Does Public Diplomacy Sway Domestic Public Opinion? Presidential Travel Abroad and Approval at Home

Abstract

Political leaders travel abroad to attend bilateral and multilateral meetings, engage in public diplomacy, and send signals of commitment or deterrence. However, their incentive to use this foreign policy tool depends in part on how the domestic audience responds to it. We leverage a powerful dataset of daily surveys during the Obama administration to examine whether U.S. presidential trips abroad change domestic public approval ratings. Specifically, we compare the approval of respondents interviewed just before or after each of Barack Obama's fifty-one diplomatic trips. We find a decrease in approval and an increase in disapproval. The magnitude of these effects is modest to large, but the measurable effect is short-lived, diminishing rapidly over time. We observe a similar pattern or no effect in monthly surveys available during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations.  Our results suggest that, contrary to the expectation of some scholars and practitioners, on average, it is unlikely that presidents can leverage foreign travel for an immediate increase in a key indicator of their success—domestic public approval. We discuss the implications for theories of foreign policy and international signaling.

Keywords: public diplomacy, high-level visits, soft power, public opinion