The possibilities and limits of international status: Evidence from foreign aid and public opinion

States use symbolic gestures to increase their international status, or relative position, within the international community. But how do the status-seeking actions of one state affect the status of others? The common assumption is that improvements in one state’s status lead to the relative deterioration of other states’ status by comparison. In this paper, we focus on status’ social qualities to delineate multiple theoretical pathways through which one state’s status can change – or not – relative to another. Status is not conferred in a vacuum and the consequences of status-altering activities may spill over to third-parties. We field an original survey and reanalyze several existing studies to understand how relative status operates in the case of foreign aid; these surveys reveal novel empirical patterns about the circumstances under which a state’s status will update relative to other states. Our results demonstrate how focusing on any single definition of status may blind observers to changes along other dimensions and fundamentally alter the conclusions drawn about status-changing activity


Introduction
Do states' symbolic gestures affect international status, or their relative position in the international hierarchy?Do these actions affect other, non-acting, states' status?A large literature agrees that politicians and their citizens are "plainly obsessed with investing in, seizing, and defending" their states' international status because it provides social, material, and psychological benefits (Renshon 2017, 1).Status is not only instrumentally valuable in conferring decision-making autonomy and deference (Wohlforth 1998, Tomz 2012, Pratt 2018), but also intrinsically valuable as a psychological benefit (Wolf 2011, Kelley 2017).
Status is one of the motivating reasons that states engage in world-shaping actions such as acquiring nuclear weapons, initiating conflicts, or joining international organizations (Larson & Shevchenko 2010, Rathbun et al. 2021, Renshon 2017), sometimes at the expense of other political goals (Barnhart 2016).But even small actions in the international arena, such as hosting the Olympics, donating and receiving insubstantial amounts of foreign aid, and committing one-off acts of torture have demonstrably changed the perceived status of the acting state (Carnegie & Dolan 2020, Hafner-Burton & Montgomery 2006, Morse & Pratt 2021, Powers & Renshon 2021).Status clearly matters to states and they are willing to take costly actions to improve it.But do the actions that states take affect their relative position in the international system?A change in one actor's status should lead to a change in "at least one other actor's status" (Dafoe et al. 2014, 375). 1 Ripple effects in the international system can occur when the identity or meaning of status-groupings change (Brooks et al. 2015, Gray 2013, Gray & Hicks 2014, Morse 2019) or when individual state actions provide information about other states' prestige (Duque 2018, Kinne 2014, Renshon 2017). 2 Scholars commonly posit that shifts in a state's individual status should affect its position in the international hierarchy in equal measure (Barnhart 2017).However, we argue that this is not always the case.In this 1 Emphasis added. 2 While Duque (2018) discusses the idea of relational status in-depth, her definition of status as socially recognized and embedded in bilateral relations differs substantially from the conception of status as a "consensus concept" recognized across multiple publics, states, and constituencies.
paper, we focus on status' "social and peer referent" qualities to delineate different models of how, and for whom, status changes occur in the international system (Renshon 2017, 113).We clarify the concepts of individual and relative status.While individual status, the focus of current experimental literature, looks at the implications for a single state, relative status requires comparisons between two or more states.Acknowledging this distinction, actions that elicit individual status changes do not automatically translate to relative status changes.Status implications may reverberate to outside states or they might not.
The framework we develop for understanding international status, and the particular challenges of measuring this concept, suggest several potential paths through which statuschanging attempts can alter international relations.When state A's status increases, state B's can: 1) stay the same (maintaining B's individual status and decreasing its status relative to A), b) increase (increasing B's individual status and maintaining its status relative to A), or decrease (decreasing B's individual status and decreasing its status relative to A).All of these potential changes to state B's status are rational responses to state A's actions and would be empirically equivalent if we only studied the status implications for state A.
We ground this argument in the case of foreign aid, an area of international relations with an implied hierarchy.Donor states are viewed with "superiority and power" (Kuusik 2006, 57), while recipient states are perceived as less developed and less powerful (Carnegie & Dolan 2020).A new group of emerging donors has also emerged, of which China is the most prolific.This group of former aid recipients turned donors differ substantially from traditional donors in their aid practices and have found foreign aid to be a useful tool in augmenting their international status (Asmus et al. 2021, Dreher et al. 2020, Eichenauer et al. 2021, Jones 2018, Mattingly & Sundquist 2021).
Our work extends recent theoretical and methodological innovations in the experimental international status literature which establish a relationship between public opinion and state status (Kitagawa & Chu 2021, Morse & Pratt 2021, Powers & Renshon 2021, Viskupič 2020).We thus field an original survey experiment as proof-of-concept for our novel status framework.The survey explores the dimensions along which status may change for various actors in a particular area, foreign aid, and during a particular period in time, the first wave of COVID-19.The disruption of typical aid flows during COVID-19 allows us to examine status reversals, or unusual aid transactions, that could destabilize established hierarchies.It is precisely the exceptional nature of these relationships that allows us to better understand how hierarchies, at multiple levels, change over time.
In a US sample, we find that information about a small aid donation increases the individual status of the donor state.For example, aid from China to the US increases positive perceptions of China.We also identify that information affects the status of other states that do not participate in the transaction.Continuing the example, aid from China increases positive perceptions of India, even though India is not involved in giving or receiving aid.
However, Chinese aid has no impact on perceptions of the UK, a more established aid donor also not involved in the transaction.When we compare the relative status of states, we find a similar pattern.Indian foreign aid decreases perceptions of American and British status relative to India, a notable pattern given Americans' concerns about relative loss (Brutger & Rathbun 2021).Finally, across all states, giving or receiving aid does not change the rank of states in the international hierarchy.These changes (or lack thereof) in international status across individual, relative, and systemic dimensions can be best understood through our expanded framework.Our analysis highlights both the opportunities states have to alter their position in the international system relative to some states, but not others, as well as the limitations to their ability to change the international order.
To test the external validity of these findings, we apply our measures of relative status to three existing experiments on foreign aid and status (Carnegie & Dolan 2020, Dietrich et al. 2018, Mattingly & Sundquist 2021).In line with the established literature, we replicate previous analyses and confirm that foreign aid increases the individual status of aid donors.We also find that the relative status of aid donors compared to other states outside the transaction also increases, but only amongst particular states.The reanalysis of these works shows the utility of our framework and offers future research avenues for extending international status studies through inter-state comparisons.
Our results have several implications for status change in the international system.First, our work brings concepts honed in the observational international status literature to the burgeoning field of experimental international status.In this paper, we demonstrate the value of including relative status measures in experiments on public opinion.By measuring status as simultaneously individual and relational, we match status concepts to appropriate empirical measurements and deepen previous conclusions about the impact of status-altering actions.Second, our approach highlights the way status-changing events reverberate across the international ecosystem.Do the individual and relative status' of non-acting states change?While future work should theorize about how individuals and states identify relevant "targets," these findings contribute an essential first step by establishing that singular status actions may have broader implications.This implies that policymakers must carefully consider who the peers of a given state are before encouraging normatively good positions, such as decreasing carbon emissions (Keohane 2010) or improving women's rights (Bush & Zetterberg 2020).Finally, this paper contributes to a growing body of literature that shows status is not only driven by security considerations but also by economic and symbolic ges-

