Explaining Support for Human Rights Actions: Experimentally Studying Democracy and Personal Authoritarianism

ABSTRACT

How do authoritarian attitudes affect public support for international intervention against human rights abuses? Does U.S. residents’ support for human rights actions against perpetrators depend on the type of regime committing human rights violations? These questions are important for understanding how U.S. residents form opinions on U.S. actions toward foreign regimes that perpetrate human rights abuses. We conducted a survey experiment to determine whether support for actions against human rights violators are influenced by the type of regime that committed the human rights violations, repetition of repression, and their preexisting personal authoritarian attitudes. We find that individuals with high personal authoritarianism, which we define as favorable attitudes toward centralized power and appeals to authority for cultural preservation, are less likely to support symbolic actions like naming and shaming or humanitarian aid. They are more likely, however, to support sending peacekeeping troops. We find little evidence that the regime type of the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s past behavior affects support. International audiences generally support action in favor of human rights, but the kind of action they prefer is shaped by their preexisting views about authority.

KEYWORDS:

• Experiment
• Foreign Policy
• Human Rights
• International Relations
• Personal Authoritarianism
• Public Opinion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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11. Whang, “Playing to the Home Crowd?.”

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27. We explore correlation between personal authoritarianism and political ideology in the Appendix.

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32. Dietrich, “Explaining Support for International Action”

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37. Tomz and Weeks, “Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace.”

38. A similar process is visible in American political campaigns, where audiences are more likely to respond to candidates that are unusual or historic “firsts” in some way, leading to increased media coverage of such candidates (Han 2011, 102-103).

39. We use a survey experimental research design for two reasons. First, it allows us to study the effects of personal authoritarian attitudes and our experimental treatments at the level of the individual. Second, by controlling the randomization of our treatments, we are able to get internally valid estimates of the treatment effects.

40. We recruited participants who reside in the United States and had at least a 95% approval rating for previous tasks on Mechanical Turk. We offered participants $1.75 to complete the survey, which Qualtrics survey analysis estimated would take 7 minutes to complete. We selected this amount to equate to a $15 hourly wage. The actual time spent on the survey was less than 7 minutes on average.

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43. Alexander Coppock, “Generalizing from Survey Experiments Conducted on Mechanical Turk: A Replication Approach,” Political Science Research and Methods 7, no. 3 (2019): 613-628.

44. Feldman and Stenner, “Perceived Threat and Authoritarianism.”

45. Ibid.

46. George Lakoff, Moral politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); David C. Barker and James D. Tinnick, “Competing Visions of Parental Roles and Ideological Constraint,” The American Political Science Review 100, no. 2 (2006): 249-63.

47. Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (London & Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

48. Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

49. We find that there is a modest correlation in our sample between a respondent’s personal authoritarianism and political ideology. In the Appendix, we explore this correlation and present a series of models demonstrating that our main findings are driven by personal authoritarianism, not political ideology.

50. Hetherington and Suhay, “Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror.”

51. Timothy J.A. Passmore, Megan Shannon, and Andrew F. Hart, “Rallying the Troops: Collective Action and Self-Interest in UN Peacekeeping Contributions,” Journal of Peace Research 55, no. 3 (2018): 366-79.

52. United Nations Peacekeeping, “How We Are Funded,” https://peacekeeping.un.org, (accessed October 15, 2022).

53. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Sons, 1950).

54. Samuel Greene and Graeme Robertson, “Agreeable Authoritarians: Personality and Politics in Contemporary Russia,” Comparative Political Studies 50, no. 13 (2017): 1802-34.

55. Dietrich, “Explaining Support for International Action.”

56. Marc J. Hetherington and Elizabeth Suhay, “Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror,” American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 3 (2011): 546-60.

57. Lise M. Howard and Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal, “The Use of Force in UN Peacekeeping,” International Organization 72, no. 1 (2018), 71-103.

58. Charles T. Call, David Crow, and James Ron, “Is the UN a Friend or Foe?” The Brookings Institute, (2017) published online at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/10/03/is-the-un-a-friend-or-foe/.

59. Aysegul Aydin, Foreign powers and intervention in armed conflicts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Szymon M. Stojek and Jaroslav Tir, “The Supply Side of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Trade Ties and United Nations-Led Deployments to Civil War States,” European Journal of International Relations 21, no. 2 (2015): 352-376.

60. Our results are substantively the same if we use an ordinal score. In this case, however, we think that the largest differences will be between parties, so we opted to use a binary variable for our tests.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ohio Wesleyan University Summer Science Research Program.