Together or Not? Dynamics of Public Attitudes on UN and NATO
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720956326 |
| Author | Osman Sabri Kiratli |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720956326
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(2) 259 –280
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720956326
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Together or Not? Dynamics
of Public Attitudes on UN
and NATO
Osman Sabri Kiratli
Abstract
This study investigates the driving forces of public endorsement of two major intergovernmental
organizations—the UN and NATO. More specifically, I scrutinize the effects of two sets of
independent variables on individual support for security intergovernmental organizations:
respondents’ subjective evaluation of the domestic economic conditions and the gap between
the home country’s foreign policy preferences and the mean preference within the said
intergovernmental organization. For the empirical analysis, I employ cross-sectional survey
data acquired from Pew Global Attitudes Surveys covering a sample of 37 countries and 10
waves spanning 2007–2017. The statistical analyses lend strong support for both hypotheses.
Specifically, citizens who are dissatisfied with the national economic conditions are less likely to
be in favor of intergovernmental organizations. The negative correlation between the perceptions
of domestic economic performance and attitudes toward intergovernmental organizations is
particularly compelling in countries that contribute more to the budget of that intergovernmental
organization. Second, in countries where the foreign policy preferences converge with the other
members of an intergovernmental organization, public opinion is more favorably disposed toward
that intergovernmental organization.
Keywords
international institutions, public opinion, UN, NATO, survey analysis
Accepted: 12 August 2020
The question of how public attitudes on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are
shaped remains a matter of scholarly dispute. Early research in the literature focuses on
ideational predispositions and value orientations to explain individuals’ perceptions of
foreign policy issues, including on international cooperation (e.g. Chittick et al., 1995;
Holsti and Rosenau, 1988; Wittkopf, 1986). Accordingly, studies have identified various
dimensions around which personal foreign policy dispositions such as cooperative versus
International Trade Department, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey
Corresponding author:
Osman Sabri Kiratli, International Trade Department, Bogazici University, Hisar Kampus, Bebek, 34342
Istanbul, Turkey.
Emails: osmansabrikiratli@boun.edu.tr; osmansabrikiratli@gmail.com
956326PSX0010.1177/0032321720956326Political StudiesKiratli
research-article2020
Article
260 Political Studies 70(2)
militant internationalism (Wittkopf, 1986), militarism (Hurwitz and Peffley, 1987), isola-
tionism (Kertzer, 2013), or economic nationalism (Chittick and Billingsley, 1989) are
formed. Different configurations of these dimensions pave the way for subsequently dif-
ferent typologies of foreign policy preferences. An implication of this line of thought was
that the identity and hard-coded dispositions of an individual should yield coherently
similar types of attitudes on international cooperation, regardless of the specifics of the
cooperation framework. In other words, positioning as a cooperative internationalist or
isolationist would be expected to translate to similar levels of support for all types of
international organizations (IOs; e.g. Everts, 1995). However, later research has sug-
gested that public support for international institutions can be instead highly multi-dimen-
sional and sway across issue areas.
An alternative line of research on public opinion toward multilateralism has flourished
predominantly in European Union (EU) studies and built upon the rational choice models.
These instrumentalist approaches concur that citizens’ evaluations of the costs and bene-
fits of a particular policy action, both for themselves and the group they are a part of, form
the basis of their opinion toward that act (Eichenberg and Dalton, 1993; Gabel, 1998).
Thus, following the homo economicus voters model, individual support for multilateral
foreign policy is dependent on the economic and political benefits obtained by the coun-
try in general and the citizen in particular (Eichenberg and Dalton, 1993; Gabel and
Whitten, 1997). Though the prudent public argument has been more effective in explain-
ing why the same individual might hold diverging attitudes toward different IGOs depend-
ing on the issue area, the majority of its arguments is advanced and tested to explain
specific domains of public support for international institutions, with a particular analyti-
cal focus on the EU. Yet, the EU is a sui generis organization driven by an ever-increasing
scheme of transnational economic integration. Thus, one needs further testing on whether
arguments on the driving sources of attitudes toward European integration can be extended
to explain attitudes toward other types of IGOs, in particular, organizations without eco-
nomic mandates. Unfortunately, only a small number of studies examine individual-level
attitudes toward non-EU IGOs (Arpino and Obydenkova, 2020; Dellmuth and Tallberg,
2015; Kaya and Walker, 2014; Schlipphak, 2015; Torgler, 2008), and even fewer present
longitudinal analyses to investigate the extent to which public opinion has shifted over the
years (Bearce and Scott, 2019).
In this article, I focus on the cost side of delegating authority to international institu-
tions and delve into the extent to which the costs of international cooperation influence
voters’ attitudes toward non-economic IGOs. Building from the principal-agent model
and research on political trust, I investigate the effects of two types of costs: the economic
costs incurred by taxpaying voters as membership dues and the political costs derived
from the loss of control due to the delegation. More specifically, I propose that first, vot-
ers who believe the domestic economy is performing poorly are less likely to be in favor
of non-economy mandated intergovernmental institutions. This outcome, I argue, is
caused by two factors. One, in times of economic hardship, voters tend to evaluate politi-
cal institutions, including IGOs, negatively regardless of their responsibility for the eco-
nomic situation. Two, in such times, there is likely to be resistance toward diverting
national resources to pay the fees to fund IGOs that do not provide direct economic ben-
efits to the home country. Such effects are likely to be particularly stronger in countries
that shoulder a larger burden of contributions in financing IGOs. My second hypothesis
is that in countries where the foreign policy preferences converge with other members of
a security institution, public opinion is more likely to be favorably disposed toward that
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