Defining international status
There is broad agreement that status conveys a state's position vis-a-vis a comparison group (MacDonald & Parent 2021).It can be defined as "standing, or rank, in a status community" (Renshon 2017, 4).Status can imply identity (i.e.membership in a group like major powers) and can be rank-based (i.e.position in a hierarchy), in which actors of lower standing defer to the interests of actors with higher standing (Pratt 2018).Where status is conceptualized as identity-based or as granted through membership in high-status organizations, states may be satisfied sharing the same status value as others so long as the relevant comparison is between members and nonmembers (Murray 2019, Larson & Shevchenko 2010).Where status is conceptualized as comparative standing, it has a zero-sum quality.If the status value of a group is fixed, additional members can dilute or change the value associated with it (Renshon 2017). 3The positional qualities of status separate this concept from related notions such as honor, reputation and credibility.Reputation, for example, is a belief about an actor's traits, such as their resolve, informed by their past behavior (Dafoe et al. 2014, Jervis 1989, Schelling 1960).Reputations are essential to assessing credibility (Renshon et al. 2018).Similarly, honor refers to beliefs about the virtue of another actor (Renshon 2017).
None of these concepts imply a pecking order, an essential element of international status.
The exclusivity implied by international status is a keen driver of state actions in the domestic and international arena.Historical evidence suggests that when states perceive the level of prestige they are attributed as incongruous with their preferred level of status compared to peer states, they respond creatively and strategically to restore or reimagine their status (Larson & Shevchenko 2010).Barnhart (2017, 393) establishes that states that have previously suffered humiliation "will engage in competitive status-seeking measures against third-party states aimed at influencing the perceptions of other states."Under this framework, state A attacking state C after suffering humiliation at the hands of B should enhance A's status relative to B. Perceived status deficits have driven states to engage in belligerent actions against both adversaries and bystanders in the international community (Barnhart 2020, Dafoe et al. 2014, Murray 2019, Renshon 2016).
But do the actions that states take affect their standing in the international hierarchy?
Measurement here poses a dilemma as international standing is often conflated with power (MacDonald & Parent 2021).While military and economic capacities affect material hierarchies of states (Gilpin 1983), most scholars argue that status is related to, though not comprised entirely of, these traditional power metrics.A historical focus on large-scale status actions taken by great powers poses difficulties for disentangling the causal effects of these events on international status even as these studies establish clear and compelling evidence of status competition.
Innovations in observational work using network analysis offer an alternative approach.This body of work provides strong support for the role of status in driving state actions using power-adjacent measures, specifically diplomatic networks.Duque (2018), Kinne (2014), andRenshon (2017) argue that changes in mutual recognition and centrality within networks of representation affect multiple states' status in the international arena.These measures are explicitly endogenous to other state characteristics-the presence or absence of embassies is deeply related to other markers of geopolitics.
A key insight from the diplomatic networks literature is the idea of status as a secondorder belief about what others believe the standing of a state is in relation to a comparison group (Dafoe et al. 2014).Therefore, status must be granted by an external audience.In a globalized world, it comes from the general international community of elite and mass actors, who often share foreign policy preferences (Kertzer 2020).As Carnegie & Dolan (2020, 498) state, "a country cannot improve its status only by earning heads of states' approval;" rather, it is a "consensus concept" that must be echoed by a broader international public capable of evaluating the implications of status-enhancing actions (Huberman et al. 2004, Frank 1985). 4iven the consensus nature of status, public opinion is one, though by no means the only, method through which to identify which states hold high or low international status.
A wealth of survey experiments have used information treatments to examine the circumstances under which publics update their perceptions of international status.The use of torture, for example, decreases perceptions of the United States on two status dimensions: prestige and morality (Powers & Renshon 2021, Morse & Pratt 2021).Information about foreign aid improves perceptions of the donor country (Dietrich et al. 2018, Mattingly & Sundquist 2021).However, rejecting foreign aid increases international perceptions of India's international status even if it does not change domestic status perceptions (Carnegie & Dolan 2020).Similarly, while apologies for past atrocities improve perceptions of the apologizing state amongst citizens in the state that received the apology, citizens of the Figure 1: Individual and relative status in the international system apologizing state disapprove of this action (Kitagawa & Chu 2021).Public concern about international status drives policy outcomes as diverse as leader approval (Powers & Renshon 2021), support for military intervention (Viskupič 2020), and composition of trade deals (Brutger & Rathbun 2021).While the experimental literature neatly isolates the causal effect of information about symbolic statecraft on the perceived status of individual states, it does not yet extend to the causal effect on states' relative position in the international hierarchy.
We illustrate this difference in Figure 1, which displays three potential models of status change.In both models, state B has higher status than state A at time t and state A takes status changing actions at time t+1.In the first model of status change (left), state A's actions result in higher status.This is the effect most likely to be identified by existing experimental approaches.However, this change also increases the relative closeness of the two states; i.e. while state B remains higher ranked than state A, the gap between their respective statuses has decreased.In this model of change, state A successfully increases both its individual and relative status.State B's individual status does not change but its status relative to A decreases.State A is now closer in status to state B.
In the middle and right panels of Figure 1, state A's actions can also impact the individual status of state B. In other words, A's status-actions lead to updating about the individual status of state B. How this impacts relative status, or the closeness of the pair, depends on the direction that B's status updates.For example, in the middle panel, both state A and state B see an increase in their individual status.Therefore, while state A's individual status increases, its status relative to B stays the same.In parallel, state B's relative status is maintained as its individual status increases.Finally, in the rightmost panel, state A's actions lead to a decrease in state B's individual status.In our schematic, as A's individual status increases and B's individual status decreases, the relative closeness of the relationship between A and B actually increases.In our illustration, A and B now have the same status.
While the individual status of state A increases in all three of these examples, status implications at the system level vary substantially.Focusing just on state A would make these models observationally equivalent when they are, in fact, theoretically distinct.By focusing attention on status' relational quality, this framework expands the existing literature on the public opinion of international status.
All three models of international status change, which are illustrative rather than exhaustive, reflect network dynamics relating states A and B. We do not posit a specific theory of how and when particular network effects might be observed.To the best of our knowledge, such a theory still eludes both political scientists and psychologists.Instead, we highlight several potential mechanisms through which symbolic gestures can have network-level implications.We pair these with new insights from public opinion.Importantly, we relax the assumption from the established observational literature that individual and relative status always move in tandem and open up the possibility for novel, more nuanced, findings about status as a relational and peer-referent concept.
Below we describe potential manifestations of each of the three scenarios in more detail.
In the leftmost panel, information about state A has no effect on the individual status of State B. As Renshon (2017) notes, Egyptian President Nasser's actions in Yemen were intended to impact Egypt's status vis-a-vis its Arab peers and not the United States.Similarly, the rise of China is unlikely to affect the status aspirations of microstates like Malta.
In the middle panel, status-actions from one member may spillover to other states with similar characteristics.When one member does something status-increasing (decreasing), the international community may raise (lower) their impression of other group members.
For example, association with more or less reputable lenders can generate "peer effects" that change investors' perceptions of sovereign debt ratings (Brooks et al. 2015).Signing a trade agreement with a country with a bad reputation leads publics to perceive the signatory as more risky (Gray & Hicks 2014).Explicit inclusion in a list of countries with poorly regulated banking systems drives a state's international reputation lower because of a "lowest-commondenominator effect;" inclusion on a blacklist is worse when the other countries on the list are in particular disrepute (Morse 2019).
Conversely, and in line with the rightmost panel, additional work shows that zero-sum status-competition can also take place within peer groupings, rather than general hierarchies.
In this case, the actions of one member imply the lack of action on behalf of another member.
When one member does something status-increasing, the international community may lower their impression of others who do not act the same way.Renshon (2017), for example, finds that status deficits are more likely to encourage bellicose behavior amongst peer states than other groupings while Honig & Weaver (2019) shows that one international organizations' success in a rating index spurred competition amongst peer organizations.
Most generally, "social creativity" in status competition, in which states unable to compete on traditional status metrics seek to reframe their own comparative advantages as alternative markers of status, offers countries without the economic or military capacity to compete with great powers an alternative means of international recognition (Larson & Shevchenko 2010).Scandinavian countries carved out a niche in international politics by focusing on human rights, welfare, and general dedication to humanitarianism (Murray 2019).
Similarly, states strategically adopt gender quotas to increase their international reputation for democracy regardless of other reforms (or lack thereof) (Bush 2011, Bush & Zetterberg 2020).Closing embassies decreases the status of the states whose representatives are sent home, despite not altering overall balance of power in the international system (Kinne 2014, Powers & Renshon 2021).North Macedonia even financed a $730 million renovation of its capital to bolster its appeal to the European Union, despite domestic backlash against wasteful spending (Hopkins 2016).Keohane (2010) makes this vision more explicit by positing an "economy of esteem" as a means of addressing climate change: offering new spaces for previously uncompetitive states to distinguish themselves in the international arena could promote pro-social behavior.We expect that this type of social creativity has more farreaching implications than has previously been studied.

