ANDI ZHOU

Scholars widely attribute the intractability of territorial disputes to domestic political constraints that deter leaders from seeking compromise. Yet, the strength of these costs has rarely been tested. I investigate two assumptions underlying much of the literature on domestic politics and territorial conflict: first, that leaders cannot easily persuade their constituents to support territorial compromise, and second, that the public holds leaders accountable on territorial issues at the ballot box. Drawing on the foreign policy public opinion literature, I argue that because many territorial disputes--even highly salient ones--are experienced by citizens only at a distance, leaders may be able to persuade citizens to accept territorial compromise through rhetorical framing, and electoral accountability may be tempered if citizens prioritize other issues and candidate attributes ahead of territorial concerns when they vote. To test these hypotheses, I embed two experiments designed around the dispute over Kashmir in an original face-to-face survey in India (N = 1,508). I find that while Indian leaders have limited power to shape public preferences on Kashmir overall, the electoral accountability that they face on Kashmir is no greater than that of other issues that are routinely contested in Indian politics and not generally considered to be "intractable." These results suggest that mass electoral politics impose relatively weak constraints on leaders even in a context where territorial disputes are intensely salient and electoral institutions provide ample opportunity for citizens to exercise accountability. This work thus raises questions about the strength of such constraints on interstate territorial bargaining both inside and outside of India, and points toward the need to examine possible sources of domestic constraint that lie outside of electoral mechanisms.

We explore how framing could affect territorial bargaining. Building on prospect theory, we argue that contemporary international norms give leaders strong incentives to frame territorial claims as losses to be averted rather than gains to be obtained. This framing suggests that domestic audiences would become more supportive of risky escalation and less supportive of compromise settlements. Using survey experiments in Argentina and Chile about disputed territory in Antarctica, we find that loss framing indeed raises risk acceptance. Moreover, we find that, relative to benign or unspecified opponents, hostile opponents raise risk acceptance and somewhat attenuate the framing effect. Contrary to our expectations, historical ownership narratives do not induce framing effects. These findings corroborate the power of framing to shape public preferences in interstate disputes but also highlight limits to the scope conditions within which loss framing operates in such settings.

In war, citizens are asked to sacrifice for their homeland. Why are people willing to make such sacrifices? One suggestion has been that maps help foster national identities strong enough to prompt willingness to make these sacrifices. We argue that maps activate a norm to defend the homeland either directly or indirectly, by priming national identity and national attachment. In four survey experiments—in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Thailand—we explore the effects of maps on willingness to sacrifice for homeland defense, national identity, and national attachment. In Argentina, Bolivia, and Thailand, exposure to homeland maps increased the level of sacrifice respondents were willing to make. Contrary to our expectations, maps did not significantly affect any of our measures of national identity and attachment. 

One of the central models in the study of international political economy holds that actors' preferences about economic issues like trade are a function of their economic interests as represented by their position in the global economy. Recent empirical work investigating the relationship between economic interests and trade attitudes, however, has found mixed results, leading to a new wave of experimental studies that point to the role of information in explaining why economic interests fail to predict economic preferences. But what kinds of information about trade are citizens exposed to in the real world, and what effect does it have on how they think about trade? This study combines survey data from an original 13 month national panel survey in the United States with individual-level behavioral measures of media consumption derived from web tracking data, to explore what news about trade Americans are exposed to in a naturalistic setting, and how it shapes their trade preferences. We find that most Americans are exposed to relatively little news about trade, but that the kind of trade news Americans are exposed to in the real world does not magnify the effects of economic interests; instead, we find some evidence that trade news affects trade preferences through sociotropic rather than pocketbook pathways, as Americans become more supportive of trade the more positive stories about trade they see.