vs. structural change,
however, we might also hypothesize that structural changes such as governance
might appeal more to those who received thematic frames (Hypothesis 6), while
more immediate changes focused on individual agency, such as elections, might be
favored by those who are exposed to episodic frames (Hypothesis 7).
Hypothesis 5: Episodic frames will see a higher budget allocation for Rule of Law
projects.
Hypothesis 6: Thematic frames will see a higher budget allocation for Governance
projects.
Hypothesis 7: Episodic frames will see a higher budget allocation for Elections and
Political Processes projects.
73
Results
Hypothesis 1: those respondents who received self-interest frames (both thematic
and episodic) should not support a higher democracy promotion budget
significantly more than those who received a humanitarian frame.
Our first hypothesis was to see whether Brancati’s findings hold up with this new
sample.
Interestingly, we find that those who received the self-interest frame do indeed
support a higher democracy promotion budget. The finding is significant at the 95%
level. On the scale where 1 means “significantly lower” and 5 means “significantly
higher” we see the self-interested appeal raises the average response by almost a
quarter of a point.
Hypothesis 2: those respondents who received other-interest frames (both
thematic and episodic) should be more likely to support a higher democracy
promotion budget for rule of law projects than those who received a self-interested
frame.
X here is the average percentage participants gave to the budget for rule of law
projects if they received the self-interested frame, and Y for those who received the
other-interested or humanitarian frame. As can be seen from the table above, this
hypothesis cannot be supported. There is no statistically significant difference in
terms of support for rule of law projects between those who received the self-
interest frames and those who received the humanitarian frames.
Hypothesis 3: those respondents who received humanitarian frames (both
thematic and episodic) should be more likely to support a higher democracy
promotion budget for civil society projects than those who did not receive one.
74
X here is the average percentage participants gave to the budget for civil society
projects if they received the self-interested frame, Y for those who received the
other-interested or humanitarian frame. The table above shows that this hypothesis
cannot be supported. The difference in results between the two frames comes
nowhere close to being supported.
Hypothesis 4: Thematic frames will see a higher budget allocation for democracy
promotion than episodic frames.
Again, this cannot be supported statistically. Those who received the episodic frame
had higher support for increasing the democracy promotion budget but not at a high
enough level to conclude that this difference is significant.
Hypothesis 5: Episodic frames will see a higher budget allocation for Rule of Law
projects.
This hypothesis can be supported at the 95% confidence level. Support for rule of
law projects went up from an average of 27% to 28.6% of the overall democracy
promotion budget allotted, for those who were exposed to episodic frames
compared to those who received thematic frames.
Hypothesis 6: Thematic frames will see a higher budget allocation for Governance
projects.
We do not find support for this hypothesis in the data.
Hypothesis 7: Episodic frames will see a higher budget allocation for Elections and
Political Processes projects.
75
Again, this hypothesis is not supported in the data.
In summary, two statistically significant relationships were found in the data. First,
self-interest appeals were statistically significantly more influential than those that
appealed to humanitarian values, pace Brancati. Second, episodic appeals (to both
self- and other-interest) were also more successful at seeing more funding for Rule
of Law projects compared to the alternatives in USAID’s portfolio.
Conclusions and Proposals for Further Research
One of the most well-known books on the shelves of most political communications
specialists is one called “Words that Work” (Luntz). Policy advocates know that how
one talks about an issue can be decisive in moving public opinion behind it. Indeed,
political science has long noted that mass opinion is a lot less consistent and
ideological than elite worldviews (Converse). Political scientists, therefore, have
been keen to formulate a theory of “framing”: how elites use simplified versions of
reality in order to commandeer public support.
Framing studies have grown hugely popular within political science, but those who
have pioneered thinking about framing have been keen to keep the empirical testing
of frames moored to some basic theoretical expectations (Chong and Druckman,
"Framing Theory"). Frames should be inductively formulated from a wide array of
literature on the topic in question and should be reducible to key aspects that make
the frame distinct. A survey of the democracy promotion literature yields a
consistent dichotomy in how the topic is framed: self-interest (i.e. funding
democracy promotion programs benefits the United States) and humanitarian
values (i.e. we should fund democracy programs because it benefits those whom the
programs are aimed at overseas). The most well-known distinction in terms of
styles of frames, as opposed to framed content, is also observable: Iyengar’s
distinction between thematic frames (overviews of a policy area using statistics,
academic studies, and “objective” data) and episodic framing (those which use one
person’s experience as an example of a wider phenomenon) also shows up
commonly in how advocates talk about democracy promotion.
Using these four frames – self-interest and humanitarian, thematic and episodic –
this paper tested how frames can move opinion on the public’s willingness to fund
USAID’s budget, and what types of project the public might be more likely to fund
from USAID’s portfolio.
76
Pace Brancati’s landmark 2014 study, we see that those that appeal to the
audience’s self-interest in benefiting the United States work significantly better than
those that appeal to the wellbeing of the target country. This contradicts Brancati’s
finding of no such difference between the two different types of appeal. This finding
also speaks to the wider literature about self-interest and altruism in laboratory
experiments. Whereas scholars have found increasing evidence for the role of
altruism in experiments like dictator games (Eckel and Grossman), this runs up
against accounts in international relations theory which stress self-help and the
pursuit of the national interest above all other considerations. This finding
buttresses the idea that appealing to enlightened self-interest is more likely to see
states contributing to public goods like promoting democracy where benefits can
otherwise be seen as intangible or overly abstract.
Second, no framing study has been performed which looks at the difference between
episodic and thematic frames as they apply to democracy promotion. The paper
does not find one type of appeal more persuasive than the other when looking at the
overall budget, but does find a difference when it comes to what types of project one
might favor: episodic appeals make people more inclined to support rule of law
projects compared to the other projects USAID tends to carry out.
As this is the first study of its kind, the theoretical priors that generated this
hypothesis were that episodic frames on democracy promotion are likely to stress
the threat of violence, arbitrary rule, and capricious application of paramilitary or
legal enforcement. Rule of law projects, when presented with this imagery, might be
seen as more resonant than other types of project (e.g. civil society, elections) that
might well benefit the country more widely rather than end violence to the specific
people mentioned in an episodic frame. Needless to say, further studies should
investigate this threat mechanism further in trying to confirm this finding.
Considering the new ground this study breaks, one might suggest working to
confirm this paper’s findings when it comes to episodic and thematic frames, as well
as building on the work here and in Brancati on self-interest appeals and
humanitarian values. Brancati’s initial test of self-interest versus humanitarian
appeals was reversed in this study. Further work might tease out whether this is
bad luck or due to some unforeseen theoretical or methodological oversight.
However, episodic vs. thematic frames have not been tested prior to this paper: it
would be worth testing a variety of different episodic frames and thematic appeals
to see if a mechanism can be isolated as to what causes the difference in public
response.
A follow-up qualitative study with the subject pool, beyond the scope of this paper,
might ask why certain frames work when others don’t. Does the result hold when
we introduce other forms of stimuli, like pictures or prompts that resemble other
types of media that citizens are likely to be exposed to?
77
Finally, this study made certain to remove all partisan cues that might trigger some
to follow policies that they might otherwise have followed anyway because of
support for the political group carrying them out. However, one might ask: what
would happen if we deliberately played with partisan cues in this way? Does politics
really stop at the water’s edge? Or do we use political heuristics of party and leader
to determine issues as crucial as whether U.S. foreign policy should promote
democracy overseas? So often, it seems, American citizens will be hawks when their
side professes that faith, only to become apostates when the opposing party
proposes much the same thing when they claim power.
When considering framing studies we should also contemplate normatively how
comfortable we are with political leadership manipulating public consent for such
important public policy aims. If we are to make the “promotion” of democracy
promotion a problem to be analyzed, it would also be interesting to posit how we
can better inform the potential and pitfalls of American democracy promotion.
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Appendix I
Democracy Promotion Budget I
Please read the following:
WHAT IS USAID?
As described on their website “USAID is the lead U.S. Government agency that works
to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize
their potential.”
WHAT DOES USAID DO?
USAID works in over 100 countries to:
• Promote broadly shared economic prosperity;
87
• Strengthen democracy and good governance;
• Protect human rights;
• Improve global health,
• Advance food security and agriculture;
• Improve environmental sustainability;
• Further education;
• Help societies prevent and recover from conflicts; and
• Provide humanitarian assistance in the wake of natural and man-made
disasters.
WHAT IS USAID’S BUDGET?
USAID is allocated approximately 1 percent of the total federal budget. USAID’s
budget, therefore, amounted to $20.4bn in Fiscal Year 2014.
DEMOCRACY, RIGHTS AND GOVERNANCE
Leaving aside Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, USAID spent $860m on democracy,
rights and governance projects in 2014.
Do you think this amount was too low or too high?
Much Too High
Slightly Too High
Just Right
Slightly Too Low
Much Too Low
Please advance to the next screen.
Democracy Assistance Projects
USAID funds various types of projects with the aim of assisting democracy in other
countries. What percentage of USAID’s budget for these projects should be assigned
to each type of project?
Elections and Political Processes
Activities oriented towards electoral assistance, support for the development of
political parties, and legislative representation.
Percentage-
Rule of Law Programs
Funding for human rights programs and for legal and judicial development.
88
Percentage-
Civil Society Programs
Programs oriented towards the promotion of independent mass media, civic
education, and labor organization.
Percentage-
Governance Programs
A very diverse category, this variable covers transparency and anti-corruption
projects, decentralization, local government, and legislative assistance programs.
Percentage-
Please advance to the next screen.
Appendix II
Demographic Background
Please answer the following questions.
What is your gender?
Male / Female
How old are you?
What race do you consider yourself to be? (Select the option that best applies)
Black / African American White / Caucasian Hispanic / Latino(a) / Other Asian
Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, Democrat, or as
an independent? (Select the option that best applies):
Strongly Republican / Republican / Independent but lean Republican / Independent
Independent but lean Democrat / Democrat / Strongly Democrat
Below is a scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from
“extremely conservative” to “extremely liberal.” Where would you place yourself on this
scale?
89
Extremely Liberal / Liberal / Slightly Liberal / Moderate / Slightly Conservative
Conservative / Extremely Conservative
What is your highest level of education?
Some high school / High school graduate / Some college / College graduate
Which of the following best describes the total pre-tax income earned by everyone
in your household last year?
Up to $20,000
$20,000 to $35,000
$35,000 to $50,000
$50,000 to $75,000
$75,000 to $100,000
$100,000 to $125,000
$125,000 to $150,000
$150,000 and over
Please advance to the next screen.
Personality Type
Here are a number of personality traits that may or may not apply to you. Please
write a number next to each statement to indicate the extent to which you agree or
disagree with that statement. You should rate the extent to which the pair of traits
applies to you, even if one characteristic applies more strongly than the other.
Disagree Strongly 1
Disagree 2
Disagree Moderately 3
Neither Agree nor Disagree 4
Agree Moderately 5
Agree 6
Agree Strongly 7
I see myself as:
1. _____ Extraverted, enthusiastic.
2. _____ Critical, quarrelsome.
3. _____ Dependable, self-disciplined.
4. _____ Anxious, easily upset.
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5. _____ Open to new experiences, complex.
6. _____ Reserved, quiet.
7. _____ Sympathetic, warm.
8. _____ Disorganized, careless.
9. _____ Calm, emotionally stable.
10. ____Conventional, uncreative.
Please advance to the next screen.
Appendix III
Vignette A
The Arguments About Democracy Promotion
Secretary of State Launches Report With Keynote Speech Calling for Renewed
American Commitment to Promoting Democracy Around the World
NEW YORK (AP) —The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that
more aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
“The evidence is clear: spreading democracy will directly advance the national
interests of the United States, because democracies will not launch wars or terrorist
attacks against the United States, will not produce refugees seeking asylum in the
United States, and will tend to ally with the United States,” the Secretary said in a
keynote address Sunday at the Council for Foreign Relations in New York. “This is
not opinion, it’s fact and it’s borne out by history.”
