Fear of Falling Behind: How Global Status Concerns Affect Support for Domestic Policies

PI: Jonathan Schulman, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $1,250, Presidency Research Fund

Project Abstract: Politicians regularly seize on Americans’ anxiety over the United States falling behind its competitors or wealthy peers to bolster support for their candidacy or policy. Donald Trump campaigned heavily in 2016 on alarmist warnings of the United States losing its dominant status because of his predecessors’ trade and immigration policies. Joe Biden repeatedly discussed the United States falling behind China in quality of domestic infrastructure and research and development to build bipartisan support for a large-scale infrastructure bill. Can this rhetoric increase support for a leader or a policy from individuals who would otherwise be opposed? Are there any unintended consequences to framing policies as competitions for global status, such as encouraging more aggressive or uncooperative foreign policy preferences, heightened political cynicism or anxiety, or higher tolerance of anti-Asian racism? I designed a survey experiment to test the effects of framing investments in domestic infrastructure as an arena in which the United States is said to be falling behind a rival or competitor to evaluate how this rhetoric affects Americans’ budgetary preferences, general foreign policy preferences, tolerance of anti-Asian racism, and political cynicism and anxiety.

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