In this dissertation I explore how informal rhetoric on Twitter may alter public opinion and political behavior during moments of crisis. I theorize that rhetoric on social media, despite being less premeditated than other speech, has the capacity to alter the responses of both individual citizens and politicians alike by inconspicuously shaping societal realities. To explore this phenomenon, I use Twitter API to scrape 25,169 tweets from politicians and healthcare authorities in 2020. I code all tweets by hand to explore how various rhetorical choices influenced gubernatorial policy decisions and the public’s responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research adds to the literature on political communication, public opinion, and political behavior by demonstrating the nuanced ways by which individuals may be persuaded to act. Understanding the nature of the influence of informal political discourse online has important implications for the future of social media strategy, particularly during crisis situations.

Why, how, and to what effect do states use disinformation in their foreign policies? Inductive accounts variously address those questions, but International Relations has yet to offer a theoretical account. I propose Putnam’s two-level game (1988) as a candidate theory. A rationalist approach that jettisons the unitary actor assumption, the model accounts for previous accounts’ observations and suggests their interrelation and four overarching objectives. The model also generates novel implications about disinformation in foreign policy, two of which I test via separate survey experiments.The primary implication is that states can use disinformation to encourage polarization and in turn can reverberate into commitment problems. A survey experiment tests the first link in that chain, arguing that disinformation’s effects could be underestimated due to focus on belief outcomes; potential selection bias in active-exposure studies; and probable pre-treatment effects. It hypothesizes that passive exposure to novel political dis/misinformation has ripple effects on trust, affective polarization, and participation-linked emotions even among those that disbelieve it. It thus tests both the implication that disinformation can encourage polarization and that disinformation can be used to impact multiple potential outcomes at once. The second empirical paper tests the latter links in the disinformation-commitment problem chain. Building on a study that found U.S polarization decreases U.K. ally confidence (Myrick 2022), it argues that polarization uniquely increases chances of voluntary defection and does so not only due to government changeover risk but also weakened leader accountability. It employs a causal mediation analysis on survey experiment data to test whether a potential partner’s polarization increases their perceived unreliability and in turn decreases public cooperation preference. The commitment problem implication receives mixed support. The first experiment evidences no impact of partisan mis/disinformation on affective polarization, though that may be due to floor effects. The second experiment finds that polarization modestly increases perceived defection risk, but this increase is not necessarily strong enough to change public cooperation preference. Beyond those findings, the first experiment also uncovers that polarization may indeed have sociopolitical impacts on even those that disbelieve it, consistent with the multiple-outcomes implication.

Can the fatality of a terror attack determine the level of public support for violent retaliatory policies? Can this relationship indicate response proportionality? This replication and extension study examines the empirical linkages between exposure to non-fatal and fatal terrorism and support for violent retaliatory policies to determine whether response proportionality can be observed in public support for violent counterterrorism policies. Building upon the original study by Shandler et al. (2021), which employed a series of randomized controlled experiments to 1,848 participants across the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel to examine the political effects of exposure to cyberterrorism on support for retaliation, this study utilizes the data from these controlled experiments and employs a distinct set of statistical analyses to instead investigate response proportionality, exploring the association between terrorism attack fatality and public support for various violent retaliatory policies. Findings indicate that the level of public support for violent retaliatory responses is dependent on attack fatality, confirming the existence of response proportionality in public support for violent counterterrorism policies. This study found little evidence of response proportionality in public support for non-violent counterterrorism responses. Most critically, this study found that regardless of attack fatality, participants disapproved of retaliatory policies that result in adversary civilian harm, indicating that public counterterrorism opinions align with existing state and international norms of proportionality. As the consideration of both public support and proportionality are vital to state counterterrorism operations, this study extends to the realm of foreign policy the existence of a relationship between these two factors. While existing literature suggests public opinion favors disproportional retaliation responses, this study argues proportionality may influence public counterterrorism opinion more than research has previously established.

How do political elites perceive regional intergovernmental organizations that seek to promote democracy? When do political elites view regional intergovernmental institutions promoting democracy as legitimate? Many informal and formal types of regional intergovernmental institutions have sought to spread democracy. However, previous research on the nexus of regional intergovernmental institutions and democracy has focused primarily on the latter. Furthermore, these studies claim that membership in these formal international institutions (a.k.a. international organizations) increases the likelihood of the democratic survival of a newly democratic regime. Membership in these organizations provides a seal of approval that the newly democratic country intends to remain democratic. This kind of external validation should dissuade spoilers from undermining the transition and encourage ordinary people to support the transitional regime. This argument assumes that the domestic audience trusts this organization and believes it plays a vital role in society. Whether elites have confidence that the regional organization can positively impact democratic consolidation and how they perceive different types of regional organizations promoting democracy are empirical questions. This project seeks to answer these questions through a small sample and non-population-based elite survey experiment in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. I also run a laboratory survey experiment with a larger sample of university students, giving me the opportunity for statistical power. The results suggest that political elites are skeptical of regional intergovernmental bodies promoting democracy. Meanwhile, non-elites consider regional institutions promoting democracy illegitimate when they are informal, i.e., no written shared expectations, rules, and permanent secretariat. When regional interstate cooperation on democracy operates under a formal procedure or codified in an international treaty and supported by a permanent secretariat, non-elites tend to consider them more legitimate.

The racial and political self-identification of biracial and multiracial individuals in America is of high importance due to the growing number of individuals that identify this way. How and why these individuals form their identities will be important for politicians, the public, and lawmakers to better understand this population and how to create policies that better them. The findings from this multi-method study conform with prior research: race and political identities are intertwined. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that an individual’s identification with the minority race may be correlated with more liberal views and that greater identification with their white race may correlate with more conservative views. This paper illustrates and highlights how an individual’s primary/public identification with their white or minority racial identity may be influenced by their socioeconomic status.

This paper puts forth an argument for a new form of political survey that is aimed towards those who have the ability to vote, but choose not to. First, I will explain the importance of voting. Second, I will outline the structure of the survey. Third, I will explain how current surveys are inadequate. I will go into detail on the methods by which people make the decision whether or not to vote, and will discuss some issues of pragmatism that will need to be answered for this survey to find success.