Relative status and foreign aid
We continue to build our argument through the case of foreign aid.This type of small, symbolic, action may change a state's perceived status, but not objective evaluations of their economic or military standing.For the purpose of examining status amongst multiple parties, foreign aid usefully confers information about the status of at least two parties, the donor and the recipient.This generates an explicit hierarchy between at least two states, unlike other status-altering strategies that can be pursued unilaterally (i.e.technological development or hosting the Olympics).This allows us to design information treatments that will affect both individual and relative status simultaneously (including closeness and rank).
In foreign aid, donors are attributed the characteristics of "superiority and power" (Kuusik 2006, 57).This superiority manifests along several dimensions.First, if status is conferred by physical attributes, donor status indicates an economic surplus.The ability to generate state revenue that exceeds domestic needs has typically been achieved by highincome, high-status states.Second, vast literatures on foreign aid confirm that aid is given Foreign aid is a social contract, akin to relational hierarchy, where donors provide necessary funds in order to offset the recipient's required policy concessions (Lake 2009).Third, providing aid can also enhance moral superiority.Aid demonstrates a dedication to helping the world's poor, improving international audiences' perception of the donor (Goldsmith et al. 2014).While these reasons are neither mutually-exclusive nor empirically-distinguishable in the context of this paper, it's clear that aid has status implications which donor countries care about.Information about donors has been shown to increase their individual status.
For example, Dietrich et al. (2018) find that Bangladeshis improve their perceptions of the US when they are informed about US aid projects.Blair et al. (2019) find this same effect with USAID in Africa.
In contrast, recipients of foreign aid are viewed with "inferiority and powerlessness" (Kuusik 2006, 57).Receiving aid implies that a given state lacks the capacity to provide what its domestic population requires.Not accepting foreign aid boosts perceptions of the competence of potential recipient governments as well as their overall international status (Carnegie & Dolan 2020).Additionally, in the aid-for-policy-concessions framework, recipients of foreign aid are pulled by the strings of their benefactors (Bueno de Mesquita & Smith 2007).By virtue of this contract, they sacrifice policy autonomy in exchange for the aid they receive.Finally, cultural and historical factors play an important role in maintaining the lower group identity of aid recipients.Developing countries, and even formerly developing countries, are subject to paternalistic arguments from donor states that they cannot handle their own affairs and deserve a lower place in the international system (Baker 2015). 5ut patterns of aid giving are also changing.A burgeoning literature highlights a new division between the group of "traditional" and "emerging" or "new" donors.This distinction is often signaled by membership in the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD.Members of the DAC are industrialized, primarily Western donors with wellestablished aid programs that follow similar norms of aid-giving.Alternatively, more than thirty donors operate outside the DAC and their aid practices differ in systematic ways (Woods 2008, Dreher et al. 2011).The latter group is less developed and less inclined to call themselves "donors", often preferring the monikor "providers of South-South cooperation" (Smith et al. 2010).Many in this group recently accepted, or continue to accept, foreign aid from the DAC.The rise of non-DAC donors and the desire for their integration with traditional aid practices became a formal part of the Paris Declaration and DAC agenda in 2005.This attention helped solidify a distinct group identity, even if the amount of divergence from Western aid practices varies (Asmus et al. 2017).As Dreher et al. (2013) point out, it is less about the newness of non-DAC donors' aid programs, and more about public perceptions of "toxic" or "rogue" aid among this group that make the "emerging" donor group salient (Naim 2007).
China is at the forefront of this group, and a growing literature traces changes in approval of China in response to Chinese aid giving in sub-Saharan Africa (Blair et al. 2019, Dreher et al. 2020, Jones 2018), Latin America (Eichenauer et al. 2021), and Southeast Asia (Custer et al. 2018, Mattingly & Sundquist 2021).Foreign aid has been a useful way for emerging donors to compete for international recognition.6Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić illustrates this point in a recent statement that "China moved from a developing country receiving international aid to a superpower" ( N1 Belgrade 2021).In a more direct example of status competition within the emerging donor group, Asmus et al. (2021) find that India increases its aid allocations to locations where China has recently experienced public opinion gains.Foreign aid thus has meaningful membership communities and implications for international status.

