Featured Graduate Student Research: Rachel Myrick
Featured Graduate Student Research: Rachel Myrick
My research project explored how partisan polarization in the United States affects foreign perceptions of American security commitments and global leadership. This project will become a chapter in my dissertation project (“Partisan Polarization and International Politics”), which examines how extreme partisan polarization impacts foreign policymaking in democratic states. The chapter uses two survey experiments – one fielded to 2000 British adults and one fielded to 150 Members of Parliament – to demonstrate that priming respondents to think about U.S. polarization negatively impacts their evaluations of the U.S.-U.K. bilateral relationship and U.S. foreign policy.1 I showed that these impacts were stronger for the long-term, reputational consequences of polarization than for immediate security concerns. In other words, while foreign allies may not necessarily believe a polarized America will renege on existing security commitments, perceptions of extreme polarization make other countries less willing to engage in future partnerships with the United States and more skeptical of its global leadership in the long run.
After establishing these overarching effects, a secondary question this chapter explores is why polarization results in more negative assessments of U.S. foreign policy. I disentangle the reputational effects of partisan polarization motivated by diverging preferences (preference polarization) and polarization motivated by partisan animus and social identity (affective polarization). The results suggest that preference polarization exerts a stronger negative impact on assessments of U.S. foreign policy relative to affective polarization. I argue that this effect is driven by the perception that diverging preferences between the Republican and Democratic Party create long-term uncertainty over U.S. foreign policy. This uncertainty makes foreign allies perceive the United States as less of a trustworthy decision-maker or reliable partner in the long-run.
I used funding from The Europe Center to field the elite survey to a representative sample of 150 British Members of Parliament. To economize, I embedded survey questions on an omnibus survey run by ComRes, a professional survey firm. The elite sample lends further legitimacy to these findings because ultimately the perspective of political officials is what matters in foreign policymaking. For example, in my sample, British MPs primed to think about polarization in the United States were 10 percentage points more likely to be uncertain about what American foreign policy would look like in a decade relative to comparable MPs in the control group. I truly appreciate funding from The Europe Center, which enabled me to add this critical dimension to the paper.
I presented a working paper based on this project at the International Studies Association Conference in March 2019 in Toronto, Canada. ISA hosts a major interdisciplinary conference annually for roughly 6,000 academics working on issues related to international politics. The paper was presented on a panel called “Foreign Policy Attitudes: Experimental Approaches.” This paper will ultimately be a chapter of my dissertation about the consequences of partisan polarization for America’s relationship with its allies.
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1 This project was reviewed and approved by the Stanford Institutional Review Board
Rachel Myrick is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science.