The Pentagon and State Department had been consulting academics over the last
year on direction of the United States’ posture towards the spread of democracy
abroad. The speech aimed to sum up the report’s key takeaways.
91
“The most stable finding in International Relations is that democracies do not go to
war with each other. If democracies virtually never go to war with one another, no
democracy will wage war against the United States. Democracies are unlikely to get
into crises or militarized disputes with the United States. Promoting democracy may
usher in a more peaceful world; it also will enhance the national security of the
United States by eliminating potential military threats. The United States would be
more secure if Russia, China, and at least some countries in the Arab and Islamic
worlds became stable democracies.”
The Secretary stressed the academics’ findings on the fact that democracies make
better allies for America throughout the world and the economic opportunities that
come with the spread of democracy. “The global spread of democracy will advance
American interests by creating more potential allies. Historically, most of America's
allies have been democracies. In general, democracies are much more likely to ally
with one another. Furthermore, democracies are much more likely to have open
economies, providing opportunity for investments for American firms and jobs right
here at home.”
The Secretary was keen to emphasize the potential security benefits, including the
lower threat of terrorism associated with having more democracies: “Spreading
democracy is likely to enhance U.S. national security because democracies will not
support terrorist acts against the United States. The world's principal sponsors of
international terrorism are harsh, authoritarian regimes, not peace-loving
democracies.”
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to push for
Congressional support for the report’s main recommendations. The Senate was due
to ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss the proposals.
Words: 446
Compliance Questions
1) Who made the speech from the article?
• The Secretary of Defense?
92
• The President?
• The Secretary of State?
2) Who have the Pentagon and State Department been consulting for the report?
• Practitioners?
• Academics?
• Foreign Leaders?
3) Which reason is given for spreading democracy in the speech?
• Enhances U.S. national security because democracies will not support
terrorist acts against the United States?
• Reflects U.S. values of freedom and opportunity?
• Will benefit people living under dictatorships?
Vignette B
Secretary of State Launches Report With Keynote Speech And Surprise Guest
Calling for U.S. Promotion of Democracy Around the World
NEW YORK (AP) —The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that
more aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
The Secretary of State welcomed Isla, 12, to the stage, a young woman who had
welcomed US promotion of democracy in her home country. “I lived in a country
that did not respect me or my family. My brother was taken from our home for being
too interested in politics. My parents were worried that they would take me too.
They left my brother’s body in the middle of the village. I knew one day the bandits
would be forced out by the people. My parents said when the election happened
that they were voting in my brother’s memory too. He gave his life so we could be
free.”
The Secretary of State stood alongside Isla and explained that the US had been
sponsoring projects in Isla’s region for a few years before the revolution that
toppled the regime. “Thanks to the generosity of the American people Isla gets to
93
do what so many young American girls Isla’s age do every morning: kiss their
parents and walk to school.”
Isla’s parents held a picture of Isla’s brother as they walked into the voting booth.
He had worked for an opposition party that caught the attention of the ruling
regime, which ruthlessly suppressed opposition groups before the democratic
revolution. Isla stayed at home with her parents as schooling for young women was
not permitted. Isla’s mother, Anna, has agreed to take up a role as a teacher at the
new local school for girls.
Isla was presented with an American flag pin in honor of the occasion. Sweeping
aside some brown hair from her eyes, and suppressing the urge to cry (as she later
told reporters), Isla addressed a gathering of campaigners who had sought to bring
attention to abuses under the old regime. “Our nightmare is over, and we have
started to dream again”, she said. When asked what her dream now was, Isla
expressed the optimism of her country’s new democratic future: “I want to be the
first female President of my country”. The Secretary of State joked that his party
would love to have someone of Isla’s talents on the ballot right here at home.
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to push for
Congressional support for further democracy promotion. The Senate was due to
ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss proposals.
Words: 449
Compliance Questions
1) What is the name of the guest of the Secretary of State?
• Esther?
• Isla?
• Aura?
2) Whose picture did her parents hold up when they went in to vote?
• The President’s?
• The old democratic leader of their country?
94
• Her brother’s?
3) What did she say her dream was?
• To live in peace?
• To travel to the United States?
• To be president of her country?
Vignette C
Fmr. Secretary of State Criticizes Report on Democracy Promotion, Cites
Dangers of “Instability” and “Putting American Interests at Risk”
NEW YORK (AP) — Responding to the Administration’s call for a renewed
commitment to promote democracy abroad, the former Secretary of State warned
that democracy often caused regional instability, that new democratic governments
would not always serve American interests, and that pro-American authoritarian
regimes could be replaced by governments hostile to U.S. interests.
"These linkages have been grossly oversimplified in a way that misleads the
American public", he said. "We're taking out all of the qualifiers and all of the
nuances. Giving people the right to vote doesn't solve the [national security]
problem."
He challenged the notion that common systems of governance translate to shared
foreign policy interests and priorities. For example, while many have praised the
budding relationship between the world's oldest democracy-the United States-and
other democratic powers, the former Secretary of State noted recent Congressional
complaints about democratic allies’ ties to states hostile to the United States.
Furthermore, many democracies are generally apathetic towards promoting
democracy beyond their borders. Despite sharing democratic values and a desire to
stop nuclear proliferation, combat terrorism, and solve regional tensions, there is no
shared perception of these threats and the correct approach to handling them.
The former Secretary of State challenged the existence of moral absolutes in
promoting democracy.
95
"Platitudes about democracy or freedom might sell very well, but they don't really
inform us", he said. Democracy engineering involves accepting "awesome" moral
responsibility for the consequences, which must be taken far more seriously.
“History tells us that we have to be hard-headed when it comes to promoting
American interests. We don’t choose the world we live in. We work with those
countries that want to work with us. We don’t pick and choose allies based on how
we wish the world would look like in an ideal world. And whenever we think we can
remake the world according to some grand plan, it never seems to work out how
some braniacs in Washington planned it. It’s better to be hard-headed than soft-
hearted.”
The former Secretary of State was speaking in response to the launch of a new
democracy promotion strategy co-authored by the Pentagon and State
Department.
The Secretary of State was due to meet with key legislators from both parties to
push for Congressional support for the report’s main recommendations, which
inspired today’s interjection from his predecessor at State. The Senate was due to
ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss the proposals. His predecessor’s comments are sure to
complicate those discussions.
Words: 440
Compliance Questions
1) Which former public official is named as giving the speech in the article?
• The former First Lady?
• The former Defense Secretary?
• The former Secretary of State?
2) What was his warning in his speech?
• Common systems of governance do not always translate to shared foreign
policy interests and priorities?
• Personal relationships between leaders can help solve common problems?
96
• Alliances can lead to trust and common interests over time?
3) What inspired the former public official’s intervention in the debate?
• The launch of a presidential campaign of a rival?
• His successor launching a report?
• The launch of a new naval ship in the Middle East?
Vignette D
Secretary of State Enlists Taylor Swift to Mark US’s Contribution to World Day of
Music
NEW YORK (AP) -- Taylor Swift's mega-selling "1989" album has earned the pop star 14
nominations at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards and now an ambassadorial role as part
of the US’s contribution to the World Day of Music, which was marked Tuesday.
Swift, who recently made headlines for being snapped stepping out with a mystery British
dining companion in Los Angeles, stepped out with the distinctly less-mysterious
Secretary of State in Washington D.C. Tuesday to mark the Day of Music, which saw
countries throughout the world mark the occasion with music and celebrations.
“It’s truly an honor to represent your country in any capacity. I was raised on music from
Etta James to Johnny Cash, Leadbelly to Elvis Presley, and our music has been amongst
our greatest gifts to the world”, said Swift. The musician plays a concert at RFK stadium
Tuesday night, with money being donated to music projects in low-income
neighborhoods.
The Secretary of State revealed his own passion for American roots music but said
people everywhere were inspired by traditional American music: “For so many people
American music brought the sound of freedom. Music, at its best, gave song to the spirit
of a people and told stories about hopes and dreams that transcended borders and
political boundaries. And in return we’ve gained so much from the music the world has
given us, from Beatlemania to Daft Punk!”
The Secretary of State and Taylor Swift were greeted by swarms of school kids wearing
t-shirts emblazoned with World Music Day’s guitar logo. “They’re here to see me!” joked
97
the Secretary. Ms Swift joked that the Secretary knew more about music than she knew
about politics: “Still, let’s rock the vote! Register to vote and find your voice in how our
country works.”
The Day saw similar events held across the world, from Bogota to Berlin, Djibouti to
Dublin. The UN General-Secretary, Ban-Ki Moon, paired up with Russian boyband
“Master Margarita” for a live cybercast on Youtube encouraging kids to take up a musical
instrument. The organization’s aim is for 5% more kids throughout the world to take up
music in the next ten years. Reports agree that introducing kids to music at a young age
can lead to gains in more traditional academic subjects.
The Secretary of State ended his speech with some not-to-subtle references to Swift’s
latest album, which has broken numerous sales records. “Don’t shake it off, shake it up!”
said the Secretary of State. Judging by the raptured attention paid to Ms Swift by the
children in attendance, the Secretary of State had never felt more hip.
Words: 448
Compliance Questions
1) Which pop star is mentioned as the main character of the article?
• Katy Perry?
• Madonna?
• Taylor Swift?
2) What Day was being Commemorated?
• World Music Day?
• World Literature Day?
• World Nature Day?
3) The pop star mentioned in the article urged attendees to do what?
• Rock the mic?
• Rock the vote?
• Rock the world?
98
Vignette E
Secretary of State Makes World Literacy Day with Visit from Author Gary
Shteyngart
(AP) - Gary Shteyngart, the author of such books as “Absurdistan” and “Little
Failure”, joined the Secretary of State in Washington D.C. Thursday for the launch
of World Literacy Day. The author, who left his native St Petersburg as a small child
and who has written movingly about the immigrant experience in the United States,
spoke of how books were his “compass” to steady himself in “the buffeting that life
so often sends our way”. Shteyngart said that he was honored to attend “but
probably more surprised than anything, considering what I’ve written about
politicians!”
The Secretary of State was joined by thousands of high school students from
around the country to mark the occasion, a day being celebrated worldwide. “We
have made tremendous strides in fighting the scourge of illiteracy, but we must
never get complacent. Not promoting literacy worldwide, not fighting illiteracy here
at home.”
The Secretary went on to say that literacy had many benefits beyond the simple
enjoyments of a story well told: “The old saying that knowledge is power holds
good today. Liberty is about being able to exercise meaningful choices: what do
you want to be? Who do you want to marry? Who should you vote for? The ability
to read opens up how we can better lead our lives.”
Shteyngart carried on this theme in his remarks: “Books are markers of meaning.
We remember where we were when we got married, had kids, met our best friends;
books share these same qualities of marking a transition between who we were to
who we are. So many people I spoke to talk about their favorite books as a child
with the same reverence they might about a long-lost friend. In an adult world
where we so often struggle to connect with one another, reading a challenging
novel is like taking a bath in someone’s mind. There’s so much to fight for in getting
access to books, from Los Angeles to Lagos.”
Students were asked to name their favorite books and many of the authors would
be recognized worldwide, from J.K. Rowling to Roald Dahl.
99
The U.N. has set ambitious targets on eradicating worldwide illiteracy by 2030. The
twin challenges to tackle the problem were breaking cycles of illiteracy by
addressing adult illiteracy and getting students access to books at a young age.
The Secretary of State was due to meet with key legislators from both parties to
push for Congressional support for action to tackle adult illiteracy. The Senate was
due to ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee
next week to further discuss the proposals.
Words: 448
Compliance Questions
1) Where was Gary Shteyngart born?
• Riga?
• St Petersburg?
• Washington DC?
2) Shteyngart describes books as what?
• “Markers of meaning”?
• “Our lives in slow motion”?
• “Our common inheritance”?
3) What is the political target mentioned in the article?