Experimental Design
We test our expanded framework with an online information experiment, preregistered at EGAP, administered by the online survey firm Lucid on 1176 US respondents on June 1, 2020, in the middle of the first wave of the novel Coronavirus.Lucid's sample is nationallyrepresentative by age, gender, ethnicity and region and we show balance across treatment and control conditions in Appendix A.3. 7 We expect that changes in status for any actor will be most pronounced when they are unexpected.Therefore, we should be more likely to detect effects when an aid transaction provides new information about both sides of a transaction.Transactions that change who gives aid and who receives aid are a most-likely case to witness updating about statuschanging events.However, the circumstances under which foreign aid donors become recipients and vis-a-versa are limited.It is unusual for states that do not already receive aid to credibly accept aid under most circumstances.The US, for one, doesn't accept development aid.High-income, high-status states primarily accept aid in the wake of natural disasters or financial crises.Thus, changes in category from donor to recipient will be more rare and most likely to occur in emergency conditions.For example, foreign aid poured into Greece during the Eurozone crisis, Japan following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and France following the fire at Notre Dame.The United States turned down foreign aid from both Canada and Cuba following Hurricane Katrina because it was worried about how that action would be perceived (Brinkley & Smith 2005).The global pandemic in 2020 is a prime example of an emergency condition that challeneged existing relationships in the international system.Notably, foreign aid offered in emergency situations is unlikely to change the economic or military capacity of donors or recipients in meaningful ways.These acts may be more symbolic than substantive, yet they can still impact perceptions of international status in meaningful ways.
As in Churchill's adage,"never let a good crisis go to waste," crisis situations are an opportunity for states to attempt status increases (Katzenstein & Seybert 2018).We work to identify status changes during COVID-19, where foreign aid was one of many status-seeking activities states pursued during the pandemic. 8The disproportionate impact of the COVID- 7 The survey was fielded on a sample of 1,532 US respondents; however, only 1176 passed standard attention checks.We demonstrate that our results are robust to additional forms of attention checks in Appendix A.4 in line with recent findings by Aronow et al. (2020) on Lucid's decline in sample quality in 2020.
8 Importantly, our reanalyses include studies conducted before the pandemic, demonstrating that neither the empirical distinction between individual and relational status nor the impact on third parties is dependent on crisis scenarios.
19 crisis on traditional Western donors in early 2020 led many of these countries to roll back their aid programs.Non-Western donors took this opportunity to offer humanitarian assistance to a diverse pool of recipients, including to traditional high-income, high-status states.
For example, the US government was sharply criticized for accepting foreign assistance from the Kremlin in April 2020, with weeks of headlines such as "Putin Sends Military Plane with Coronavirus Aid to Help US" and "Russia sends Virus Aid to the US" (Rudnitsky 2020, Troianovski 2020).The acceptance of this aid was highly controversial, and political commentary highlighted that "it is an uncomfortable and humbling spot for the U.S. to find itself in -the world's richest and most powerful country, one that plays an outsize role in global security issues and international affairs, suddenly turned supplicant."(Shesgreen & Hjelmgaard 2020).This real-life example motivates our experimental design.9 Our choice of a US sample offers external validity, advantages to measurement, and a population for whom the treatment is likely to be salient.First, the US' role as a superpower makes the opinion of its citizens important to atypical donors seeking to improve their status.States routinely target status-enhancing activities to the American mass public (Goldsmith & Horiuchi 2012).10Second, the US is a hard test case as high attachment to US status by Americans biases against finding a decrease in status for the recipient state.11 Importantly, if said decrease occurs, high US status at baseline leaves significant room for respondents to update status negatively.Finally, US citizens generally believe that the US spends a disproportionate amount of its own budget on foreign aid (Milner & Tingley 2013).
Reversing the US' position from that of an aid donor to an aid recipient allows us to sidestep potential issues of respondent numerical-illiteracy and provides ample space for updating status beliefs. 12e note that our theory is not US-centric and there are clear shortcomings to the use of a US sample, including bias against finding significant results due to American perceptions of superiority and the reinforcement of Western perspectives in the study of international relations.This initial study validates our theory in a convenient and internationally salient sample of respondents.Our reanalyses of existing survey experiments, described in Section 6, confirm the value of a relative and peer-referent status framework in non-US samples.While reanalyzing previous studies in other sample strengthens the external validity of our results, we urge future research to consider replicating our status analyses in other populations.
Respondents are randomly assigned to read a hypothetical excerpt of a news article about aid acceptance or are directed straight to the outcome measures.For respondents who learn of the US' aid acceptance, we further randomize the donor country (UK, China and India).
The treatment wording for the UK condition appears as follows: [LONDON] -The [British] government announced that it would be sending a cargo plane full of medical supplies to the United States.The [British] aid is intended to help the US in its fight against the growing coronavirus pandemic.
For the Chinese and Indian aid conditions, we include an additional experimental treatment, randomizing information on the country's past aid actions.We include the following sentence as a prime of China and India's identity as emerging aid donors: "[China/India] has been a long time recipient of US foreign aid, and remains a developing country."13All treatment wordings are provided in Appendix A.1.
The vignette is realistic.The acceptance of a single cargo plane with medical supplies is a small act, but the single plane that arrived from Russia on April 1 st , 2020 made headlines for days.We choose language that approximated how the public was informed about this specific event, but are careful to avoid any political commentary. 14Our treatment, a diplomatic statement about a single donation, is a comparatively-weak prime.
We choose to manipulate hypothetical donor states in our treatment conditions in order to evaluate multiple donors simultaneously.While the case of Russian aid motivates our treatment, we cannot pair the Russian example with other donations.This would manipulate hypothetical and real examples across treatment conditions, which would result in a bundled treatment.While hypothetical cases might introduce additional challenges to our study if respondents don't find the example plausible, we believe this offers a conservative estimate of the treatment effect.We choose to include China as a hypothetical donor country because China has played the largest role in distributing virus-specific aid and its foreign aid activities have been framed as a threat to US interests.We also include India as an example of an additional non-DAC donor.Indian aid has received less attention then Chinese aid, meaning that respondents should have fewer prior beliefs.Finally, we include the United Kingdom as a hypothetical aid-provider.The UK is a traditional DAC donor.
The word "status" invokes multiple connotations in the minds of the public.Having a high status in the international community might be interpreted as "being powerful," "being a good example," or "being respected" (Powers & Renshon 2021). 15Rather than bundle these connotations, we invoke a specific meaning of status that isn't conflated with power.Status is position in a hierarchy, so we focus on "what rights and respect" a high status actor can expect (Dafoe et al. 2014).Therefore, we ask "How much respect do other countries have for the following countries?"We ask respondents to rate each country from 1 (least respected) to 100 (most respected). 16These questions prompt respondents to think about second-order opinions -not how they personally see the United States or other comparison countries, but how they think the United States and other countries are seen by others.As Fiske et al.
(1999) note, respect is also divorced from positive affect.Dimensions of liking and respect 14 Actual news coverage from major outlets used much stronger rhetoric than our prime, going as far as to portray the act as "turning the tables" of international standing between Russia and the US (Troianovski 2020).
15 94.8% of respondents in the author's sample report that status is valuable. 16Question wording is based on Carnegie & Dolan (2020) who in turn rely on the psychology literature, where "status" is qualified as "respect, prestige."See Pettit & Lount (2010) and Pettit et al. (2013).
operate reciprocally so one usually envies high-status groups, but does not necessarily like them.
Our design allows us to evaluate status at multiple levels (individual and relational) and for multiple actors.Regardless of which treatment respondents receive, they are asked about the respect of multiple countries.We focus on their evaluation of the US, the UK, India, and China.17While the first country represents the recipient, the other three represent the manipulated donor.Therefore, each respondent rates individual (both countries in the transaction), bilateral (both countries in the transaction relative to each-other), and thirdparty (two non-manipulated countries) status perceptions.
Finally, our question wording allows us to measure status changes in several ways.We first analyze country's individual status rating on a 1-100 scale.This measure is closest to the existing experimental status literature.To measure relational status, we also analyze the closeness of status ratings for country pairs by subtracting the individual value of status for one country from each other country.We also use the rating information to code each respondent's hierarchical ranking among the five countries.As we theorize, it is possible for a country's individual rating and closeness to change without affecting its rank.

