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Has Trump Damaged the U.S. Image Abroad? Decomposing the Effects of Policy Messages on Foreign Public Opinion

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“Well, you know, my critics are only saying that [my rhetoric is increasing tensions with foreign countries] because it’s me. If someone else uttered the exact same words that I uttered, they would say what a great statement, what a wonderful statement.”

— U.S. President Donald Trump, on August 11, 2017.

Abstract

The U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently made foreign countries central to his political messages, often conveying animosity. But do foreign citizens react more to the speaker of these messages—Trump himself—or their content? More generally, when people are exposed to messages sent from foreign countries, are their attitudes influenced by information heuristics or information content in messages? Although related studies are abundant in the literature of American public opinion, these questions are not fully examined in the literature of foreign public opinion. To address them, we used Japan as a case and fielded a survey experiment exposing citizens to U.S. policy messages that varied by source, policy content, and issue salience. Results suggest that while the source cue (Trump attribution) causes negative perceptions of the U.S., the policy content (cooperative vs. uncooperative) has a larger effect in shaping opinion of the U.S. Furthermore, analysis of interaction effects shows that only when U.S. policy approach is uncooperative does the Trump attribution have significantly negative and large effects. We conclude that foreign citizens rely more on policy content in transnational opinion formation—an aspect that past research in this area has overlooked. Substantively, these findings may demonstrate that even under a presidency that has alienated foreign countries and seemingly undermined U.S. stature in the world, foreign opinion toward the U.S. does not hinge entirely on its political leader. In short, Trump has not irreparably damaged the U.S. image abroad.

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Notes

  1. Patrick E. Tyler, “Threats and Responses: News Analysis; A New Power In the Streets.” The New York Times, February 17, 2003. https://nyti.ms/2oqFXOI (last accessed: July 5, 2018).

  2. “Donald Trump on Foreign Policy: 2016 Republican nominee for President, 2000 Reform Primary Challenger for President.” On The Issues, last updated on March 3, 2018. http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Donald_Trump_Foreign_Policy.htm (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  3. Dan Merica, Jeremy Diamond and Melissa Gray, “Trump speaks with Macron amid mounting tensions with North Korea.” CNN Politics, updated 4:37 PM ET, Saturday August 12, 2017, http://cnn.it/2fzGOL3 (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  4. Donald Trump, On The Issues, last updated on June 15, 2017. http://www.ontheissues.org/Donald_Trump.htm (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  5. Bruce Stokes, “How Strong Is the U.S.-Japan Relationship?” Foreign Policy, April 14, 2015. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/14/united-states-japan-relationship-poll-washington-tokyo/ (last accessed: July 5, 2018).

  6. An alternative would be to choose another country with a larger share of citizens with anti-U.S. sentiment. But with an assumption that Trump’s rhetoric tends to decrease, rather than increase, foreign individuals’ favorable attitudes toward the U.S., choosing such a country in a study could suffer from a “floor” effect.

  7. As we introduce later, these effects are independent of issue salience, which has largely insignificant independent or moderating effects on Japanese people’s attitudes toward the U.S.

  8. We discuss a potential concern about the use of Japan as a case in the concluding section and introduce additional results of statistical analysis to address this.

  9. The aggregate data are downloadable from their Global Indicators Database, http://www.pewglobal.org/database/ (last accessed on March 14, 2018). See their website for exact question wordings.

  10. Compared to Trump’s statements during the campaign period, his statements toward Japan after becoming the president may seem less hostile. This change, if any, and its impact on any change of Japanese public opinion are subjects for future research.

  11. The entire survey is described in English here, but was translated into and appeared in Japanese for respondents. The original survey data, a complete set of computer scripts in R, and the survey questionnaire (in Japanese) are available at one of the authors’ dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SVXPSO.

  12. This survey experiment was approved by Dartmouth College’s Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects (ID: STUDY00030273) and preregistered at Evidence in Governance and Politics (ID: 20170428AA), https://egap.org/registration/2488. Past studies show that CrowdWorks is a valid platform for recruiting subjects for behavioral and cognitive research (Majima et al. 2017; Majima 2017), offering support for our use of it in this study. However, the resulting sample does differ from Japan’s adult population in terms of key demographic variables. As Table A.1 in the Supplementary Materials shows, our sample includes participants who are younger and more well-educated than the population, and has higher percentages of participants who are female and from higher income households. In the Supplementary Materials, we show the results of testing the three hypotheses with post-stratified sampling weights and discuss some implications.

  13. In an initial test run of the survey experiment, we paid 54 Japanese Yen to the first 100 respondents. We increased the amount to 86 Japanese Yen for the remainder of the respondents after observing a slow pace with the initial lower compensation. We excluded 13 participants who did not answer a question about income and/or answered “other” to a question about education to make the weighted and unweighted data comparable. The results including these participants (in unweighted analysis) are only marginally different from the results presented in this paper.

  14. We use these questions for further exploratory analyses, a balance check, and robustness tests. For these results, see the Supplementary Materials.