• The Federal Government has set ambitious targets for 10 books in every
home by 2040
• The U.N. has set ambitious targets on eradicating worldwide illiteracy by
2030
• The state of Texas has set ambitious targets for a library in every major town
by 2020
Vignette F
Secretary of State Launches Report With Keynote Speech Calling for Renewed
American Commitment to Promoting Democracy Around the World
100
NEW YORK (AP) — The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that
more aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
“The evidence is clear: The United States should attempt to spread democracy
because people generally live better lives under democratic governments.
Compared to inhabitants of non-democracies, citizens of democracies enjoy
greater individual liberty, political stability, freedom from governmental violence,
enhanced quality of life, and a much lower risk of suffering a famine,” the Secretary
said in a keynote address Sunday at the Council for Foreign Relations in New York.
“This is not opinion, it’s fact and it’s borne out by history.”
The Secretary was speaking at the launch of a new democracy promotion strategy
co-authored by the Pentagon and State Department. The two Departments had
been consulting academics over the last year on the United States’ posture towards
assisting the spread of democracy abroad. The speech aimed to sum up the
report’s key takeaways.
“First, as human beings, American should and do feel some obligation to improve
the well-being of other human beings. The bonds of common humanity do not stop
at our borders.”
The Secretary cited statistics from the work of R. J. Rummel that found that citizens
of democracies were substantially less likely to die from internal violence than those
who lived in their authoritarian or totalitarian counterparts.
The Secretary stressed the academics’ findings on the fact that democracies don’t
suffer from humanitarian catastrophes like famine and instead put in place the
groundwork for long-run economic growth. “The United States should spread
democracy because democracies do not suffer from famines. The economist
Amartya Sen concludes that ‘one of the remarkable facts in the terrible history of
famine is that no substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a
democratic form of government and a relatively free press.’
Indeed, democracies that embrace liberal principles of government are likely to
create a stable foundation for long-term economic growth. Individuals will only
invest when they are confident that their investments will not be taken from them.
101
Democratic governments are more likely to have the political legitimacy necessary
to embark on difficult and painful economic reforms.”
The Secretary concluded his remarks by saying “democracy is the United States’
gift to the world, and it has never stopped being so vital.”
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to push for
Congressional support for the report’s main recommendations. The Senate was due
to ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss the proposals.
Words: 450
Compliance Questions
1) Why does the Secretary of State say that we should promote democracy?
• Because people generally live better lives under democratic governments?
• Because democracy in other countries means that they are more likely to
vote with us in the UN on major decisions?
• Because a world which respects freedom is more likely to be safe for
Americans?
2) States, according to the Secretary of State, that are democratic are less likely to
suffer from what?
• Disease?
• Climate Change?
• Famine?
3) Where was the speech given?
• The Council on Foreign Relations in New York?
• The Press Club in Washington D.C.?
• The Union Debating Society at Cambridge University?
Vignette G
102
Secretary of State Launches Report With Keynote Speech And Surprise
Guests Calling for U.S. Promotion of Democracy Around the World
NEW YORK (AP) —The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that
more aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
The Secretary welcomed a group of America’s first responders, who had joined him
to promote the findings of a report the Secretary had commissioned on the need to
promote democracy. Steve, 43, a firefighter from Boston, explained their backing:
“I’ve responded to terrorist attacks and I have seen the devastation that they cause:
death, destruction, families never the same again. And it breaks my heart. But we
need a strategy that brings hope to those people who live in countries where they
don’t know the meaning of the word freedom.”
Grace, a policewoman who has served in New York City for the last 24 years,
echoed his sentiments: “We need order there so people don’t spread disorder and
destruction here. We need to solve the causes, not the symptoms.” Grace was
treated for PTSD after responding to the attacks in New York City and told reporters
that she “got political in terms of thinking of policy solutions” from then: “I know
what I went through and I don’t want any other American to suffer the same way
because we didn’t bother to think through a solution.”
Grace’s husband, Jim, a retired Air Force veteran, told of their struggles: “I couldn’t
be prouder of the role she is now playing. Sleepless nights, medical bills, she had
flashbacks and fits. If we can spread democracy and drain the swamp of terrorism,
then perhaps another family can live in peace rather than go through hell”. Jim
offered his military experience as further evidence: “Our friends in the world have
always been democracies. I knew when I was talking to someone high up in a
democracy that they got there by merit, not by the favor of some tyrant.”
The Secretary saluted their heroism but also wished that they hadn’t had to face the
challenges that they had faced. “They want to change America, but it is up to us to
sponsor change throughout the world so people prefer the ballot to the bullet. We
need to let the sunlight of freedom into these societies. So many societies have
gone from violence towards a democratic future, but our work is far from done.”
103
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to push for
Congressional support for further democracy promotion. The Senate was due to
ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss proposals.
Words: 450
Compliance Questions
1) Who did the Secretary of State join in making the speech?
• American Veterans of Foreign Wars?
• American first responders?
• American reservists?
2) Grace, in the article, was treated for what?
• Ebola?
• PTSD?
• Dehydration?
3) The Secretary saluted them for what?
• Their sacrifice?
• Their performance in the line of duty?
• Their heroism?
104
The Unstable Fable: Framing Arguments Against Democracy
Promotion
19
Simon Radford
Abstract
Studies on public opinion have long shown that mass opinion is less ideologically
structured and consistent than elite opinion (Converse). Elites often, therefore,
deploy certain frames in order to gather support for a policy position (Entman;
Chong and Druckman, "A Theory of Framing"). While previous studies have looked
at the framing of democracy promotion in self-interested motivations compared to
appeals aimed at democratic values (Brancati), and have built on that work to
include the role of episodic v. thematic frames (Radford), this paper heeds the call of
Chong and Druckman in the American Political Science Review to take into account
the role of oppositional, competitive frames. Using a sample of over 2,000
Americans, the paper outlines a framing experiment that situates an argument
concerning regional instability, and the potential for chaos, as a counter to
prominent pro-democracy frames arguing for increased spending on democracy
promotion activities. The paper finds that there is no change in willingness to
increase USAID’s democracy promotion budget, even when exposed to a frame that
emphasizes the possibility for instability and unintended consequences. However,
the mixture of democracy promotion budgets does see a difference when the
instability frame is entered into the mix, with rule of law programs seeing more
favor, and electoral processes and governance programs seeing a decline in
popularity.
Introduction
During the run-up to the Iraq war, debate was characterized by the strikingly
divergent nature of the predictions of what might happen in the event of a U.S.-led
invasion. Vice-President Cheney confidently asserted that “we will be greeted as
liberators”, while UK anti-war politician Charles Kennedy warned that an invasion
would likely see “a refugee crisis of huge proportions” (“Kennedy Attacks Azores
Summit”). Some scholars of democracy promotion thought that the removal of
Saddam Hussein could be the start of a march towards “universal democracy”
(Diamond), whilst some intelligence analysts correctly saw the possibility of
sectarian violence and Iranian mischief-making (Pincus and De Young). One side of
19
I would like to thank Prof Nicolas Weller and Mark Paradis for their support in
writing this chapter, as both served as incredibly useful sounding boards. Any
mistakes remain mine alone.
105
the debate saw a bright new dawn for Iraq and for U.S. interests there, the other saw
the possibility of U.S. actions bringing only instability and regional chaos.
These same messages – the potential to foster democracy overseas to the benefit of
both the donor country and the recipient, and conversely the risk that doing so
might foster instability to the detriment of both – are arguments often issued in
regards to democracy promotion more generally (which can range from
interventions from as blunt as military-assisted regime change to programs which
aim to support civil society groups or train activists, amongst other activities). For
example, the EU’s Neighborhood Policy in the Southern Mediterranean has been
termed by one scholar as “the democracy-stability dilemma” (Isaac) while another
major report on democracy promotion projects argues the need to balance the risks
of democracy promotion with its benefits: “Western donors attempting to promote
democracy across the globe face a dilemma. Democracy is a highly valued policy
goal, but they are fearful that the path to democracy will undermine another highly
valued goal – political stability – and potentially cause widespread violence in the
recipient countries or beyond” (Leininger and Ziaja).
More than $10bn a year is spent on democracy promotion projects annually
(Carothers), and USAID is the single largest donor globally. USAID’s projects focus
on help with electoral processes, governance and rule of law projects, together with
direct civil society engagement. However, those trying to assess the likely results of
any democracy promotion project beforehand are subjected to claims and counter-
claims that are difficult to arbitrate. Will such projects be a mutual help to those
giving the money and those living without the political freedoms the donors enjoy?
Or will undermining the prevailing regime set off a chaos that puts the few rights
enjoyed in many non-democracies at further risk?
Scholars of political communication have long studied how members of the public
parse different “frames”, a simplified representation of reality, used by elites in
order to come to some conclusion. Scholars who study issue persuasion have made
strides in examining the effectiveness of particular frames, but one of the challenges
from those who have shaped the literature is to integrate the study of competitive
frames: most arguments are not heard in isolation but as part of a debate both in
favor and against some proposal. Framing studies have been carried out on topics as
diverse as immigration (Knoll, Redlawsk, and Sanborn), welfare spending
(Rasinski), international threat perception (Rousseau and Garcia-Retamero), and
the role of regime type and the dominant faith of the target country in the public’s
support for war (Johns and Davies). However, little work has been done on the
framing of support for democracy promotion (a notable exception is Brancati), and
there is no literature (to this author’s knowledge) looking at competitive framing
with respect to its merits. This paper aims to close this lacuna.
In this paper, I use experimental methods to assess the impact of a negative frame
about the possibility of democracy promotion causing instability and the potential
for chaos in the target country. This is assessed against common frames in favor of
106
democracy promotion. Using vignette-style experiments, I manipulate predictions
about the effectiveness of democracy promotion initiatives and assess its effects on
participants’ willingness to favor democracy promotion both in general and when
budgeting for different kinds of democracy promotion project. I find that, consistent
with hypotheses, predictions of instability are associated with lower levels of
support for certain democracy promotion programs but not democracy promotion
overall.
The remainder of the paper unfolds in five further sections. In the second section, I
review the literature on framing with a focus on the role of competitive frames, the
literature on the debate around democracy promotion, and a brief survey of the
literatures on self-interest and risk/uncertainty. In the third section, I describe the
current study and present the hypotheses that will be tested. In the fourth section, I
introduce the experimental manipulation of frames around instability and pro-
democracy promotion arguments, and the measures of support for democracy
promotion. In the fifth section, I present the results of the experiment. Finally, I
present some general conclusions and avenues for future research.
Which Frame Wins?
Framing is a concept used for study across a host of disciplines and sub-disciplines:
from political psychology to bargaining theory and social movements. It is because
of this disciplinary promiscuity, one scholar suggests, that framing has often been
defined in myriad ways (Druckman).
Framing theorists draw a distinction between a “frame in thought” and a “frame in
communication”: the former refers to an individual’s cognitive understanding of a
given situation, whereas the latter relates to “the words, images, phrases, and
presentation styles that a speaker uses when relaying information to another”
(Druckman 227). As Chong and Druckman tell us in the American Political Science
Review, “the identification of frames in communication—that is, the key
considerations emphasized in a speech act—has become a virtual cottage industry”
for social scientists. The same authors outline a four-stage process that the best
studies follow:
• Identify an issue.
• Isolate a specific attitude, such as risk tolerance, individualism,
humanitarianism etc.
• Identify an initial set of frames inductively.
• Specify how a frame can be identified.
While this paper looks at the outcomes of framing effects on individuals rather than
patterns within or across media portrayal of an issue, the method of selecting which
frames to test for an issue can follow the first three stages of the same process.
107
Identifying democracy promotion as an issue could be advocated on many bases,
from its importance in political debate, and the way the issue cuts across party lines,
to the more prosaic reason of it being little-embraced in the political science
literature on framing. One notable exception to this trend, however, tests the
underlying attitudes of wanting the best for one’s nation (“national interest”)
compared to a cosmopolitan impulse (“democratic values”) (Brancati). Radford
extends this study
20
to include how these two dimensions interact with “episodic”
and “thematic” frames, two different types of framing techniques which look at
either how a specified person is affected in a story form or, instead, a frame that
emphasizes “objective” data to impersonally build a case (Iyengar). This study adds
in an attribute often played to in the debate around democracy promotion: risk
intolerance.