Results
We present several sets of results.First, we confirm that sending aid has a positive effect on perceptions of (some) donors.However, not all donors and not all recipients of aid see changes in their status as a result of information about aid.Our results on relative status illuminate some of these discrepancies.We present evidence that the relative closeness between two given countries may change, but that the rank of countries in the international system does not change in response to aid information.
Turning to our main findings, the presentation of results for individual respect is shown in Figure 2. Respondents rated each country individually; this measure is most similar to Figure 2: Individual status: In (A), group means of each treatment condition are calculated with 95% confidence intervals for each outcome, the individual status of four states (China, India, the UK, and the US).The treatments, aid to the US from China, India, and the UK, are compared to a control of no information for each outcome.In (B), OLS estimates on the effect of treatment on the outcomes with 95% robust standard errors are presented.
previous measures of status in the public opinion literature.Group means are depicted in Figure 2.A by treatment (aid from China, India, or the UK) and control.Even though the act is symbolic, we see changes in respect for countries sending the hypothetical plane.Figure 2.B shows the average treatment effect (ATE) for the perceived respect of a given country by treatment.For example, the topmost row represents the ATE on American respect when the United Kingdom provides aid to the United States.
As expected, India's respect increases when it gives aid (8.43, p = 0.00) and China's status increases when China gives aid (6.64, p = 0.01).However, the UK's respect rating does not increase with information about British aid (1.45, p = 0.48).It's possible that respondents may not update their perceptions of the UK because they already believe the UK to be the type of country that provides aid.In other words, the UK's actions are not "against type" so they do not provide novel information on which to update perceptions of status.It's also possible that because the respect ratings of the UK are already high, respondents face a ceiling effect.Strikingly, we also find that aid from China and India increases the individual respect of third-parties uninvolved in the transaction.The UK's respect increases significantly when India gives aid (4.15, p = 0.04) and substantively, though not significantly, when China does (2.90, p = 0.14).India's respect also increases in response to information about Chinese aid (3.68, p = 0.09).The same is true for China's respect, which substantively increases when India gives aid (4.00, p = 0.12) even as it misses standard levels of significance.
Empirically, status-actions reverberate further through the international system than has been previously tested.The results mirror the middle example of status change in Figure 1, where we demonstrated the possibility that status-improvements by one state can positively impact the perceived status of non-acting states.Information about one emerging donor can impact perceptions of the other.The upward movement of the UK may also imply that respondents update British status as a way to preserve the distinction between established and emerging donors.We investigate whether this increase is enough to offset relative status changes next.
In evaluating relational status, we turn first to our measure of closeness.We transform the dependent variable from individual to relational closeness by subtracting the individual respect of one state in each treatment pair from the other.For ease of interpretation, we always subtract the status of the lower ranked state from the higher ranked state meaning that negative values represent decreased distance, or increased closeness.For example, to calculate the respect of India relative to the US, we subtract India's value from the US's value for each respondent.A negative treatment effect would indicate that Indian and American respect has become closer, a relative loss in the eyes of Americans (Brutger & Rathbun 2021).Figure 3.A presents the mean difference of each pair relative to the control group, along with 95% confidence intervals.Figure 3.B shows the ATE of each donor treatment on the relative closeness between country pairs.We find that the relative closeness between India and the US increases (that is, India's respect becomes closer to that of the US) when participants are given information that the US received aid from India (-6.23, p = 0.04).India's respect increases relative to the US by one fifth of a standard deviation, a statistically and substantially significant increase.
China's respect relative to the US moves in the same direction in response to the Chinese aid Figure 3: Relative status (closeness): In (A), group means of each treatment condition are calculated with 95% confidence intervals for each outcome, the relative status of four states (China, India, the UK, and the US) compared to each other.The treatments, aid to the US from China, India, and the UK, are compared to a control of no information for each outcome.The outcomes are calculated by subtracting the status value of one country from another.In (B), OLS estimates on the effect of treatment on each outcome with 95% robust standard errors.
treatment, but the effect misses significance (-5.21, p = 0.12).While these results logically follow from each countries' individual movement (or lack therefore), the comparative decline of the US becomes important when Americans care their relative, rather than absolute, position in the international system (Brutger & Rathbun 2021, Mutz & Lee 2020).Looking just at the US would suggest that respondents don't punish the US for a status-denying act.We would miss the fact that accepting aid does indeed have consequences for the US when viewed through the lens of status competition.Perhaps because it is already an established donor (see Appendix A.5), the UK aid treatment condition does not effect the relative position on the US (0.06, p = 0.98).
The relative respect of third-parties, or parties not involved in the aid transaction, also changes.British respect decreases relative to India when India gives aid (-4.49, p = 0.04).
While the UK's individual respect did increase slightly, the movement is not large enough to counter the substantial increase in Indian respect when India provides aid.The relative decline of the UK in comparison to India mirrors the relative decline of the US in comparison to India.On the other hand, Indian respect increases relative to China when India gives aid (4.39, p = 0.11).Recall that both China and India's status increased in the Indian aid treatment.Respondents still reward India more than China when India gives aid.Similarly, India's status relative to China decreases (-2.99, p = 0.25) when China gives aid, though the effect is statistically insignificant.This reaffirms the importance of studying both individual and relative respect.
To better understand how symbolic gestures affect international hierarchy, we conduct a test of relative status using our measure of rank.To do so, we transform each respondents' rating of individual status into a relative rank -the highest-rated state by an individual receives a rank of 1 while the lowest-rated state receives a rank of 4. Figure 4 then displays the ATE from ordered probit estimations of our three donor treatments (Chinese, Indian, and British aid). 18ompared to the individual and closeness measures, we see no movement in ranked respect as a result of any treatment.Donors do not significantly increase in rank.China and India might increase their rank in the expected direction when they provide aid, but neither manages to achieve significant change.The UK's rank is also static.Similarly, recipients do not decrease in rank.The US did not change its rank for any of the three treatments.This implies that changes in relative closeness were not large enough to impact relative rank.
