Date of Award

Spring 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Wilkinson, Steven

Abstract

When and how do domestic political institutions shape the behaviour of foreign policy crisis actors? Existing research on interstate crisis behaviour in democracies has largely been agnostic about the extent to which intermediate levels of democratic institutionalisation can impact the expectations and behaviour of electorally competitive foreign policy crisis actors. The three empirical papers in this doctoral dissertation explore and shed light on the complex relationship between democracy, political institutions and political actors in Pakistan, a weakly-institutionalised democratic polity with a legacy of frequent foreign policy crises. Paper I, titled "The Punisher's Dilemma: Domestic Opposition and Foreign Policy Crises", advances the existing literature on democratic institutions and interstate crisis behaviour in IR, which to date has held that when an incumbent incurs a foreign policy setback, including but not limited to standing down in a conflict, making costly compromises, or accepting defeat abroad, opposition politicians at home weigh the benefit of criticising the government with the national interest. I argue that this work has largely been developed with a view to explaining oppositional behaviour in competitive and fully consolidated democracies, and that while opposition politicians in weakly institutionalised regimes also frequently criticise their incumbent in costly international crises, they weigh the decision to publicly do so against the consequences their actions might have for regime instability, including the possibility of provoking irregular leadership turnover, given that this may forestall their own electoral prospects. In two elite survey experiments, first on a sample of 202 real-world elected Pakistani lawmakers, followed by a sample of 430 political party workers from the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Pakistan's former ruling party, I exogenously vary information pertaining to democratic institutionalisation and find that while the opposition is indeed critical of a national leader during an international crisis, institutional memory of irregular leadership turnover and perceptions of possible democratic interruption reduce the opposition's willingness to punish an incumbent from a rival party for sub-optimal foreign policy crisis behaviour. Paper II, titled "Gendering Hawkishness in the War Room: Evidence from Pakistani Politicians", examines how political representation conditions diplomatic hawkishness, building on an original survey experiment on 147 male and 55 female real-world Pakistani former and serving legislators, in which I randomly assign both genders to either an all-male or a gender-mixed hypothetical parliamentary committee on national security, to ``listen in" on a four-minute audio recording of a crisis deliberation against an external adversary. Existing research on gender representation in IR to date (and by virtue of mostly observational large-N analysis) has maintained that gender representation in deliberative and consultative spaces ought to induce more conciliatory foreign policy behaviour. Contrary to expectations, I find that both male and female politicians assigned to hypothetical gender-mixed committees became significantly less supportive of conflict resolution with an external rival compared to politicians assigned to hypothetical all-male committees. I pair my initial experimental findings with a detailed structural topic model (STM) analysis of interviews conducted with every politician who participated in the study to argue that improving the committee's gender balance increased the extent to which politicians scrutinised the suitability of their peers, which in turn enhanced their defensiveness in the room and foreign policy hawkishness abroad. Paper III, titled "Technologies of Affect: Social Media and Democratic Constraints on Crisis Escalation," qualifies and tests claims from a growing but still-nascent literature on social media and democratic accountability of foreign policy. This literature theorises that social media technologies erode democratic constraints on foreign policy because of the fragmented information streams that are inherent to social media environments. I argue that while this may be the case, elite foreign policy crisis messaging is also subject to selection effects that result in qualitatively different kinds of messages being Tweeted compared to what is relayed, say, via an executive press release. In a bid to isolate both the form and downstream effects of a leader's foreign policy communication choices, I first descriptively analyze observational evidence from a novel writing experiment on seven national security elite officials, currently in office in Pakistan, to show that elite messaging in foreign policy crises is more likely to invoke affective language on Twitter than when it is conveyed via offline mediums. I then aggregate across and randomise the messages derived from this writing experiment on an online panel of 1,687 social media users in Pakistan. I find that an escalatory press-release issued by a national leader was taken more seriously by domestic audiences, corresponding with higher levels of respondent attentiveness, while escalatory Tweets by a leader were taken less seriously and correspondingly saw reduced respondent attentiveness. I concurrently find that escalatory messages on Twitter were less likely to trigger worries about the likelihood of war than escalatory messages contained in press-releases. Critically, these dynamics increased the space available to respondents to engage in public jingoism and nationalist anti-foreign mobilisation.

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