Positive frames around democracy promotion, unless disastrously wrong-headed
(or priming the reader to think of a particular negative instantiation of democracy
promotion), should increase support for democracy promotion budgets and
programs, but a more accurate reflection of public debate would see a competing
frame that emphasizes the contingent nature of the promised gains of democracy
promotion, and the potential for losses and not just democratic gains.
Locating frames inductively, as per Chong and Druckman’s advice above, quickly
threw up common examples that spoke to the attributes identified. Sean Lynn-Jones,
in a wide-ranging report on the benefits of democracy promotion, summarizes the
arguments in favor of such a commitment:
After a brief discussion of definitions of democracy and liberalism, the paper
summarizes the reasons why the spread of democracy—especially liberal
democracy—benefits the citizens of new democracies, promotes international
peace, and serves U.S. interests. Because the case for democratization is rarely
made comprehensively, the paper explicates the arguments for why democracy
promotes liberty, prevents famines, and fosters economic development. (Lynn-
Jones)
The same dichotomy of self-interest and humanitarianism is evident. Many
summaries of the democracy promotion debate similarly divide up the arguments in
favor of such a policy in these terms: McFaul and Fukuyama talk about “American
interests” and “American values” (Fukuyama and McFaul); one study of democracy
promotion in India talks about the balance of interests and values (Mohan); and
representatives of USAID itself formulate arguments in favor of democracy
promotion in these terms: “We partner to end extreme poverty and to promote
resilient, democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity”
(USAID). It is no surprise, therefore, that the only major framing study of democracy
promotion tests frames along these two dimensions (Brancati).
20
See another study in this dissertation.
108
Most scholars or advocates, however, tend to concentrate on one rhetorical strategy
to build the case for democracy promotion. Rhetorically, American action to advance
democracy is most often framed as a moral, altruistic cause. Brancati claims that the
epitome of this approach is Wilson’s public explanation of the reason for entering
the First World War: “to make the world safe for democracy.” She also sees the same
moral impulse in Nixon’s commitment to Vietnam and Cambodia during the war. In
this sense, democracy is seen as a “world value” (McFaul), with American hegemony
having a duty of care to the rest of the world to promote democracy as a public
good. Certainly the promise of democracy is considerable according to researchers:
democracies have higher rates of economic growth (Przeworski and Limongi;
Acemoglu et al.), they are said to alleviate ethnic factionalism (Burgess et al.), and
Amartya Sen famously proposed that no democracy has ever suffered a famine
(Sen).
Equally, democratic peace theory has long provided rhetorical ballast to those who
argue that democracy promotion is best argued through the frame of national
interest (Cox). Neo-conservative supporters of the Iraq war advocated for their
position beyond the tactical disarming of Saddam to a wider vision of a reverse-
domino effect as a newly democratized Iraq would set off similar impulses
throughout the region. It was only by “draining the swamp” of terrorism through
democratization that the ballot would prove more attractive than the bullet.
As well as the self- or other-interest of the proposed course of action, the messaging
style of a frame might also prove either more or less persuasive. Positive frames for
democracy promotion – like other important political issues – can be broken down
into “episodic” and “thematic” frames (Gross). Episodic frames tend to use examples
of particular people affected by an issue in a story-like format (a famous example, is
perhaps Reagan’s invocation of a Chicago-area woman and his allegations about her
bilking of the welfare system
21
), whereas thematic frames tend to use data-led and
fact-based “objective” arguments (for example, articles in a magazine like The
Economist tend to use this format). Figures like Malala Yousafzai served as an
example of those who saw democracy promotion in “AfPak” as an American
commitment to girls like Malala throughout the region. Thematic frames were often
used to show why such a commitment was in America’s own self-interest – for
example in terms of providing for more security at home. In reality, we can and do
see self- and other-interest frames in both thematic and episodic forms.
However, critics of democracy promotion activities have long stressed their alleged
propensity to foster instability, unintended consequences, and attendant civil unrest
and humanitarian catastrophe. Political leaders peddled the “be careful what you
wish for” argument before the Arab Spring:
21
The myths around Linda Taylor’s story have been revisited in recent media
stories, for example, on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/20/255819681/the-truth-
behind-the-lies-of-the-original-welfare-queen [Accessed February 2 2016]
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“Let's be clear what the stakes are for the United States. We have an
authoritarian regime in power that has been our ally. We don't know at this
point what the real alternatives are,” former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who
is considering a White House run, told Fox News as ongoing protests in Cairo
and across Egypt threatened to upend both Mubarak's decades-long rule and
geopolitics throughout the Middle East. (Hunt)
Similarly, supporters of the color revolutions used terms like “The Ukraine Miracle”
(Boot), but some analysts of the U.S.-Russia relationship see democracy promotion
within the former Soviet Union as a direct provocation that puts at risk potential
geopolitical stability:
And to those who maintain that America must pursue “democracy promotion,”
even regime change, in today’s Russia, we answer, as I did in Congressional
testimony in 1977: “We do not have the wisdom or the power, or the right, to
try directly to shape change inside the Soviet Union. Any foreign government
that becomes deeply involved in Soviet internal politics… will do itself and
others more harm than good. What the United States can and should do is
influence Soviet liberalization indirectly by developing a long-term American
foreign policy, and thereby an international environment, that will strengthen
reformist trends and undermine reactionary ones inside the Soviet Union… In
short, détente.” (Cohen)
The rise of ISIS has also been put firmly at the feet of would-be democracy
promoters in Iraq. While Republican politicians put the emergence of ISIS down to
Obama’s failure to secure a Status of Forces Agreement (or “SOFA”) with the Iraqi
government and the subsequent withdrawal of American troops, those on the more
liberal side of the political spectrum trace the chain of causation back to the original
sin of President Bush’s war on Iraq. One blog post’s title summed up the argument
pithily: “Yes, Bush helped create ISIS – and set up the Middle East for a generation of
chaos” (Beauchamp). The underlying insinuation of instability being associated with
aggressive democracy promotion is again the prevailing argument.
This view is not confined to high-profile politicians simply criticizing their
opponents, or the ideological combat of the blogosphere, but is common amongst
policy wonks, practitioners, and academics. Perhaps the most prominent academic
work used to chasten those who propose democracy promotion argues that new
democracies are more likely to go to war (Mansfield and Snyder). This joins a
tradition of democracy-focused academics who argue that institutions should come
before “premature” democratization (Zakaria; Huntington and Fukuyama); that
support for authoritarian states is justified because of their theorized likelihood to
gradually transition towards democracy in a more stable fashion (Kirkpatrick,
Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics); or that
personal security trumps other democratic rights (Etzioni). Indeed, international
realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Henry Kissinger would buck the charge of
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amorality by arguing that the full-throated pursuit of the national interest produces
a stability-through-clarity superior to the well-meaning chaos of pursuing systemic
change or lofty-but-gossamer ideas like human rights. Actors who know your
interests and the force of your will make informational breakdowns such as in
Fearon’s bargaining model less likely.
While no scholar, to this author’s knowledge, has conducted a competitive framing
experiment in regards to democracy promotion, there is another literature that we
might make reference to: that of decision-making in the face of uncertainty or risk.
Arguably the first theorist of rational choice was Thomas Hobbes. In Leviathan
Hobbes argues that submission to the kingly ruler was a rational response to the
need for security
22
. Centuries later, studies involving decision-making in the face of
risk is at the forefront of many fields’ research agendas today. Three major
landmarks have punctuated this drive: the rise of rational choice modeling, the
response of behavioral economics, and the public autopsy of human error in the
run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, with the role of VAR (Value at Risk) models, the
reconsideration of “Knightian uncertainty” and the problematizing of risk as a
quantifiable concept at all.
In most theories of choice under uncertainty, the judged probabilities of possible
outcomes and the evaluation of those outcomes constitute the defining variables
(Hsu). However, certain decision-making contexts differ drastically from each other;
predictions can vary by the complexity of the systems under consideration. Usable
predictions in poker games are easier to assign than they are for meteorologists
forecasting the weather, or in assigning the risk of a terror attack, for example
(Silver). These two types of uncertain events are often termed “risky” and
“ambiguous”(Hsu). In conventional accounts of risk, the uncertainty of a result
should not affect one’s calculation (Von Neumann and Morgenstern), but this has
not been borne out in experimental results where people have been more willing to
bet in risky than in ambiguous circumstances (Camerer and Weber).
Lastly, in the wake of finance’s efforts to quantify risk using Gaussian copulas in
their VAR models (and its attendant failures), a revival has taken place in the
concept of “Knightian uncertainty”: an idea of totally unquantifiable uncertainty as
opposed to mathematically quantifiable risk. Some economists have argued,
however, that Knightian uncertainty is simply a case of agents not assigning
probabilities rather than agents being unable to; others argue that probabilities can
be defined entirely subjectively. While the debate is far from resolved, it would be
amiss to not discuss Knight’s contribution in light of the subject of this paper.
23
22
Although, c.f. Neal.
23
For more on subjective probability, a useful overview can be found at
http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/het/essays/uncert/subjective.htm .
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In terms of the international relations literature, perhaps the most experimental
work has been done on humanitarian intervention. As one scholar who has
contributed to this literature has pointed out: “If the public is generally risk averse,
as suggested by most models of politics based on expected utility theory, we would
expect less support overall for humanitarian interventions (particularly since the
positive outcomes associated with humanitarian intervention are often indirect and
frequently intangible)” (Boettcher 334). The same indirect and intangible results
could certainly be said for democracy promotion.
Secondly, the literature on self-interest versus altruism in light of risk or uncertainty
is illuminating, and is not consulted by Brancati. The maxim of La Rochefoucauld
that “Benevolence may plume self-approbation; 'Tis but self-kindness by
anticipation” reflected an early belief that altruism was just self-interest in disguise.
However, “when economists removed these incentives in anonymous, one shot,
dictator games among unrelated strangers, the initial findings surprised many.
Subjects often eschewed selfish choices, with many even choosing equal splits
(Forsythe et al.” (Andreoni, Rao, and Trachtman). Indeed, scholars have found an
effect for societal interest independent of self-interest across issue areas (Funk).
Realists in international relations theory, however, eschew societal interest in
international interactions, or at least consider societal impulses valid only insofar as
they are costless:
In order to make humanitarian interventions more effective, realists argue that
national interests must prevail in the decision to intervene. The higher the
expected utility, i.e. the interest for the nation and the decision-maker, the
higher the risks the decision maker is willing to take in order to achieve his
objectives. If the interests in a humanitarian crisis are only peripheral,
intervention will only occur in a limited nature, if at all. Therefore, self-
interested motivations have to be an inherent part of humanitarian
intervention. Indeed, national interests cannot be divorced from
humanitarianism or altruism as according to realists, governments are
rational egoists who act in their pursuit of their interests. Raising national
interests during humanitarian intervention is a prerequisite for an intervention
on [the] basis of otherwise humanitarian grounds. (Krieg 45)
Again, the logic for humanitarian intervention would apply just as neatly for realists’
views on the promotion of democracy overseas. In the realist worldview
enumerated above, we would expect evocations of the national interest to win more
support in the light of possible costs rather more than encomia to the public good.
When it comes to matters of humanitarian intervention or democracy promotion,
we can and do hear from a variety of competing voices, arguing on the basis of
competing ethics. Despite the empirical regularity of pro-democracy promotion
frames being hugged closely by opposition frames of the threat of instability, no
previous study has tested these frames’ efficacy in a competitive environment.
Indeed, the lack of competitive framing studies is somewhat of a puzzle more
112
generally. As the two most prominent scholars on framing relate: “Analysts have
documented framing effects for numerous substantive issues in various political
contexts. But, remarkably, the voluminous literature on framing effects has virtually
ignored perhaps the most typical communications environment in which competing
sides promote alternative interpretations of an issue” (Chong and Druckman,
"Framing Public Opinion", 638).