Importantly, third-party states do not see significant changes in rank in response to any treatment.
To further probe the mechanisms through which individuals update (or do not update) their perceptions of state status, we conduct two additional tests.First, in Appendix A.5, we Figure 4: Relative status (rank): In (A), group means of each treatment condition are calculated with 95% confidence intervals for each outcome, the rank status of four states (China, India, the UK, and the US).The treatments, aid to the US from China, India, and the UK, are compared to a control of no information for each outcome.The outcomes are calculated by transforming the rating of each country outcome into its rank among all other country ratings.In (B), ordered probit estimates on the effect of treatment on relative rank with 95% robust standard errors.
find that priming respondents about India and China's former recipient status has little effect.This suggests that respondents already know that China and India are in a common group of emerging donors.Second, we explore heterogenous effects by respondent characteristics.
Although space constraints prevent us from discussing some of the nuances of our findings, we report heterogenous effects of treatment by partisanship and nationalism in Appendix C.
Heterogenous effects amongst respondents with different levels of nationalism and political ideology provide some initial evidence that shared characteristics or "peers" might be driving which models of relative status change we observe.People who directly or indirectly express beliefs in the superiority of a given nation are less likely to update the relative status of this nation.Conservatives are less likely than liberals to update relative status, particularly for the US relative to other nations.Similarly, high-nationalism individuals are less likely to update their perceptions of state status across almost every treatment condition and outcome.Individuals who find particular countries exceptional may be less likely to consider other countries comparable, making these respondents unlikely to respond to information about status-changing actions.
6 Reanalyzing the experimental aid and status literature Our original survey results reaffirm the relationship between foreign aid and international status, but they also offer important caveats.States may see relative changes in status due to foreign aid, but these changes are confined to situations in which foreign aid provides new information about the relationship between states.In light of these findings, we return to the existing literature to demonstrate how an expanded framework can productively nuance prior conclusions.Specifically, we reanalyze three studies by Dietrich et al. (2018), Mattingly & Sundquist (2021) and Carnegie & Dolan (2020).All three experiments ask respondents about the status of third-party states.As an added benefit all three studies are also fielded on non-US samples.
Appendix B describes the full replication process and Table 1 outlines each papers' findings about the implications of status-enhancing actions for individual status.All three studies lay important groundwork in understanding the relationship between foreign aid and international status.Our contribution is to extend their analyses to include measures of relative status.We reiterate that opening up different levels of analyses has novel and important implications for understanding status-seeking activity.
In Dietrich et al. (2018), information about the USAID brand is shown to improve the perceived influence of the US amongst Bangladeshi citizens.We show in our reanalysis of the experiment that the information affects not only perceptions of the US, but of other states in the international community.USAID's brand also changes how Bangladeshi citizens perceive Arab states and Pakistan, even though neither state was primed in the experimental treatment.Arab states see their individual influence decrease as well as their influence relative to the US, India, and others.These results point to a significant contagion effect of aid branding in which the presence of foreign aid from one donor actually changes the does not increase India's rank in the international system • Rejection does not change the rank of any other country in the international system Table 1: Foreign aid and international status reanalyzed perceived influence of other donors.Here, the results are in line with status competition.
The decline of Arab states' individual influence mirrors the possibility we illustrate in the rightmost panel of Figure 1, whereby when one state does something status-enhancing, the international community lowers their impression of other actors who do not act in the same way.This also fits with work by Blair et al. (2019), although we note that this occurs amongst some aid donors but not others.While we do not directly theorize the circumstances under which specific third-party states will experience status changes, we note that relative status movement captures an important dynamic of status change in the international system.
The importance of international ripple effects is also underscored by Mattingly & Sundquist (2021).The authors find that Chinese tweets about aid affect perceptions of China among Indian respondents.In line with theories of status competition, we find that positive perceptions of China also increase relative to the United States (whose actions were not manipulated in the experiment).Like the results for US status in our original survey experiment, here, the relative change occurs mechanically from the fact that perceptions of China increase in a positive direction while perceptions of the US remain unchanged.Unlike in our original survey, information about Chinese aid might fully reverse Indian respondents' preferences.
While US policies and governance structures are preferred in the control condition, Indian respondents who read tweets about Chinese aid prefer Chinese systems, though the rank reversal is not statistically significant at conventional levels.The addition of network-based analysis of Mattingly & Sundquist (2021) not only supports their initial conclusion, but offers additional evidence of the significant effects of Chinese aid on China's, and the US', international reputation.
Finally, Carnegie & Dolan (2020) show that India's refusal to accept disaster aid increases its perceived international status among US respondents.They also report in their paper that India's rank in the international system does not change.When we reanalyze their results, we find that the refusal to accept aid does not change the rank for any other state in the international system either.While India's aid rejection is indicative of positive peer effects -it triggers decreases in rank for recipients (i.e.India, Kenya and Haiti) and increases in rank for donors (i.e.Germany and China) -none of these movements are statistically significant.It's possible that there is not enough power to detect spillover implications in the larger donor and recipient peer groups.It could also be the case that the other countries respondents ranked were not appropriate targets for comparison.Finally, it's possible that while aid rejection may improve international status in isolation, its role is overestimated if we don't take into account the lack of change in the international hierarchy.This squares with the results of our main study, which suggest that a systematic approach opens up not just new opportunities for relative change but also limitations to meaningful change in the world order.

