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Teargas and Selfie Cams: Foreign Protests and Media in the Digital Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2021

Naima Green-Riley Open the ORCID record for Naima Green-Riley [Opens in a new window] ,
Dominika Kruszewska-Eduardo  and
Ze Fu
Naima Green-Riley*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA02138, USA, Email: zefu@g.harvard.edu, Twitter: @naimagreenriley
Dominika Kruszewska-Eduardo
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA02138, USA, Email: zefu@g.harvard.edu, Twitter: @naimagreenriley
Ze Fu
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA02138, USA, Email: zefu@g.harvard.edu, Twitter: @naimagreenriley
*
*Corresponding author: Email: ngreen@g.harvard.edu
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Abstract

This study explores the impact of repression of foreign protests and the media source reporting the news upon American foreign policy preferences for democracy promotion abroad. We use two survey experiments featuring carefully edited video treatments to show that even short media clips presenting foreign protests as violently repressed increase American support for targeted sanctions against the hostile regime; however, these treatments alone do not inspire respondents to political action. Furthermore, we do not find evidence that mobile treatment magnifies the effects of violence.

Keywords

Public opinionmedia effectsforeign policyprotest
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 2022 , pp. 203 - 215
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

For their excellent feedback throughout the development of this project, we thank Alexander Cappelen, Stephen Chaudoin, Ryan Enos, Josh Kertzer, Przemyslaw Palka, Dustin Tingley, Bertil Tungodden, and participants of Government 2008 and the IR Workshop at Harvard, as well as the 2016 WESSI Alumni Conference at NYU Florence, ISA and MPSA 2018, and APSA 2019. We thank Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies (CAPS), the course heads for Harvard’s Government 2008 course, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard for generously contributing funding to this project. The studies were preregistered on EGAP with IDs 20180319AC and 20160516AA. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: doi:10.7910/DVN/N9RIKG. The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

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