Chong and Druckman ("Framing Public Opinion") distinguish between the strength
and frequency of competitive frames. In order to distinguish the mechanism of how
competitive framing works, analysts must distinguish between whether the frame
that is deployed most tends to win out, or whether certain frames (for example,
those that are endorsed by authority figures, for example) exhibit features in
composition that serve to persuade. Research designs that mix up frames, and the
number of times they are deployed, are more likely to tell us about how frames
work better “in the wild” compared to the more common experimental studies that
look at frames independently of those that tend to oppose them when deployed in
real life.
A Framing Study & Some Hypotheses
Brancati has proved to be the only study of democracy promotion that examines
whether self-interest or humanitarian values (i.e. other-interest) persuades the
mass public more readily. She finds, using a framing experiment, that the American
population is not motivated by appeals to either sentiment. Other research on
democracy promotion has focused on what the public’s attitudes to democracy
promotion are (i.e. polls), rather than what drives it in one direction or the other
(i.e. experiments) (Tures; DeBartolo). However, vignette-based experiments have
been used in a number of other policy areas, from the role of audience costs in
international relations (Tomz) to immigration (Hainmueller and Hiscox), in order to
tease out what raises political temperatures rather than simply measuring them.
In Brancati’s study respondents were assigned to four different groups: those
assigned to a control group, who received a basic vignette which conveyed
information regarding a country’s president refusing to step down after elections
and bipartisan U.S. Senate support for protestors; and groups who received
additional reasons on top of the previous vignette to back the bipartisan call to
action because of: (a) the benefits to the target country, (b) U.S. moral responsibility,
and, finally, (c) because it was in the U.S.’s national interest to do so. Brancati’s
analysis finds that “neither democratic values nor national interests in general lead
people to support democracy promotion… However, democratic values do motivate
a subset of the population to support democracy promotion with a more
cosmopolitan perspective of foreign affairs” (Brancati 720).
113
This study extends Brancati’s work by introducing both episodic and thematic
frames embedded within self-interest or other-interest vignettes to better reflect
real rhetorical frames used in policy debates, as well as including a competitive
frame of instability, which we often see paired with pro-democracy promotion
framing in media. Do instability frames negate positive frames advocating
democracy promotion? Do instability frames perform better against certain types of
pro-democracy arguments? Or if the benefits stressed in promoting democracy
accrue to one’s own country rather than the recipient’s?
A sample of 2006 respondents was collected through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
(MTurk) program. MTurk is a program, hosted by Amazon, which boasts 3 million
people worldwide who perform short online tasks for small amounts of money.
Researchers have found that MTurk respondents recruited are often more
representative of the U.S. population than in-person convenience samples, which are
widely used in political science research (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz). Prior research
in social science has been shown consistent with replicated studies using MTurk
study pools (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz), 366). As such, MTurk has been widely used
in the social scientific community for easy and cost-effective experiments.
At the time of the survey (May/June 2015), democracy promotion was not a
particularly salient issue in the United States. The uptick in media attention after the
Arab Spring was now very much in abeyance: the controversy surrounding ISIS and
the attacks in Paris were still very much in the future. As a result, I do not expect
people to have had in mind any particular country or situation when reading the
vignettes, and they were designed to be as non-attributable as possible in terms of
the country that democracy promotion was aimed at. Otherwise, this would have
weakened the effect of the cues ( Tversky and Kahneman).
The setup of the experiment was as follows: after reading the consent information
and related terms and conditions of taking part in the experiment, as is common to
human subject research, a pre-test of support for democracy promotion was issued.
Respondents were informed of the mission and activities of USAID’s democracy
promotion projects
24
, as well as the funding allocated to it, and were then asked
whether this was much too little, slightly too little, just right, slightly too much, or
much too much (see Appendix I for wording). Respondents were also asked to
allocate democracy promotion funding to different types of USAID projects
25
(also
laid out in Appendix I) using a slider so that 100% of the budget was assigned.
Respondents were then asked to fill out some basic demographic information and
complete a short personality test (see Appendix II). As funding questions were
asked as a pre-test before the vignettes as well as afterwards, this also had a
salutary effect of being a distractor test that minimized the chances that the pre-test
would effectively prime the post-test.
24
Information was taken directly from the agency’s website.
25
The titles and descriptions of these different types of projects were taken from
USAID’s website.
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There were four vignettes that were designed to resemble popular pro-democracy
promotion frames: national interest and episodic, national interest and thematic,
altruistic and episodic, and altruistic and thematic. Two controls were created
(vaguely resembling the other frames but devoid of the democracy promotion cues).
Finally, an instability frame was written. All of these vignettes can be seen in
Appendix III. Respondents were randomly assigned to groups that received two of
the vignettes. After every vignette a compliance test (also in Appendix III) –
questions about the article that they just read – was given and those who scored
lower than two correct questions out of three were dropped from the study. Finally,
after the two vignettes, a post-test exactly the same as the pre-test was given again.
Pro-Democracy Promotion and Self-Interest
The first pro-democracy promotion frame appeals to the national interest and does
so in a thematic fashion.
Vignette A
Vignette A hews closely to arguments actually used by academics concerning the
benefits of democracy promotion, while using language used by politicians
themselves. This is to guarantee that the frame is both thematic (using as many fact-
based appeals to reason as possible) while still resembling an actual frame likely to
be encountered in the real world. The format was chosen to resemble a newspaper
article, again for its fidelity to a frame one might encounter outside an experimental
setting.
The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that more
aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
This wording is taken from a speech given by Chris Christie in 2014 (Peoples). The
Secretary of State is not identified; no date is given; and Secretary of State was
chosen to be less obviously political than, for example, a president.
“The evidence is clear: spreading democracy will directly advance the
national interests of the United States, because democracies will not launch
wars or terrorist attacks against the United States, will not produce refugees
seeking asylum in the United States, and will tend to ally with the United
States,” the Secretary said in a keynote address Sunday at the Council for
Foreign Relations in New York. “This is not opinion, it’s fact and it’s borne
out by history.”
115
The arguments here are taken from an academic making a comprehensive argument
for democracy promotion (Lynn-Jones). The Council for Foreign Relations was
chosen as a primarily academic and non-partisan location.
“The most stable finding in International Relations is that democracies do not
go to war with each other. If democracies virtually never go to war with one
another, no democracy will wage war against the United States.
Democracies are unlikely to get into crises or militarized disputes with the
United States. Promoting democracy may usher in a more peaceful world; it
also will enhance the national security of the United States by eliminating
potential military threats. The United States would be more secure if Russia,
China, and at least some countries in the Arab and Islamic worlds became
stable democracies.”
The arguments here are from the same source (Lynn-Jones). They also clearly define
the argument in terms of the benefits that accrue to the United States and not in
terms of benefits to the country wherein democracy is being promoted.
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to
push for Congressional support for the report’s main recommendations. The
Senate was due to ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign
Relations committee next week to further discuss the proposals.
The last paragraph aims to show the potential for bipartisan agreement on these
ideas (again, to diffuse any partisan reaction to the frame).
Vignette A is grounded in thematic arguments for democracy promotion, is clearly
framed as a self-interested argument where benefits accrue to the state doing the
promoting, and uses language used by politicians in a format faithful to a regular
newspaper story.
Vignette B
Vignette B is a frame that is episodic and altruistic: it uses emotion and storytelling
rather than cold analysis, and it emphasizes the benefits for those who live in the
target country. The frame starts in the same way as the previous frame (so that only
the important differences between the two are changed and any difference in
response is to that and that alone):
116
The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that more
aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
Vignette B then goes on to introduce the content that has changed from the previous
vignette:
The Secretary of State welcomed Isla, 12, to the stage, a young woman who
had welcomed US promotion of democracy in her home country. “I lived in a
country that did not respect me or my family. My brother was taken from our
home for being too interested in politics. My parents were worried that they
would take me too. They left my brother’s body in the middle of the village. I
knew one day the bandits would be forced out by the people. My parents
said when the election happened that they were voting in my brother’s
memory too. He gave his life so we could be free.”
The Secretary of State stood alongside Isla and explained that the US had
been sponsoring projects in Isla’s region for a few years before the revolution
that toppled the regime. “Thanks to the generosity of the American people
Isla gets to do what so many young American girls Isla’s age do every
morning: kiss their parents and walk to school.”
Isla’s parents held a picture of Isla’s brother as they walked into the voting
booth. He had worked for an opposition party that caught the attention of
the ruling regime, which ruthlessly suppressed opposition groups before the
democratic revolution. Isla stayed at home with her parents as schooling for
young women was not permitted. Isla’s mother, Anna, has agreed to take up
a role as a teacher at the new local school for girls.
Isla was presented with an American flag pin in honor of the occasion.
Sweeping aside some brown hair from her eyes, and suppressing the urge to
cry (as she later told reporters), Isla addressed a gathering of campaigners
who had sought to bring attention to abuses under the old regime. “Our
nightmare is over, and we have started to dream again”, she said. When
asked what her dream now was, Isla expressed the optimism of her
country’s new democratic future: “I want to be the first female President of
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my country”. The Secretary of State joked that his party would love to have
someone of Isla’s talents on the ballot right here at home.
These paragraphs evoke popular themes in the framing of democracy promotion: the
empowerment of women in general and the “rescuing” of women from subjugation and
human rights abuses. Many scholars find this framing problematic, with Cynthia Enloe
even coining the term “womenandchildren” to show the commonplace nature of the
phrase when discussing intervention
26
, but the framing is agreed to be a popular one
when reading episodic frames that promote democracy in terms of other states’
potential benefits (Rosenberg; Eisenstein; Abu-Lughod). “Isla” was chosen as a name to
be deliberately ethnically ambiguous so as not to trigger any particular intervention or
case of democracy promotion. The wording was chosen to be deliberately emotive and
episodic and to focus on the benefits to particular individuals within the target country.
This was similar to episodic articles used in other framing studies (Gross).
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to
push for Congressional support for further democracy promotion. The
Senate was due to ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign
Relations committee next week to further discuss proposals.
The frame ends with the same bipartisan ending as the previous frame to again keep
the treatments as close to each other as possible.
Vignette C
Vignette C is the instability frame. The frame treatment was designed to be a similar
length and style to the others. The three arguments in the first paragraph are the
common tropes that democratization causes regional instability, that democracy
promotion can be injurious to American interests, and that there is no link between
democracy and being pro-American.
Responding to the Administration’s call for a renewed commitment to
promote democracy abroad, the former Secretary of State warned that
democracy often caused regional instability, that new democratic
governments would not always serve American interests, and that pro-
26
Spivak called this phenomenon “white men rescuing brown women from brown
men” in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Nelson and Grossberg).
118
American authoritarian regimes could be replaced by governments hostile to
U.S. interests.
These arguments about regional instability (widely seen in think-tank reports,
academic treatises, and uttered by politicians in mainstream media (Chua; Hunt;
Alessandri, Hassan, and Reinert)) and potential for anti-American orientation (or at
least not pro-American), are heard all the time from saturnine prognosticators of
the unintended consequences of American missionary zeal (Walt; Kirkpatrick,
“Dictatorships and Double Standards”).
"These linkages have been grossly oversimplified in a way that misleads the
American public", he said. "We're taking out all of the qualifiers and all of the
nuances. Giving people the right to vote doesn't solve the [national security]
problem."
He challenged the notion that common systems of governance translate to
shared foreign policy interests and priorities. For example, while many have
praised the budding relationship between the world's oldest democracy-the
United States-and other democratic powers, the former Secretary of State
noted recent Congressional complaints about democratic allies’ ties to
states hostile to the United States. Furthermore, many democracies are
generally apathetic towards promoting democracy beyond their borders.
Despite sharing democratic values and a desire to stop nuclear proliferation,
combat terrorism, and solve regional tensions, there is no shared perception
of these threats and the correct approach to handling them.
These arguments were taken directly from Paul Saunders, of the Nixon Center, in a
public discussion of the role of democracy promotion (Singer), using wording as
close to that used as possible.