Discussion and Conclusion
Our original survey results reaffirm the relationship between foreign aid and international status, but, in line with findings from our replication studies, we offer important caveats.
While new donors can improve their status through donating foreign aid, their status may not improve relative to all other states in the international system.We offer evidence that, at least in the case of small acts, states' status-changing actions may have more enhanced or more limited implications than has been previously documented.Status actions reverberate through the international system in many ways and our framework enumerates three potential channels through which these ripple effects can occur.While these pathways are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, we demonstrate how the measures we use impact the conclusions we draw about international status change.
Our analyses only scratch the surface of what it means for status to be a relative and peer-referent concept.We establish that status-enhancing actions are referential, but individual and relative status implications do not always flow in the same direction.State actions impact the status of some third-party states but not others.While we provide a novel framework, we also point to the need for additional theorizing about which type of network dynamics we will observe for whom.How do individuals and states identify relevant targets?
One potentially fruitful avenue is the role of group identity in conditioning how far and for whom status changes ripple in the international ecosystem.Psychologically, limitations on information processing make categorization a useful heuristic for individuals evaluating complex phenomena, like international status (Taylor 1981).This cognitive shortcut should be especially useful in evaluating subjects on which an individual has less information (Gray & Hicks 2014).Moreover, the act of grouping like-members serves to minimize the perceived differences across group members while increasing the perceived differences between groups (Tajefl & Wilkes 1963).Status actions may be more helpful in updating status perceptions about "us" versus "them".Therefore, understanding how status implications travel within and across identifiable groups (e.g."emerging markets", "democracies", "Scandinavian countries") may offer an initial opportunity to advance the understanding of relative status updating.
For policymakers, our findings should also generate clear prescriptions for developing strategies to encourage states to act in pro-social ways.For example, motivating states to engage in greater commitment to human rights may be less productive if the Scandinavian countries are the standard to which states expect to be compared.For states outside of this group and lower in the international hierarchy, changes in their status won't be comparable to Norway and those efforts may therefore seem fruitless.However, generating new types of peers may be one means of encouraging status competition.For example, in the wake of the January 6th right-wing attack on the US capitol, pundits and experts alike lamented the US' loss of status, with one official noting "It is a very sad day in America when an official from corrupt and authoritarian Venezuela expresses 'concern for the violent events' at the U.S. Capitol and 'hopes that the American people will open a new path toward stability and social justice'" (Arnson et al. 2021).While the US was not rendered less democratic than Venezuela by the attack, the quoted official implicitly sees the US' status decline in relation to Venezuela, a state which might not normally be included amongst the US's peer nations.
Policymakers should pay attention to targeted comparisons and the potential reshaping of peer groups to generate pressure for policy change.A.3 Balance tables

