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Measuring attitudes toward regional organizations outside Europe

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Abstract

What shapes public attitudes toward regional organizations (ROs)? Although a number of articles have focused on the causes, design, and effectiveness of ROs in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, research so far has neglected to study the factors influencing public opinion regarding these bodies. This exploratory article argues that public attitudes toward organizations in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are shaped by citizens’ fundamental economic and ideational perceptions and by their trust in domestic actors. These hypotheses are tested by employing data from the Afrobarometer and Latinobarometro surveys. The findings lend more credibility to the assumption that citizens outside Europe use heuristics instead of utilitarian cost-benefit analyses when asked for their attitudes toward regional integration and its organizations.

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  1. Although higher education has so far been demonstrated to be nearly always positively connected to more favorable attitudes toward free trade, the picture is more complicated when it concerns regional integration attitudes. For example, Brinegar and Jolly (2005) show that higher education is actually negatively correlated to citizens’ support for deepening regional integration and that the strength of the negative effect significantly varies over the type of welfare regime where citizens are living. However, Gabel and Palmer (1995) and Gabel (1998) demonstrate that higher education caused people to perceive the EU more positively in the 1990s. For the most recent data, Harteveld et al. (2013) and Hakhverdian et al. (2013) controlled for divergent hierarchical levels by applying multilevel methods as well as models with country-fixed effects to demonstrate that citizens’ trust in the EU is significantly and positively affected by their level of education.

  2. Gabel (1998), for example, reports the findings of previous studies demonstrating that several indicators expected from a utilitarian perspective — such as higher levels of education, income, occupational skills and a closer proximity of a citizen’s residence to border regions — positively influenced citizens’ attitudes toward regional integration (337). However, Gabel then questions the theoretical validity of these indicators, mentioning that “education, income, and occupational skills are positively correlated with cognitive skills” that might make “the evidence supporting the utilitarian theory […] merely capture the influence of cognitive mobilization on support” (337 f.).

  3. This is not to say that domestic elites in both regions do not potentially see regional cooperation or the rhetorical emphasis of its necessity as merely an instrument by which to remain in power (see, e.g., Mosinger 2012). However, I would emphasize that the idea of “African unity” is much more common in the discourse of sub-Saharan African elites than Latin or South American unity among the elites of Latin America (see, again, Makinda and Okumu 2008; Söderbaum 2007).

  4. All data and models used in the article are available to the general public on the author’s and the journal’s website. The author wants to thank the Latinobarometro Corporation and the Afrobarometer for providing the original data (Latinobarometro 2014; Afrobarometer 2014).

  5. The Latin American countries included are the following: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The sub-Saharan African countries included are the following: Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Spain, which is also covered by the Latinobarometro, is excluded from further analysis for obvious reasons. Additionally, because several Latin American countries are not members of any of the ROs where citizens’ attitudes were surveyed, the number of countries (and individuals) is lower for most of the calculations in the remainder of the paper.

  6. Only analyzing the attitudes of citizens from countries that are Unasur members obviously limits the number of countries and citizens included in the Latin American model. Only nine countries (out of the 18 Latin American countries surveyed by the Latinobarometro) are part of the Unasur. The number of respondents living in these countries—and therefore included in the analysis—is 10,804.

  7. Although Kwon (2010) discusses this problem, he nevertheless still does not offer findings for models that exclude these problematic respondents.

  8. Future research should also go more deeply into discussing what actually makes some citizens knowledgeable regarding international organizations. Citizens’ increasing awareness regarding who decides what—and with what consequences—for the international and domestic level is not only normatively desirable; it might also have an impact on the context in which national domestic elites are able to act. The ability of government actors to shift responsibility to the international level—for example, blaming the IMF for the effects of a financial crisis—as well as to gain support for international policies—for example, sending troops on AU-led missions—should be strongly influenced by the level of knowledge that citizens have regarding the international actor and policy in question. Therefore, identifying the factors making citizens more likely to share this knowledge is of high analytical value and should be confronted in future research endeavours.

  9. Note that these three variables might already be strongly correlated. We could assume that there is an educational gap between men and women because some cultures are more likely to allow higher education to be available only to men. In addition, we might assume that this gender gap in educational status is stronger among the older generations than among younger generations.

  10. In all the robustness check models, citizens not answering or answering ‘Don’t Know’ on the question regarding RO evaluation were excluded from the analysis. Similar to Luskin and Bullock (2011: 547), I am convinced that “‘Don’t Know’ means ‘Don’t Know’”. That is, citizens choosing this answer option should never be treated as giving actually (negative) evaluative answers.

  11. I must thank one of the reviewers for directing me to this possibility of testing for the robustness of the empirical findings. Because employing the adapted Heckoprobit model by each country resulted in the non-convergence of models, I used single-level ordered logit models with robust standard errors. For every country model, I checked for violations of the assumption of the homoscedasticity of error variances. If violations appeared, I recalculated an adapted oglm model. However, in the appendix, I only report the results of the last calculations if they significantly deviate from the findings from the ordered logit model.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Muenster, Scharnhorststr. 100, 48151, Muenster, Germany

    Bernd Schlipphak

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The author wants to thank Andreas Dür, Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt, Christian Rauh, the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback.

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Appendix

Table A1 OGLM models for Latin American countries
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Table A2 OGLM models for sub-Saharan Africa countries
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Table A3 Dummy dependent variable models
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Table A4 Multilevel model for sub-Saharan African countries
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Table A5 Stepwise regression models for Latin American countries
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Table A6 Stepwise regression models for sub-Saharan African countries
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Table A7 Ordered logit regression models for Latin American countries
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Table A8

Table A8 Ordered logit regression models for sub-Saharan African countries
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Schlipphak, B. Measuring attitudes toward regional organizations outside Europe. Rev Int Organ 10, 351–375 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-014-9205-5

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