The former Secretary of State was speaking in response to the launch of a
new democracy promotion strategy co-authored by the Pentagon and State
Department.
The Secretary of State was due to meet with key legislators from both
parties to push for Congressional support for the report’s main
recommendations, which inspired today’s interjection from his predecessor
at State. The Senate was due to ask the Secretary to appear before the
Senate Foreign Relations committee next week to further discuss the
119
proposals. His predecessor’s comments are sure to complicate those
discussions.
Again the bookends of the frame were deliberately chosen to be as similar to other
frames as possible, in order to isolate the framing content as the treatment. The use
of a “former Secretary of State” showed that the speaker was of equal status to the
“Secretary of State” from whom the respondent might already have heard.
Vignettes D & E
Vignettes D and E are control frames that contain mention of the Secretary of State
for continuity purposes, but most importantly were a similar number of words, so
that reading time would be something similar to those that contained a treatment
frame.
Vignette F
Vignette F is a thematic and altruistic frame. The bookends of the frame are the
same as other frames in the experiment to maintain consistency. The following is
the content that contains the treatment:
“The evidence is clear: The United States should attempt to spread
democracy because people generally live better lives under democratic
governments. Compared to inhabitants of non-democracies, citizens of
democracies enjoy greater individual liberty, political stability, freedom from
governmental violence, enhanced quality of life, and a much lower risk of
suffering a famine,” the Secretary said in a keynote address Sunday at the
Council for Foreign Relations in New York. “This is not opinion, it’s fact and
it’s borne out by history.”…
…“First, as human beings, Americans should and do feel some obligation to
improve the well-being of other human beings. The bonds of common
humanity do not stop at our borders.”
The Secretary cited statistics from the work of R. J. Rummel that found that
citizens of democracies were substantially less likely to die from internal
violence than those who lived in their authoritarian or totalitarian
counterparts.
120
The Secretary stressed the academics’ findings on the fact that democracies
don’t suffer from humanitarian catastrophes like famine and instead put in
place the groundwork for long-run economic growth. “The United States
should spread democracy because democracies do not suffer from famines.
The economist Amartya Sen concludes that ‘one of the remarkable facts in
the terrible history of famine is that no substantial famine has ever occurred
in a country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free
press.’
“Indeed, democracies that embrace liberal principles of government are
likely to create a stable foundation for long-term economic growth.
Individuals will only invest when they are confident that their investments will
not be taken from them. Democratic governments are more likely to have the
political legitimacy necessary to embark on difficult and painful economic
reforms.”
The verbiage is largely taken from the same source as one of the other treatment
frames (Lynn-Jones). R. J. Rummell and Amartya Sen are name-checked as
academics whose works speak to this argument.
Vignette G
Again, continuity was achieved by using previous openings and closings. Vignette G,
however, aimed for an episodic, self-interested frame. This author found this
rhetorical frame less common than the other three pro-democracy treatment
frames, but one of the groups that are often mentioned as characters in advocating
for democracy promotion has been American first responders:
The Secretary welcomed a group of America’s first responders, who had
joined him to promote the findings of a report the Secretary had
commissioned on the need to promote democracy. Steve, 43, a firefighter
from Boston, explained their backing: “I’ve responded to terrorist attacks
and I have seen the devastation that they cause: death, destruction, families
never the same again. And it breaks my heart. But we need a strategy that
brings hope to those people who live in countries where they don’t know the
meaning of the word freedom.”
121
Grace, a policewoman who has served in New York City for the last 24
years, echoed his sentiments: “We need order there so people don’t spread
disorder and destruction here. We need to solve the causes, not the
symptoms.” Grace was treated for PTSD after responding to the attacks in
New York City and told reporters that she “got political in terms of thinking of
policy solutions” from then: “I know what I went through and I don’t want
any other American to suffer the same way because we didn’t bother to think
through a solution.”
Grace’s husband, Jim, a retired Air Force veteran, told of their struggles: “I
couldn’t be prouder of the role she is now playing. Sleepless nights, medical
bills, she had flashbacks and fits. If we can spread democracy and drain the
swamp of terrorism, then perhaps another family can live in peace rather
than go through hell”. Jim offered his military experience as further evidence:
“Our friends in the world have always been democracies. I knew when I was
talking to someone high up in a democracy that they got there by merit, not
by the favor of some tyrant.”
The Secretary saluted their heroism but also wished that they hadn’t had to
face the challenges that they had faced. “They want to change America, but
it is up to us to sponsor change throughout the world so people prefer the
ballot to the bullet. We need to let the sunlight of freedom into these
societies. So many societies have gone from violence towards a democratic
future, but our work is far from done.”
Again, this vignette is largely emotionally-driven and aimed at the benefits that
accrue to the United States itself, rather than the country in which democracy is
being promoted.
Hypotheses
The use of a competitive frame is likely to make the context seem more ambiguous
than risky in terms of working out the quantifiable odds of a successful intervention
to promote democracy; as such, we should expect people to be less willing to make
bets on democracy promotion under such circumstances, as per Camerer and
Weber. Equally, Boettcher forcefully argues that (in an analogous case of
humanitarian intervention) a risk-averse public would be less likely to support
122
programs when the risks and potential costs of such a policy are raised. From these
it is easy enough to derive the hypothesis that a competitive frame is likely to
decrease support for democracy promotion compared to those who receive no such
frame.
Hypothesis 1: those respondents who received an instability frame will favor a
smaller democracy promotion budget compared to those who did not receive such a
frame.
The categories of democracy assistance are Elections and Political Processes, Rule of
Law Programs, Civil Society Programs, and Governance Programs. However, there is
no prima facie reason from the literature to think that the presence of an instability
frame will have more of an effect on some of these projects than others. However,
there are some theoretical reasons why we might see a differential effect on the
allocation for those who receive an instability frame: projects centered on the rule
of law are likely to be favored when made to think of unstable states, and
strengthening the government directly (through governance programs) is less likely
to be popular with those who have pondered a potential hostile political orientation.
One might also expect more short-term change (through e.g. elections) would see
less support, but civil society support might also be seen as a worthwhile long-term
investment and would allow for greater social organization in the face of potential
chaos or instability.
Hypothesis 2: those respondents who received an instability frame will be less
likely to favor governance programs than other types of democracy promotion
program.
Hypothesis 3: those respondents who received an instability frame will be more
likely to favor rule of law programs than other types of democracy promotion
program.
Hypothesis 4: those respondents who received an instability frame will be more
likely to favor civil society programs than other types of democracy promotion
program.
Hypothesis 5: those respondents who received an instability frame will be less
likely to favor electoral process programs than other types of democracy promotion
program.
What about when one group who gets an instability frame has had a self-interest
frame rather than one based on altruism? What should we expect the result to be?
While Brancati suggests that there should be no discernible difference between
those appealed to through self-interest or for humanitarian reasons, Krieg suggests
that this might well change in the presence of heightened risk. When presented with
the possibility of instability being generated, we should see self-interest appeals
123
holding up more robustly to the challenge than those that appeal to the benevolence
of the listener. This helps generate our last hypothesis:
Hypothesis 6: those respondents who received an instability frame along with a
self-interest frame are more likely to maintain a higher democracy promotion
budget than those who received an “other” frame alongside an instability frame.
Results
Hypothesis 1: Those respondents who received an instability frame will favor a
smaller democracy promotion budget compared to those who did not receive such a
frame.
Hypothesis 1 is not supported by the data. The Welsh t-test shows that where no
instability frame was seen, the mean support for the democracy promotion budget
was 4.26 (on the 1-5 scale with 5 being that the budget should be “much higher”).
When an instability frame was seen, the mean was 4.25. However, the 95%
confidence interval crosses 0 and therefore we can’t say that the difference between
the two means is statistically significant.
To sense-check this, it was worth checking the power of the instability frame when
isolated. When the group who received two control frames was contrasted with a
group who got a control and the instability frame, the latter were still not
significantly less likely to favor a higher democracy promotion budget.
Hypothesis 2: those respondents who received an instability frame will be less
likely to favor governance programs than other types of democracy promotion
program.
124
Hypothesis 3: those respondents who received an instability frame will be more
likely to favor rule of law programs than other types of democracy promotion
program.
Those who were given an instability frame acted in the way that we expected in
Hypotheses 2 and 3. The hypothesis holds at the 99% confidence level for those who
allocated resources to governance programs. The mean of the percentage allocation
went down from 24.41% to 22.97% when respondents were given an instability
frame. Those who received the instability frame increased their allotment to rule of
law programs compared to those who did not receive such a frame. This was
statistically significant at the 95% level.
Hypothesis 4: those respondents who received an instability frame will be more
likely to favor civil society programs than other types of democracy promotion
program.
We did not find support for this hypothesis, with significance falling just outside the
95% confidence level.
Hypothesis 5: those respondents who received an instability frame will be less
likely to favor electoral process programs than other types of democracy promotion
program.
This hypothesis finds support in the data with a 95% confidence level. Support for
electoral assistance projects drops from 20.45% of the budget to 19.28% after
respondents see an instability frame.
Hypothesis 6: those respondents who received an instability frame along with a
self-interest frame are more likely to maintain a higher democracy promotion
budget than those who received an “other” frame alongside an instability frame.
125
This hypothesis is supported in the data with a 95% confidence level. Support for
the democracy promotion budget drops from 4.37 on the 5-point scale to 4.13 after
respondents get an instability frame and a positive (but other-benefiting) frame,
compared to a situation in which the instability frame is coupled with one stressing
the benefit to their home country.
Given our results from Hypothesis 1, we might well ask ourselves whether this is
the instability frame doing the work. Therefore, I tested whether there was a
statistically significant difference between those who received the self-interest
frame compared to the other-interest framing. The result is in the table below:
The result of appeals to self-interest and altruism is that the latter does statistically
significantly worse (at the 95% confidence level). Those receiving an altruism frame
saw a drop in support for a higher budget compared to those who received a self-
interest frame – from 4.36 on the 5-point scale to only 4.188. This is very similar to
the drop from 4.38 to 4.13 that we observed when we tested Hypothesis 6. This
suggests that the main action is with which positive frame we start with, rather than
the instability frame itself (which also makes more sense in light of the results in
Hypothesis 1).
27
Conclusion
The literature on competitive frames is puzzlingly sparse (Chong and Druckman,
"Framing Public Opinion"), as is the literature on the framing of democracy
promotion, with one single honorable exception (Brancati). This is despite the high
salience of democracy promotion (in terms of emphasis and content) in American
foreign policy debates over recent years. The present article fills this considerable
gap in the literature.
When respondents were shown lifelike frames both in favor of democracy
promotion (in common and agreed-upon framing techniques) as well as the most
common frame against democracy promotion (which emphasizes the possibility of
instability being the result of undermining non-democratic regimes), there was no
statistically significant difference in budget allocation towards USAID’s democracy
27
See “Just the Facts, Please” essay in this dissertation for more discussion on self-
interest vs. altruism as different appeals for democracy promotion.
126
promotion budget. This result might seem strange, but might well reflect an in-built
acknowledgement of the dangers of instability in the democracy promotion setting,
or an awareness that instability in a far-away country would have little effect on the
listener, or that it might be a price worth paying to further the democracy agenda.
Follow-up work on this issue might well delve into this surprising null result
further. While most null results are a disappointment to scholars interested in large,
significant effects, null results can be fascinating when strategies we presume to be
important in the real world (and observe often) are shown to have little impact
when tested. Those “Cassandras” who tried to raise the alarm about the dangers of
attempts to democratize the Middle East – or drag countries of the former Soviet
Union into the democratic orbit – might now know why their warnings went
unheeded.
The result is also interesting in light of the theoretical debate about decision-making
under conditions of uncertainty. We should have expected a decrease in willingness
to back democracy promotion when exposed to an instability frame; instead, we saw
no significant change. This might mean that citizens are operating under conditions
of Knightian uncertainty – the idea of democracy promotion seems so technical and
abstract that one’s instincts carry the day and processing more information doesn’t
budge this instinct – or it might well mean that the idea of instability is so well
understood as a possible consequence of democracy promotion that it yields no
detriment to the democracy promotion case. A final interpretation could be that
instability is likely to affect others more than our own self-interest. Just as the
altruistic frame generated less support for democracy promotion than self-interest
framing, it might well be that costs to others do not much affect the case one way or
the other. Instability might seem to be a normal state of affairs in those countries in
which USAID might seek to operate.