A.4 Attention checks
Table 2 presents our main results for the subsample of participants above the first quartile of respondents in timing for the pre-treatment demographic checks.Results are also robust with the subsample of respondents between the first and third quartiles of timing.Figures 8 and 9 show the individual and relative status effects of information about USAID funding (relative to no information about funding) on the perceived influence of the US, UK, Pakistan, Indonesia, India, Germany, China, Australia, and Arab countries.We note that Dietrich et al. (2018) calculate influence on a binary scale which differs from our 0-100 ratings in the original survey.We caution readers about the substantive interpretations of the individual and relative differences in this reanalysis as each respondent could not adjust the ratings of the outcome countries to reflect rank.Individual influence, here as in our own study, is an average across all respondents.Relative (closeness) influence is the average difference between two outcomes across all respondents.
A. Individual ATE B. Individual Group means

B.3 Carnegie and Dolan (2020)
We replicate Carnegie & Dolan (2020) to test for the relative (rank) difference in status changes for India and other states given information treatment in a US population sample.The authors identify rank status gains by asking respondents to rank states in the international system using the following outcome measure: Below is a list of several countries, including India.Please rank the following countries in terms of how much international status (respect, prestige) they have among the other countries in the world.To change the order of the list, use your cursor to drag and drop the items.Please order the list so that the country with the most status is at the top of the list, the country with the second most status is next, and so on.
In Table 3, we report ordered probit findings for each state the authors ask about in their constructed international system.We find no significant change in state rank following the aid rejection treatment.20 tures (Brutger & Kertzer 2018, Carnegie & Dolan 2020, Hafner-Burton & Montgomery 2006, Larson & Shevchenko 2010, Morse & Pratt 2021, Powers & Renshon 2021).

Figure 5 :
Figure 5: Respect at Baseline: Density plots of country ratings for respect by respondents in the control condition.

Figure 7 :
Figure 7: Prime treatment: In (A), group means of each treatment condition are calculated with 95% confidence intervals for each outcome, the individual status of four states (China, India, the UK, and the US).The two treatment conditions shown are aid from China (top) and India (bottom) to the US.The opaque bars represent no additional information while the solid bars represent information that China and India, respectively, are former aid recipients.In (B), OLS estimates on the effect of treatment on the outcomes with 95% robust standard errors are presented.The coefficients represent the effect of additional information that China and India are former aid recipients, relative to information only that the China and India gave aid to the US.

Figure 8 :
Figure 8: Dietrich et al. (2018) Individual Status: Panel A depicts the average treatment effect of US branding of aid projects on perceived influence (0 to 1) of a given country with 95% robust standard errors.Panel B shows the group means of each country by treatment status with 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 10 :
Figure 10: Mattingly & Sundquist (2021) Replication with Relative Effects: Columns depict outcomes, colors states for which outcomes were evaluated.Standardized average treatment effects with 95% robust standard errors depicted.

Figure 11 :
Figure 11: Individual status by partisanship: Group means of each country by treatment status with 95% confidence intervals.Panels represent outcomes, y-axis treatment conditions.

Figure 12 :
Figure 12: Relative status by partisanship: Group means of each country by treatment status with 95% confidence intervals.Panels represent outcomes, x-axis treatment conditions.

Figure 13 :
Figure 13: Individual status by nationalism: Group means of each country by treatment status with 95% confidence intervals.Panels represent outcomes, y-axis treatment conditions