Abstract

To what extent do elite and social group cues affect the public's willingness to embrace their leader's actions during domestic and international security crises? Studies traditionally have focused on top-down elite cue-driven models to study how the public's attitudes are influenced during international and domestic security crises, largely disregarding the bottom-up effects social peer groups can have on individuals' attitudes. This is problematic as the public is regularly exposed to cue messages from elites and social peer groups, both of which are expected to help determine how successful leaders will be in mobilizing public support on a tactical level. To address this dissertation, conducted three studies drawing on prospect theory and audience costs evaluating to what extend elite and social group cues are able to moderate the American and Indian public's willingness to support or oppose the use of force in the context of humanitarian interventions, trade disputes, international and domestic security crises. Relying on ten survey experiments, the results from the three studies present robust evidence that the tactical use of elite and social group cues is not particularly effective as these information signals are unable to consistently induce preference shifts among the public during domestic and international security crises.

Notes

If this is your thesis or dissertation, and want to learn how to access it or for more information about readership statistics, contact us at STARS@ucf.edu

Graduation Date

2021

Semester

Summer

Advisor

Boutton, Andrew

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

School of Politics, Security and International Affairs

Degree Program

Security Studies

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0008705;DP0025436

URL

https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0025436

Language

English

Release Date

August 2021

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Download

Share

COinS