When respondents were asked to allocate USAID’s budget across its program
categories, interesting changes did emerge: respondents responded to worries
about instability by wanting to invest more in rule of law projects, but were less
inclined to allocate money to state capacity in terms of governance. Budget
allocations to electoral processes – which might now have unintended consequences
according to the instability argument – go down, as hypothesized. The hypothesis
that civil society funding would shift was not borne out in the data. This could well
suggest that the specter of insecurity makes us favor long-term structural change
rather than a more agential vision of democratization. The position of Zakaria – that
order must come before freedom for liberal democracy to flourish – might be
preferred to the more agential vision of those authors who contributed to the
“Transitions” literature, for example (O’Donnell and Schmitter). This result might
inspire us to examine why and how citizens prefer certain types of democracy
promotion to others.
Finally, the findings on self-interested vs. altruistic reasons for promoting
democracy directly contradict Brancati. Self-interest is a demonstrably more
powerful motivator for democracy promotion than appeals to humanitarian values
127
or to the benefits that might accrue to those living under non-democratic regimes. It
is for further studies to try and run more framing experiments to see if this gap
endures or is reversed, but this result echoes the theoretical intuition as described
in the realist literature more closely than it does Brancati.
As the first of its kind, there are plenty more questions prompted by the study than
it can hope to answer. Researchers, for example, might interact the Big Five
personality traits with responses to particular frames. Do Conscientious respondents
feel the threat of instability more than those, for example, who are more Open to
Experience? Equally, qualitative follow-up on the thought-processes of respondents
might open up interesting new lines of inquiry.
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Appendix I
Democracy Promotion Budget I
Please read the following:
WHAT IS USAID?
As described on their website “USAID is the lead U.S. Government agency that works
to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize
their potential.”
WHAT DOES USAID DO?
USAID works in over 100 countries to:
• Promote broadly shared economic prosperity;
• Strengthen democracy and good governance;
• Protect human rights;
• Improve global health,
• Advance food security and agriculture;
• Improve environmental sustainability;
• Further education;
• Help societies prevent and recover from conflicts; and
136
• Provide humanitarian assistance in the wake of natural and man-made
disasters.
WHAT IS USAID’S BUDGET?
USAID is allocated approximately 1 percent of the total federal budget. USAID’s
budget, therefore, amounted to $20.4bn in Fiscal Year 2014.
DEMOCRACY, RIGHTS AND GOVERNANCE
Leaving aside Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, USAID spent $860m on democracy,
rights and governance projects in 2014.
Do you think this amount was too low or too high?
Much Too High
Slightly Too High
Just Right
Slightly Too Low
Much Too Low
Please advance to the next screen.
Democracy Assistance Projects
USAID funds various types of projects with the aim of assisting democracy in other
countries. What percentage of USAID’s budget for these projects should be assigned
to each type of project?
Elections and Political Processes
Activities oriented towards electoral assistance, support for the development of
political parties, and legislative representation.
Percentage-
Rule of Law Programs
Funding for human rights programs and for legal and judicial development.
Percentage-
Civil Society Programs
Programs oriented towards the promotion of independent mass media, civic
education, and labor organization.
Percentage-
137
Governance Programs
A very diverse category, this variable covers transparency and anti-corruption
projects, decentralization, local government, and legislative assistance programs.
Percentage-
Please advance to the next screen.
Appendix II
Demographic Background
Please answer the following questions.
What is your gender?
Male / Female
How old are you?
What race do you consider yourself to be? (Select the option that best applies)
Black / African American White / Caucasian Hispanic / Latino(a) / Other Asian
Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, Democrat, or as
an independent? (Select the option that best applies):
Strongly Republican / Republican / Independent but lean Republican / Independent
Independent but lean Democrat / Democrat / Strongly Democrat
Below is a scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from
“extremely conservative” to “extremely liberal.” Where would you place yourself on this
scale?
Extremely Liberal / Liberal / Slightly Liberal / Moderate / Slightly Conservative
Conservative / Extremely Conservative
What is your highest level of education?
Some high school / High school graduate / Some college / College graduate
138
Which of the following best describes the total pre-tax income earned by everyone
in your household last year?
Up to $20,000
$20,000 to $35,000
$35,000 to $50,000
$50,000 to $75,000
$75,000 to $100,000
$100,000 to $125,000
$125,000 to $150,000
$150,000 and over
Please advance to the next screen.
Personality Type
Here are a number of personality traits that may or may not apply to you. Please
write a number next to each statement to indicate the extent to which you agree or
disagree with that statement. You should rate the extent to which the pair of traits
applies to you, even if one characteristic applies more strongly than the other.
Disagree Strongly 1
Disagree 2
Disagree Moderately 3
Neither Agree nor Disagree 4
Agree Moderately 5
Agree 6
Agree Strongly 7
I see myself as:
1. _____ Extraverted, enthusiastic.
2. _____ Critical, quarrelsome.
3. _____ Dependable, self-disciplined.
4. _____ Anxious, easily upset.
5. _____ Open to new experiences, complex.
6. _____ Reserved, quiet.
7. _____ Sympathetic, warm.
139
8. _____ Disorganized, careless.
9. _____ Calm, emotionally stable.
10. ___ Conventional, uncreative.
Please advance to the next screen.
Appendix III
The Arguments About Democracy Promotion
Vignette A
Secretary of State Launches Report With Keynote Speech Calling for Renewed
American Commitment to Promoting Democracy Around the World
NEW YORK (AP) —The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that
more aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
“The evidence is clear: spreading democracy will directly advance the national
interests of the United States, because democracies will not launch wars or terrorist
attacks against the United States, will not produce refugees seeking asylum in the
United States, and will tend to ally with the United States,” the Secretary said in a
keynote address Sunday at the Council for Foreign Relations in New York. “This is
not opinion, it’s fact and it’s borne out by history.”
The Pentagon and State Department had been consulting academics over the last
year on direction of the United States’ posture towards the spread of democracy
abroad. The speech aimed to sum up the report’s key takeaways.
“The most stable finding in International Relations is that democracies do not go to
war with each other. If democracies virtually never go to war with one another, no
democracy will wage war against the United States. Democracies are unlikely to get
into crises or militarized disputes with the United States. Promoting democracy may
140
usher in a more peaceful world; it also will enhance the national security of the
United States by eliminating potential military threats. The United States would be
more secure if Russia, China, and at least some countries in the Arab and Islamic
worlds became stable democracies.”
The Secretary stressed the academics’ findings on the fact that democracies make
better allies for America throughout the world and the economic opportunities that
come with the spread of democracy. “The global spread of democracy will advance
American interests by creating more potential allies. Historically, most of America's
allies have been democracies. In general, democracies are much more likely to ally
with one another. Furthermore, democracies are much more likely to have open
economies, providing opportunity for investments for American firms and jobs right
here at home.”
The Secretary was keen to emphasize the potential security benefits, including the
lower threat of terrorism associated with having more democracies: “Spreading
democracy is likely to enhance U.S. national security because democracies will not
support terrorist acts against the United States. The world's principal sponsors of
international terrorism are harsh, authoritarian regimes, not peace-loving
democracies.”
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to push for
Congressional support for the report’s main recommendations. The Senate was due
to ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss the proposals.
Words: 446
Compliance Questions
1) Who made the speech from the article?
• The Secretary of Defense?
• The President?
• The Secretary of State?
2) Who have the Pentagon and State Department been consulting for the report?
141
• Practitioners?
• Academics?
• Foreign Leaders?
3) Which reason is given for spreading democracy in the speech?
• Enhances U.S. national security because democracies will not support
terrorist acts against the United States?
• Reflects U.S. values of freedom and opportunity?
• Will benefit people living under dictatorships?
Vignette B
Secretary of State Launches Report With Keynote Speech And Surprise Guest
Calling for U.S. Promotion of Democracy Around the World
NEW YORK (AP) —The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that
more aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
The Secretary of State welcomed Isla, 12, to the stage, a young woman who had
welcomed US promotion of democracy in her home country. “I lived in a country
that did not respect me or my family. My brother was taken from our home for being
too interested in politics. My parents were worried that they would take me too.
They left my brother’s body in the middle of the village. I knew one day the bandits
would be forced out by the people. My parents said when the election happened
that they were voting in my brother’s memory too. He gave his life so we could be
free.”
The Secretary of State stood alongside Isla and explained that the US had been
sponsoring projects in Isla’s region for a few years before the revolution that
toppled the regime. “Thanks to the generosity of the American people Isla gets to
do what so many young American girls Isla’s age do every morning: kiss their
parents and walk to school.”
142
Isla’s parents held a picture of Isla’s brother as they walked into the voting booth.
He had worked for an opposition party that caught the attention of the ruling
regime, which ruthlessly suppressed opposition groups before the democratic
revolution. Isla stayed at home with her parents as schooling for young women was
not permitted. Isla’s mother, Anna, has agreed to take up a role as a teacher at the
new local school for girls.
Isla was presented with an American flag pin in honor of the occasion. Sweeping
aside some brown hair from her eyes, and suppressing the urge to cry (as she later
told reporters), Isla addressed a gathering of campaigners who had sought to bring
attention to abuses under the old regime. “Our nightmare is over, and we have
started to dream again”, she said. When asked what her dream now was, Isla
expressed the optimism of her country’s new democratic future: “I want to be the
first female President of my country”. The Secretary of State joked that his party
would love to have someone of Isla’s talents on the ballot right here at home.
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to push for
Congressional support for further democracy promotion. The Senate was due to
ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss proposals.
Words: 449
Compliance Questions
1) What is the name of the guest of the Secretary of State?
• Esther?
• Isla?
• Aura?
2) Whose picture did her parents hold up when they went in to vote?
• The President’s?
• The old democratic leader of their country?
• Her brother’s?
3) What did she say her dream was?
143
• To live in peace?
• To travel to the United States?
• To be president of her country?
Vignette C
Fmr. Secretary of State Criticizes Report on Democracy Promotion, Cites
Dangers of “Instability” and “Putting American Interests at Risk”
NEW YORK (AP) — Responding to the Administration’s call for a renewed
commitment to promote democracy abroad, the former Secretary of State warned
that democracy often caused regional instability, that new democratic governments
would not always serve American interests, and that pro-American authoritarian
regimes could be replaced by governments hostile to the U.S. interests.
"These linkages have been grossly oversimplified in a way that misleads the
American public", he said. "We're taking out all of the qualifiers and all of the
nuances. Giving people the right to vote doesn't solve the [national security]
problem."
He challenged the notion that common systems of governance translate to shared
foreign policy interests and priorities. For example, while many have praised the
budding relationship between the world's oldest democracy-the United States-and
other democratic powers, the former Secretary of State noted recent Congressional
complaints about democratic allies’ ties to states hostile to the United States.
Furthermore, many democracies are generally apathetic towards promoting
democracy beyond their borders. Despite sharing democratic values and a desire to
stop nuclear proliferation, combat terrorism, and solve regional tensions, there is no
shared perception of these threats and the correct approach to handling them.
The former Secretary of State challenged the existence of moral absolutes in
promoting democracy.
"Platitudes about democracy or freedom might sell very well, but they don't really
inform us", he said. Democracy engineering involves accepting "awesome" moral
responsibility for the consequences, which must be taken far more seriously.
144
“History tells us that we have to be hard-headed when it comes to promoting
American interests. We don’t choose the world we live in. We work with those
countries that want to work with us. We don’t pick and choose allies based on how
we wish the world would look like in an ideal world. And whenever we think we can
remake the world according to some grand plan, it never seems to work out how
some braniacs in Washington planned it. It’s better to be hard-headed than soft-
hearted.”
