The psychology of persuasion in global politics : global image, source cues, and U.S. soft power

This dissertation applies the concept of source cue effects – drawn from the political psychology literature – to the study of transnational persuasion in International Relations. As a theoretical contribution, it elaborates a set of hypotheses about the conditions under which transnational source cue effects are most likely to occur. As a substantive contribution, it focuses on how foreign publics’ perceptions of the United States and of the U.S. President shape U.S. soft power. It explores how the U.S. President’s global popularity shapes the U.S. government’s transnational persuasiveness and influences the United States’ country image, and investigates the ways in which a negative U.S. country image (anti-Americanism) constrains its foreign policy. The empirical contribution of this dissertation consists primarily of a set of original computer-based source cue and priming experiments administered to undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia in the spring and winter of 2009. The results of these experiments show that foreign actors like Presidents Obama and Clinton and the United States can exert source cue effects on a Canadian audience. Furthermore, they point to three key moderators of transnational source cue effects: 1) the popularity of the source in question, 2) the audience’s familiarity with the source, and 3) the way in which the message source is covered in the news media. The experiments also show that priming a popular U.S. President like Barack Obama significantly improves participants’ overall attitudes towards the United States when compared to their attitudes if an unpopular president like George W. Bush is primed. In a separate empirical analysis, the dissertation also uses a cross-national dataset to show that aggregate attitudes towards the United States were associated with state decisions to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and their subsequent decisions to withdraw their forces from the operation.Arts, Faculty ofPolitical Science, Department ofGraduat

Structural change and human rights norms : identity-based socialization processes in the international system

This thesis examines the international norms banning torture and the death penalty, codified in the Convention against Torture and Cruel and Unusual Punishment and the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights aiming at the abolition of the death penalty. It seeks to explain the differing systemic outcomes experienced by the two norms: why the Convention against Torture is adhered to by most of the state system, while the Second Optional Protocol remains largely a European institution. The operating hypothesis emerges from the recent literature on norms in international relations, and argues that while the norm against torture has undergone a "norm cascade" and initiated a process of socialization in the international system, the norm abolishing the death penalty remains in the "norm emergence" phase, where countries adopt it only as a result of domestic processes. A quantitative analysis is used to test the empirical plausibility of the hypothesis. Binary time-series cross-section (BTSCS) data with a country-year unit of analysis are analyzed using logit regression, with temporal dependence accounted for by a series of temporal dummy variables. A number of identical models are estimated for both norms, comparing the relative significance of the variables in each case. The results appear to support the hypothesis that accession to the Convention against Torture is much more associated with systemic socialization variables than accession to the Second Optional Protocol, which is primarily associated with domestic and regional variables. This points to the relevance of the norm "life-cycle" theoretical framework to the evolution of the norms examined in the thesis, and suggests that it is a generalizable social dynamic.Arts, Faculty ofPolitical Science, Department ofGraduat