Commanding Support: Values and Interests in the Rhetoric of Alliance Politics

How can democratic governments convince their citizens to support a costly military alliance? We theorize about two rhetorical tools that foreign policy leaders have historically used to achieve this goal: instrumental cues emphasizing national interests and ideational cues highlighting shared values. We then assess the effects of these appeals in various forms and contexts by analyzing two original survey experiments fielded in the United States. Our analysis shows that alliance rhetoric – whether positive or negative – can sway public support for alliances. Positive appeals to both interests and values raise citizen approval for maintaining a costly alliance in times of peace and during an active crisis, though their effects are slightly muted in a crisis. We also find that negative rhetoric erodes public support for alliances, but only under limited conditions: negative rhetoric affects public support for peace-time alliance policies but not for defending an ally during a crisis, and its effect disappears in the presence of positive rhetoric. The findings contribute to literatures on the domestic politics of international institutions and the role of political communication in foreign policy.