When do people care about relative gains in trade? Much of the international relations scholarship—and much of the political rhetoric on trade—would lead us to expect support for a trade policy that benefits ourselves more than it benefits others. Yet, a large interdisciplinary literature also points to the prevalence and importance of other-regarding preferences, rendering the conventional wisdom contestable. We investigate whether and how relative gains influence trade preferences through an original survey experiment in the midst of the China–US trade war. We find that in a win-win scenario, relative gains shape trade opinion: if both sides are gaining, people want to gain more than their foreign trade partner. However, these considerations are offset in a win-lose scenario where the other side is losing out. Relative-gains considerations causally affect opinion on trade, but not in a “beggar-thy-neighbor” or even a “beggar-thy-rival” situation. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of relative gains in international relations and provide the first experimental evidence that relative-gains considerations can be offset by other-regarding preferences in international trade.

Two states in a dispute refuse to back down. One ties its own hands to strengthen its stand and gain advantage; the other tries to untie the tied hands to preempt disadvantage. Tying hands is a well-studied strategy, but it tells only part of the story, and the response strategy of untying hands remains unexplored. Can a state untie the tied hands of its opponent to give freedom back to its opponent—the freedom to concede? I identify three strategies of untying hands: counterthreat, reassurance, and normative framing. I show experimentally that these strategies can reduce the public costs of backing down and the perceived reputational damage from backing down. Tied hands and audience costs are not static and immutable, but dynamic and malleable by the other side.

Two mechanisms of costly signaling are known in international relations: sinking costs and tying hands. I show that there exist four mechanisms of costly signaling that are equally general. I develop the new mechanisms of installment costs and reducible costs and contrast them with sunk costs and tied-hands costs. I then conduct experiments to test the four signaling mechanisms. I find that each mechanism can improve credibility when the costs are high, but reducible costs can improve credibility even when the costs are low.

Militaries are sustained by public money that is diverted away from other domestic ends. How the public react to the “guns-versus-butter” trade-off is thus an important question in understanding the microfoundations of Chinese military power. However, there are few studies on public attitudes towards military spending in China, whose rising power has been a grave concern to many policymakers around the world. We fielded a national online survey to investigate the nature of public support for military spending in China. We find that Chinese citizens support military spending in the abstract, but their support diminishes when considered alongside other domestic spending priorities. We also find that public support for military spending coexists surprisingly with anti-war sentiments and a significant strain of isolationism. In addition, while the conventional wisdom suggests that nationalism moves a state towards bellicosity and war, we find that Chinese citizens with a stronger sense of national pride report stronger anti-war sentiments than other citizens.

How do individuals respond to internal security threats in non-democracies? Does violence make individuals more supportive of a strong state? Are the effects of violence on individual attitudes uniform, or are they heterogeneous with respect to the identity of the perpetrators? We field an online survey experiment on a national sample of Chinese citizens, in which respondents were randomly selected to view reports on violent acts in China. We show that exposure to violence makes individuals more supportive of a strong state: respondents randomly exposed to violence are more likely to approve police use of lethal force, and this effect is particularly strong among the less wealthy Han Chinese. We also find suggestive evidence that individuals exhibit intergroup biases in their reaction to violence.

The “democratic peace”—the regularity that democracies rarely (if ever) fight with other democracies but do fight with nondemocracies—is one of the most famous findings in international relations scholarship. There is little agreement, however, about the mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Recently, scholars have shown that mass publics in liberal democracies are less supportive of using military force against other democracies. This finding has been taken to support the idea that the content of public opinion may provide one mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Using a large-scale survey experiment, we show that mass publics in an authoritarian regime—China—show the same reluctance to use force against democracies as is found in western democracies. Our findings expand the empirical scope of the claim that mass publics are reluctant to use force against democracies, but force us to rethink how public opinion operates as a causal mechanism underpinning the democratic peace.

Mass election predictions are increasingly used by election forecasters and public opinion scholars. While they are potentially powerful tools for answering a variety of social science questions, existing measures are limited in that they ask about victors rather than voteshares. We show that asking survey respondents to predict voteshares is a viable and superior alternative to asking them to predict winners. After showing respondents can make sensible quantitative predictions, we demonstrate how traditional qualitative forecasts lead to mistaken inferences. In particular, qualitative predictions vastly overstate the degree of partisan bias in election forecasts, and lead to wrong conclusions regarding how political knowledge exacerbates this bias. We also show how election predictions can aid in the use of elections as natural experiments, using the effect of the 2012 election on partisan economic perceptions as an example. Our results have implications for multiple constituencies, from methodologists and pollsters to political scientists and interdisciplinary scholars of collective intelligence.

Private information and the commitment problem are central to the rationalist theory of war, but causal evidence is scarce, as rationalist explanations for war are difficult to test with observational data. I design laboratory experiments to isolate the effects of private information and the commitment problem on the risk of conflict. I find that the commitment problem sharply increases the incidence of conflict, but there is no significant difference in conflict incidence with or without private information in the shadow of shifting power. I also investigate the realism of the positive experimental results with a case study of Japan’s decisionmaking on the eve of the Pacific War. The permutation of formal, experimental and historical methods applies the strength of one method to compensate for the weakness of another. Convergent results from the different methods strengthen the causal inference.