Effective response to and rapid, reliable detection of infectious disease outbreaks require successful coordination of countries’ border policies early on. As threats from diseases are highly salient to the public, researchers agree that a better understand- ing of domestic politics is crucial. This study investigates a key piece of this question: public demands for border closures. Our experiments in the United Kingdom and the United States show that a greater pandemic threat mildly increases support for border closures, but the World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidance against border closures and reminders about international legal obligations to follow the guidance substantially weaken support for border closures. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries flouted WHO’s recommendations and restricted their borders. Examining media attention suggests people’s lack of knowledge of the WHO guidance as a crucial reason for those border closures. Our study produces insights into the design of effective global health governance.

Replication data for "Public Support for Assistance for Workers Displaced by Technology" (Seth Werfel, Christopher Witko, Tobias Heinrich)

Recent research disputes the conventional wisdom that “sanctions do not work.” It demonstrates that states may impose sanctions for purposes beyond seeking an immediate change in the behavior of targeted regimes. For example, democratic leaders often impose sanctions to satisfy their own domestic constituencies. However, we know little about how the consequences of sanctions shape whether or not citizens favor them. Building on insights from prior studies on the use and consequences of sanctions, we develop theoretical expectations regarding the aspects of sanctions that citizens might favor or disfavor. We use these to design and conduct a survey experiment to explore degrees of support for proposed sanctions. We find that on average, citizens support proposed sanctions that they expect will have a long-run impact on the behavior of the targeted state.

How do the human rights practices abroad affect decisions about the allocation of foreign aid? This article provides a new approach to this long-standing question. We bring donor government, donor citizens, and recipients’ attributes together in a single analytical framework. We argue that donor citizens are more self-serving than previously assumed; they do not wholeheartedly support their government punishing human rights abusers when those states provide important policy benefits. When donor governments believe that their citizens will hold them accountable for their policy choices, they make foreign aid decisions that mirror citizens’ self-serving policy preferences. Thus, they avoid punishing repressive regimes that are the sources of valuable benefits. Our experimental and observational results provide support for our claims. Overall, our findings suggest that aid donors selectively punish human rights violators with aid cuts, but their variegated treatment of human rights violators largely stems from the self-serving policy preferences of their voters.

Recent theories of foreign aid assume that moral motives drive voters’ preferences over foreign aid. However, there is little knowledge how moral concerns interact with the widely accepted instrumental goals that aid serves. Moreover, what effects do such interplay have on preferences over policy actions? In this article, we assess these questions using a novel survey experiment in which respondents evaluate foreign aid policies toward nasty recipient regimes (those that torture, rig elections, etc.). The results indicate that the public does have a strong aversion for providing aid to nasty recipient regimes, but it is also appreciative of the instrumental benefits that aid acquires. Interestingly, contrary to a mainstay assertion in the literature, we find that moral aversion can be reversed to a great extent when the donor government engages more with the nasty country. These findings not only bring into question the micro-foundations of recent theories of foreign aid, but also produce a slew of implications for the aid literature.

These are materials for registering the core analyses for "Backyard politics and foreign aid" [tentative title] by William Christiansen, Tobias Heinrich, and Timothy Peterson (U South Carolina).