  15. Moreover, the length of our treatment materials is comparable to that in other studies (e.g., Cohen 2003; Ciuk and Yost 2016). If anything, as Bullock (2011) himself notes, his use of fairly long policy statements represents more of an exception in this literature.

  16. “Trump v Clinton on foreign policy.” Kim Ghattas, BBC News, Washington. May 8, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-36232271 (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  17. “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again.” Office of Management and Budget. 2017. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/2018_blueprint.pdf (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  18. One possible concern was that our use of Trump vs. a U.S. congressman would motivate participants to consider the difference between the presidency and the Congress in the policy-making process. If participants knew the detailed process of policy-making under the U.S., their attitudes toward the U.S. might be influenced by this difference. But we argue that this is unlikely, because average Japanese people do not fully understand the different roles that the two branches in the U.S. federal government play in the foreign policy-making process.

  19. “In Welcoming Shinzo Abe, Trump Affirms U.S. Commitment to Defending Japan.” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Peter Baker, The New York Times. February 10, 2017. https://nyti.ms/2kWRSmE (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  20. “The 141 Stances Donald Trump Took During His White House Bid.” Jane C. Timm, NBC News. November 28, 2016. http://nbcnews.to/1MAY10z (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  21. “Shinzo Abe won big on Sunday. This is what it means for Japans national security policy.” Michael Green and Zack Cooper, Washington Post. October 25, 2017. http://wapo.st/2yNY3zU?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.49eef4ef2665 (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  22. “Trump Warns That Major, Major Conflict With North Korea Is Possible.” Gerry Mullany, The New York Times. April 27, 2017. https://nyti.ms/2qcRXlM (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  23. Favorability towards the U.S.—the broadest perception of the four—was always asked first. The other three questions appeared in random order to minimize question order effects.

  24. “Global Indicators Database.” Pew Research Center. http://www.pewglobal.org (last accessed on July 5, 2018).

  25. In addition, the Cronbach’s alpha, which measures how closely these four measures are related, is 0.71. This serves as further justification for our decision to collapse these four different measures into a uni-dimensional scale.

  26. The interaction model includes two other non-interaction terms. Although these coefficient estimates are not our main interests, they also warrant inspection. The effect of an uncooperative policy message given the baseline conditions is large (0.22 points) and highly significant (\(p < 0.001\)). This means that people become more unfavorable toward the U.S. when they are exposed to an uncooperative (baseline) policy statement made by an anonymous U.S. Congressman (baseline). The effect of exposure to a salient issue (national security) given the baseline conditions is small (0.03) and insignificant at any conventional level. This is consistent with the results based on our additive model.

  27. The study by Ciuk and Yost (2016) suggests the importance of looking at another interaction—that of issue salience and policy content. Because estimating all interaction effects with a focus on issue salience was not our main research interest, we did not preregister a hypothesis on this additional interaction. But the results of running a model with an interaction of Policy Content and Issue Salience show that the interaction is in fact insignificant. This result is contrary to the finding in Ciuk and Yost (2016). One might expect that uncooperative policy on a charged issue like security would motivate people to consider policy implications more closely, compared to a less strained area like exchange programs. Nevertheless, Japanese respondents react equally to cooperative or uncooperative policy statements regardless of issue area. This suggests that U.S. image abroad can suffer (or improve) from policy directions taken in several issue domains, regardless of their importance to international debate.

  28. The same is done for all figures in the Supplementary Materials.

  29. “OECD Chart: Population with tertiary education, 25-34 year-olds / 55-64 year-olds, % in same age group, Annual, 2016,” available at https://data.oecd.org/chart/5dVl (last accessed July 5, 2018).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Election and Data Science Lab, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Alexander Agadjanian

  2. Dartmouth College, 204 Silsby Hall, HB 6108, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA

    Yusaku Horiuchi

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  1. Alexander Agadjanian
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  2. Yusaku Horiuchi
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Correspondence to Yusaku Horiuchi.

Additional information

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2017 Political Psychology APSA Pre-Conference (at the University of California, Berkeley) on August 30, 2017, in a seminar for Harvard University’s Contemporary Japanese Politics Study Group on November 11, 2017, and in a seminar for Dartmouth College’s Program in Quantitative Social Science on April 20, 2018. The first draft was written by Agadjanian as an independent research paper supervised by Horiuchi. Agadjanian thanks the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning and the Department of Government at Dartmouth College for providing financial support for the project and conference attendance. We also thank Katie Clayton, David Cottrell, D.J. Flynn, Ben Goldsmith, Josh Kertzer, Dean Lacy, Jack Landry, Brendan Nyhan, Jen Wu, and QSS seminar classmates for useful comments.

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Agadjanian, A., Horiuchi, Y. Has Trump Damaged the U.S. Image Abroad? Decomposing the Effects of Policy Messages on Foreign Public Opinion. Polit Behav 42, 581–602 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9511-3

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