Brief Description: "With nationalism on the rise around the world, many worry that these attitudes could lead to a surge in deadly conflict. To combat this trend, federations like the European Union have tried to build inclusive regional identities to overcome nationalist distrust and inspire international cooperation. Yet not all nationalisms are alike. Nationalisms in International Politics draws on insights from psychology to explore when nationalist commitments promote conflict — and when they foster cooperation.

Challenging the received wisdom about nationalism and military aggression, Kathleen Powers differentiates nationalisms built on unity from those built on equality, and explains how each of these norms give rise to distinct foreign policy attitudes. Combining innovative US experiments with fresh analyses of European mass and elite survey data, she argues that unity encourages support for external conflict and undermines regional trust and cooperation, whereas equality mitigates militarism and facilitates support for security cooperation.

Nationalisms in International Politics provides a rigorous and compelling look at how different forms of nationalism shape foreign policy attitudes, and raises important questions about whether transnational identities increase support for cooperation or undermine it."

Summary: "This article first reviews theory and evidence about nationalism's conflict-causing potential. We discuss the microfoundations that link nationalism to foreign policy attitudes before describing research that implicates nationalism as a cause of militarized conflict. Next, we argue that understanding the complex relationships between nationalism and conflict requires theorizing the causal processes that connect various stakeholders' nationalism to foreign policy outcomes. Moreover, research on identity content suggests that nationalism is compatible with a variety of foreign policy preferences. Throughout, we center research that features nationalism as a principal independent variable or causal mechanism precipitating conflict." (para. 2)

Abstract: Globalization is frequently linked to populism in advanced industrial societies, yet scholars have found little evidence for a direct connection between citizens' personal economic fortunes and populist beliefs. We draw on the sociotropic tradition to argue that beliefs about how the global economy differently affects groups in society link globalization to populism and its component elements — anti-elitism, people-centrism, and demand for popular sovereignty — on the distribution within society of gains and losses. Data from an original survey of U.S. residents supports our argument that beliefs about whether wealthy Americans have gained from globalization — the rich getting richer — correlate with populist attitudes. This pattern holds while adjusting for a broad range of pocketbook measures and the nativist attitudes associated with right-wing populism. Results from a pre-registered experiment further show that exposure to an article about globalization enriching Davos billionaires increases two of three populist beliefs, lending causal leverage to our empirical tests. Our results emphasize the class dynamics created by outside financial forces and not the country as a whole, suggesting that IR scholars gain important insights by accounting for globalization's uneven effects. Perceptions about globalization inform attitudes about politics in general, a layer deeper than foreign economic policy preferences.

Abstract: When confronted with coercive threats, targets often stand firm rather than back down. We identify one important yet unrecognized factor that causes actors to resist threats: psychological reactance. Reactance theory explains that when someone perceives a threat to their freedom to make choices, they attempt to restore their autonomy by refusing to capitulate. The result is unwillingness to concede to coercion that extends beyond rational incentives. We test for reactance as a cause of coercion failure with two novel experiments. Each experiment pairs a coercive threat treatment with a matched 'natural costs' counterpart that imposes the same choice on the target without intentional action by a coercer. Controlling for prominent alternative explanations including costs, benefits, power, credibility, and reputation, we find that the targets of threats capitulate less frequently and more often support aggression against their opponents.

Abstract: How do concerns about fairness shape foreign policy preferences? Although IR scholars are increasingly interested in the role of fairness concerns in international politics, they tend to operationalize fairness in terms of equality rather than equity. We show that fairness has two faces, and taking both into account can shed light on the structure of important foreign policy debates. Fielding an original survey on a national sample of Americans, we show that different types of Americans think about fairness in different ways, and that these fairness preferences correlate with foreign policy preferences: individuals who emphasize equity are far more sensitive to concerns about burden sharing, are far less likely to support US involvement abroad when other countries aren't paying their fair share, and often support systematically different foreign policies than individuals who emphasize equality. As long as IR scholars primarily focus on one dimension of fairness, we miss much about how fairness concerns shape foreign policy attitudes.

Abstract: Recent elections in the US and UK highlighted a growing anti-globalization sentiment that threatens the liberal international economic system. Existing research points to economic dislocation, sociotropic judgments, and status threats to explain mass protectionist attitudes, but neglects a key factor that has been central to campaign rhetoric: nativism. With nationally representative survey data from the U.S. and UK, we first introduce a new latent measure for globalization attitudes and show that nativism predicts negative beliefs about globalization's effects --- even among people who espouse a strong free market ideology. Second, we analyze the results of a survey experiment to show that while giving people information about the long-term national benefits of free trade decreases protectionism on average, the treatment effect weakens among more nativist Americans. The results have implications for research on the antecedents of international economic attitudes and foreign policy public opinion in a comparative context.

Abstract: For the past fifty years, public opinion scholars have searched for signs of "constraint" in the American public's foreign policy attitudes. We review these attempts here, suggesting that the ensuing work has ultimately fallen into two research traditions that have largely been conducted in isolation of one another: horizontal models that portray attitudes as being sorted along multiple dimensions on the same plane, and vertical models that imply a hierarchical organization in which abstract values determine specific policy positions. We then offer a new — networked — paradigm for political attitudes in foreign affairs, leveraging tools from network analysis to show that both camps make unrealistically strict assumptions about the directionality and uniformity of attitude structure. We show that specific policy attitudes play more central roles than our existing theories give them credit for, and the topology of attitude networks varies substantially with individual characteristics like political sophistication.

Abstract: The recent Eurozone crisis and negotiations over bailout packages to Greece are more than a simple controversy about financial resources. They have a decidedly moralistic overtone. Giving more funds is thought by some to be unfair to hardworking taxpayers and does not teach Greece an important moral lesson. Yet much international political economy scholarship neglects such considerations. We build on moral psychology to understand the ethical drivers of both German support and opposition to the 2015 Greek government bailout package. We analyze original survey data to show how morality is an essential factor in Germany's hard line approach. Our results show that caring and European attachment are associated with bailout support, while authority, national attachment, and retributive fairness drive opposition. Some morals also have boundaries: National attachment attenuates the effect of harm/care on sup- port for foreign financial assistance but strengthens the effect of fairness on bailout opposition. Moral psychology helps us understand foreign policy but must be adapted to account for multiple potential ingroups.

Abstract: Although classical international relations theorists largely agreed that public opinion about foreign policy is shaped by moral sentiments, public opinion scholars have yet to explore the content of these moral values, and American IR theorists have tended to exclusively associate morality with liberal idealism. Integrating the study of American foreign policy attitudes with Moral Foundations theory from social psychology, we present original survey data showing that the five established moral values in psychology — harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity — are strongly and systematically associated with foreign policy attitudes. The "individualizing" foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity are particularly important drivers of cooperative internationalism, and the "binding" foundations of authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity of militant internationalism. Hawks and hardliners have morals too, just a different set of moral values than the Enlightenment ones emphasized by liberal idealists.