Keywords

Foreign policy; historical legacies; anti-Americanism

Abstract

Latin America is often cited as a prime example of historically rooted and deeply embedded opposition to the United States. There exists a prevalent assumption in the literature that suggests a legacy of foreign intervention can breed anti-Americanism. From this theoretical point of departure, we would expect individuals who lived through periods of intervention to express more negative opinions of the U.S. This thesis aims to explore whether historical legacies continue to live on and impact individual-level evaluations of the United States. By exploiting cross-country variation in the years and types of intervention, this study tests the empirical significance of the relationship between “exposure” to U.S. intervention and anti-Americanism. To quantify the effects, ordered logistical regression analyses are conducted at the regional and country level using an original dataset from Berger et al. (2013b) on CIA interventions and large-n survey data from the 2020 Latinobarometer. The results show that exposure is indeed a significant predictor of anti-Americanism with respondents who lived through periods of intervention having higher odds of expressing negative opinions of the U.S. However, further subset analyses demonstrate how this relationship can vary based on ideological cleavages, country, and the type of intervention that took place.

Thesis Completion Year

2024

Thesis Completion Semester

Spring

Thesis Chair

Mirilovic, Nikola

College

College of Sciences

Department

School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs

Thesis Discipline

Political Science

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Length of Campus Access

None

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

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Rights Statement

In Copyright