Study assesses U.S. image amid weakening of democracy

(Press-News.org) The erosion of democracy in the U.S. has been a topic of concern in recent years, especially after protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden's election as president. Most of the academic studies on democratic backsliding, however, have focused on public opinion within the U.S. and have not looked at global public opinion.

How favorably others view the U.S. is part of the country's "soft power"—a term coined by Joseph Nye at Harvard University in the 1980s. It refers to a country's ability to influence other countries’ policy decisions toward them through attraction rather than coercion. According to Nye, one of a country's soft power resources is democracy, so how others view U.S. democracy may affect how willing they are to cooperate with the U.S. on foreign policy.

A team of researchers from Dartmouth, the Australian National University, and Florida State University set out to examine how democratic backsliding in the U.S. may affect people's views toward the U.S. Through a series of survey experiments conducted in 2023 and 2024—all before Donald Trump won a second term in office—they obtained data from more than 11,800 participants in 12 other democracies throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. The findings are published in PNAS Nexus.

In the spring of 2023, participants in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom evaluated how unfavorably or favorably they viewed the U.S. on a four-point scale. Half of the respondents received an overview of a hypothetical report on how democracy is declining in the U.S. before they were asked to rate how favorably they viewed the U.S. while the other half received no information beforehand. While the summary of the report mentioned the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol without mentioning Trump by name, the report also included other concerns about U.S. democratic backsliding, such as new laws that could make it harder for some groups of people to vote. 

The researchers intentionally designed this hypothetical report to evaluate how information about democratic backsliding affects people's attitudes, independent of who the president is. In other words, their goal was to understand how people respond to negative views of U.S. democracy, not those of a particular president.

The second and third surveys were administered in New Zealand in July 2023 and in Japan, India, and South Korea in February 2024. The research team selected the four countries because they are key U.S. partners in the Indo-Pacific. In these studies, respondents in the "treatment" group received either the democratic backsliding information, the same as the report used in the first study, or a summary of a hypothetical report on how the U.S. economy is declining. Respondents in the control group received neither. All participants were then asked to evaluate their favorability toward the U.S. In addition, they also answered questions about their policy preferences toward the U.S.

Across all three surveys, the results showed that respondents who received the information about the democratic backsliding report had a less favorable view of the U.S.

Yet, contrary to the research team's expectations, democratic backsliding did not reduce public support for cooperation policies with the U.S., a stark contradiction to Nye's theory of soft power.

"Our findings demonstrate that when it comes to international public opinion, a country's attractiveness does not necessarily change people's policy preferences," says co-author Yusaku Horiuchi, a professor of government and the Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies at Dartmouth. "If the study, however, were to be repeated now under President Trump's second term, it would be interesting to see if the results may be any different." 

However, the co-authors add that in the current context, it would be especially difficult to distinguish between how global public opinion has changed due to U.S. democratic backsliding or the Trump administration’s policies. "Our study is unique because we show the effects of changes in American democracy before the leadership change," says Horiuchi. 

The results also showed that participants' favorability toward the U.S. was not reduced when they received hypothetical information reporting on the U.S. economy's declining performance. This finding demonstrates that an economic downturn does not influence global public opinion while U.S. democratic decline does. 

"Understanding how citizens of democracies view each other—or in this case view the U.S.—holds relevance for the future of U.S. foreign policy," says co-author Kathleen Powers, an associate professor of government and faculty coordinator for the War & Peace Fellows Program at the Dickey Center for International Understanding. "We did not find evidence that democratic backsliding reduced support for international cooperation, but the declining image of the U.S. could be an early indicator of whether there will be sustained support."

Horiuchi's long-time collaborators Benjamin Goldsmith at the Australia National University and Kelly Matush, a former post-doctoral fellow at the Dickey Center now at Florida State University, also contributed equally to the study.

The researchers have other studies underway examining democratic solidarity—whether democracies support another democracy in conflict—and how foreign policy opinion shifts when major political change occurs within a country.

Horiuchi is available for comment at: Yusaku.Horiuchi@dartmouth.edu.

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