The former Secretary of State was speaking in response to the launch of a new
democracy promotion strategy co-authored by the Pentagon and State
Department.
The Secretary of State was due to meet with key legislators from both parties to
push for Congressional support for the report’s main recommendations, which
inspired today’s interjection from his predecessor at State. The Senate was due to
ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss the proposals. His predecessor’s comments are sure to
complicate those discussions.
Words: 440
Compliance Questions
1) Which former public official is named as giving the speech in the article?
• The former First Lady?
• The former Defense Secretary?
• The former Secretary of State?
2) What was his warning in his speech?
• Common systems of governance do not always translate to shared foreign
policy interests and priorities?
• Personal relationships between leaders can help solve common problems?
• Alliances can lead to trust and common interests over time?
3) What inspired the former public official’s intervention in the debate?
145
• The launch of a presidential campaign of a rival?
• His successor launching a report?
• The launch of a new naval ship in the Middle East?
Vignette D
Secretary of State Enlists Taylor Swift to Mark US’s Contribution to World Day of
Music
NEW YORK (AP) -- Taylor Swift's mega-selling "1989" album has earned the pop star 14
nominations at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards and now an ambassadorial role as part
of the US’s contribution to the World Day of Music, which was marked Tuesday.
Swift, who recently made headlines for being snapped stepping out with a mystery British
dining companion in Los Angeles, stepped out with the distinctly less-mysterious
Secretary of State in Washington D.C. Tuesday to mark the Day of Music, which saw
countries throughout the world mark the occasion with music and celebrations.
“It’s truly an honor to represent your country in any capacity. I was raised on music from
Etta James to Johnny Cash, Leadbelly to Elvis Presley, and our music has been amongst
our greatest gifts to the world”, said Swift. The musician plays a concert at RFK stadium
Tuesday night, with money being donated to music projects in low-income
neighborhoods.
The Secretary of State revealed his own passion for American roots music but said
people everywhere were inspired by traditional American music: “For so many people
American music brought the sound of freedom. Music, at its best, gave song to the spirit
of a people and told stories about hopes and dreams that transcended borders and
political boundaries. And in return we’ve gained so much from the music the world has
given us, from Beatlemania to Daft Punk!”
The Secretary of State and Taylor Swift were greeted by swarms of school kids wearing
t-shirts emblazoned with World Music Day’s guitar logo. “They’re here to see me!” joked
the Secretary. Ms Swift joked that the Secretary knew more about music than she knew
about politics: “Still, let’s rock the vote! Register to vote and find your voice in how our
146
country works.”
The Day saw similar events held across the world, from Bogota to Berlin, Djibouti to
Dublin. The UN General-Secretary, Ban-Ki Moon, paired up with Russian boyband
“Master Margarita” for a live cybercast on Youtube encouraging kids to take up a musical
instrument. The organization’s aim is for 5% more kids throughout the world to take up
music in the next ten years. Reports agree that introducing kids to music at a young age
can lead to gains in more traditional academic subjects.
The Secretary of State ended his speech with some not-to-subtle references to Swift’s
latest album, which has broken numerous sales records. “Don’t shake it off, shake it up!”
said the Secretary of State. Judging by the raptured attention paid to Ms Swift by the
children in attendance, the Secretary of State had never felt more hip.
Words: 448
Compliance Questions
1) Which pop star is mentioned as the main character of the article?
• Katy Perry?
• Madonna?
• Taylor Swift?
2) What Day was being Commemorated?
• World Music Day?
• World Literature Day?
• World Nature Day?
3) The pop star mentioned in the article urged attendees to do what?
• Rock the mic?
• Rock the vote?
• Rock the world?
147
Vignette E
Secretary of State Makes World Literacy Day with Visit from Author Gary
Shteyngart
(AP) - Gary Shteyngart, the author of such books as “Absurdistan” and “Little
Failure”, joined the Secretary of State in Washington D.C. Thursday for the launch
of World Literacy Day. The author, who left his native St Petersburg as a small child
and who has written movingly about the immigrant experience in the United States,
spoke of how books were his “compass” to steady himself in “the buffeting that life
so often sends our way”. Shteyngart said that he was honored to attend “but
probably more surprised than anything, considering what I’ve written about
politicians!”
The Secretary of State was joined by thousands of high school students from
around the country to mark the occasion, a day being celebrated worldwide. “We
have made tremendous strides in fighting the scourge of illiteracy, but we must
never get complacent. Not promoting literacy worldwide, not fighting illiteracy here
at home.”
The Secretary went on to say that literacy had many benefits beyond the simple
enjoyments of a story well told: “The old saying that knowledge is power holds
good today. Liberty is about being able to exercise meaningful choices: what do
you want to be? Who do you want to marry? Who should you vote for? The ability
to read opens up how we can better lead our lives.”
Shteyngart carried on this theme in his remarks: “Books are markers of meaning.
We remember where we were when we got married, had kids, met our best friends;
books share these same qualities of marking a transition between who we were to
who we are. So many people I spoke to talk about their favorite books as a child
with the same reverence they might about a long-lost friend. In an adult world
where we so often struggle to connect with one another, reading a challenging
novel is like taking a bath in someone’s mind. There’s so much to fight for in getting
access to books, from Los Angeles to Lagos.”
Students were asked to name their favorite books and many of the authors would
be recognized worldwide, from J.K. Rowling to Roald Dahl.
148
The U.N. has set ambitious targets on eradicating worldwide illiteracy by 2030. The
twin challenges to tackle the problem were breaking cycles of illiteracy by
addressing adult illiteracy and getting students access to books at a young age.
The Secretary of State was due to meet with key legislators from both parties to
push for Congressional support for action to tackle adult illiteracy. The Senate was
due to ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee
next week to further discuss the proposals.
Words: 448
Compliance Questions
1) Where was Gary Shteyngart born?
• Riga?
• St Petersburg?
• Washington DC?
2) Shteyngart describes books as what?
• “Markers of meaning”?
• “Our lives in slow motion”?
• “Our common inheritance”?
3) What is the political target mentioned in the article?
• The Federal Government has set ambitious targets for 10 books in every
home by 2040
• The U.N. has set ambitious targets on eradicating worldwide illiteracy by
2030
• The state of Texas has set ambitious targets for a library in every major town
by 2020
Vignette F
149
Secretary of State Launches Report With Keynote Speech Calling for Renewed
American Commitment to Promoting Democracy Around the World
NEW YORK (AP) — The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that
more aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
“The evidence is clear: The United States should attempt to spread democracy
because people generally live better lives under democratic governments.
Compared to inhabitants of non-democracies, citizens of democracies enjoy
greater individual liberty, political stability, freedom from governmental violence,
enhanced quality of life, and a much lower risk of suffering a famine,” the Secretary
said in a keynote address Sunday at the Council for Foreign Relations in New York.
“This is not opinion, it’s fact and it’s borne out by history.”
The Secretary was speaking at the launch of a new democracy promotion strategy
co-authored by the Pentagon and State Department. The two Departments had
been consulting academics over the last year on the United States’ posture towards
assisting the spread of democracy abroad. The speech aimed to sum up the
report’s key takeaways.
“First, as human beings, American should and do feel some obligation to improve
the well-being of other human beings. The bonds of common humanity do not stop
at our borders.”
The Secretary cited statistics from the work of R. J. Rummel that found that citizens
of democracies were substantially less likely to die from internal violence than those
who lived in their authoritarian or totalitarian counterparts.
The Secretary stressed the academics’ findings on the fact that democracies don’t
suffer from humanitarian catastrophes like famine and instead put in place the
groundwork for long-run economic growth. “The United States should spread
democracy because democracies do not suffer from famines. The economist
Amartya Sen concludes that ‘one of the remarkable facts in the terrible history of
famine is that no substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a
democratic form of government and a relatively free press.’
150
Indeed, democracies that embrace liberal principles of government are likely to
create a stable foundation for long-term economic growth. Individuals will only
invest when they are confident that their investments will not be taken from them.
Democratic governments are more likely to have the political legitimacy necessary
to embark on difficult and painful economic reforms.”
The Secretary concluded his remarks by saying “democracy is the United States’
gift to the world, and it has never stopped being so vital.”
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to push for
Congressional support for the report’s main recommendations. The Senate was due
to ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss the proposals.
Words: 450
Compliance Questions
1) Why does the Secretary of State say that we should promote democracy?
• Because people generally live better lives under democratic governments?
• Because democracy in other countries means that they are more likely to
vote with us in the UN on major decisions?
• Because a world which respects freedom is more likely to be safe for
Americans?
2) States, according to the Secretary of State, that are democratic are less likely to
suffer from what?
• Disease?
• Climate Change?
• Famine?
3) Where was the speech given?
• The Council on Foreign Relations in New York?
• The Press Club in Washington D.C.?
• The Union Debating Society at Cambridge University?
151
Vignette G
Secretary of State Launches Report With Keynote Speech And Surprise
Guests Calling for U.S. Promotion of Democracy Around the World
NEW YORK (AP) —The Secretary of State called Sunday for a foreign policy that
more aggressively promotes democracy abroad — even "in some very messy,
difficult places."
The Secretary welcomed a group of America’s first responders, who had joined him
to promote the findings of a report the Secretary had commissioned on the need to
promote democracy. Steve, 43, a firefighter from Boston, explained their backing:
“I’ve responded to terrorist attacks and I have seen the devastation that they cause:
death, destruction, families never the same again. And it breaks my heart. But we
need a strategy that brings hope to those people who live in countries where they
don’t know the meaning of the word freedom.”
Grace, a policewoman who has served in New York City for the last 24 years,
echoed his sentiments: “We need order there so people don’t spread disorder and
destruction here. We need to solve the causes, not the symptoms.” Grace was
treated for PTSD after responding to the attacks in New York City and told reporters
that she “got political in terms of thinking of policy solutions” from then: “I know
what I went through and I don’t want any other American to suffer the same way
because we didn’t bother to think through a solution.”
Grace’s husband, Jim, a retired Air Force veteran, told of their struggles: “I couldn’t
be prouder of the role she is now playing. Sleepless nights, medical bills, she had
flashbacks and fits. If we can spread democracy and drain the swamp of terrorism,
then perhaps another family can live in peace rather than go through hell”. Jim
offered his military experience as further evidence: “Our friends in the world have
always been democracies. I knew when I was talking to someone high up in a
democracy that they got there by merit, not by the favor of some tyrant.”
The Secretary saluted their heroism but also wished that they hadn’t had to face the
challenges that they had faced. “They want to change America, but it is up to us to
152
sponsor change throughout the world so people prefer the ballot to the bullet. We
need to let the sunlight of freedom into these societies. So many societies have
gone from violence towards a democratic future, but our work is far from done.”
After the speech the Secretary met with key legislators from both parties to push for
Congressional support for further democracy promotion. The Senate was due to
ask the Secretary to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations committee next
week to further discuss proposals.
Words: 450
Compliance Questions
1) Who did the Secretary of State join in making the speech?
• American Veterans of Foreign Wars?
• American first responders?
• American reservists?
2) Grace, in the article, was treated for what?
• Ebola?
• PTSD?
• Dehydration?
3) The Secretary saluted them for what?
• Their sacrifice?
• Their performance in the line of duty?
• Their heroism?
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Radford, Simon Wyn
(author)
Core Title
The political psychology of democracy promotion, or how democracies democratically promote democracy promotion
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Political Science and International Relations
Publication Date
07/29/2016
Defense Date
06/09/2016
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
democracy,democracy promotion,framing,International relations,OAI-PMH Harvest,political psychology,Political science
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
English, Robert (
committee chair
), Munck, Geraldo (
committee chair
), Cull, Nick (
committee member
), James, Pat (
committee member
)
Creator Email
simon.wyn.radford@gmail.com,sradford@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-288277
Unique identifier
UC11281151
Identifier
etd-RadfordSim-4684.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-288277 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-RadfordSim-4684.pdf
Dmrecord
288277
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Radford, Simon Wyn
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
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Repository Location
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Tags
democracy promotion
framing
political psychology