Foreign policy issue ownership, interstate conflict, and U.S. vote intention

Abstract

The literature on issue ownership shows that voters use ownership opinions when evaluating parties on salient issues. The audience costs literature shows that interstate conflict can significantly affect voter behavior. Due to these topics being studied in isolation from one another, it is unclear how foreign policy issue ownership interacts with interstate conflict to affect voter behavior. Using a formal model explaining voters' utility for the incumbent party, I theorize that the effect of foreign policy issue ownership will be larger in the presence of certain voter-level, party-level, and system-level traits. To examine the relationship between foreign policy and conflict on voting behavior, I first explore 1939-2020 U.S. public opinion data using numerous U.S. surveys and data from the Most Important Problem Dataset (MIPD). I find that more voters think foreign policy is salient around periods of time when the U.S. is involved in conflict. Examining trends in ownership, I find that foreign policy issue ownership changes hands between the Democratic and Republican Party over time. To test the formal model, I then use individual-level data from numerous U.S. surveys ranging from 1948 to 2016. To varying degrees of support, logistic regression results show that voters' utility for the incumbent party is higher when the incumbent party owns foreign policy and when respondents are conservative and Republican, when respondents think foreign policy is the MIP, when incumbent parties are Republican and hawkish, and when interstate conflict is severe, fatal, and fought over regime change. These findings support hypotheses regarding when foreign policy and foreign policy issue ownership is salient to voters. Thus, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of when voters use foreign policy ownership perceptions to evaluate incumbent parties and how the effect of these perceptions vary across types of voters, parties, and interstate conflicts.