External Threats and Support for International Security Cooperation

Abstract

Are voters more willing to accept external security commitments when international threats increase? While much work in international relations treats threats as key drivers of international behavior, we know little about whether bodies politic change attitudes toward important foreign and security policy questions based on changes in threats, threat perceptions, or even information about threats. We address this question about the relationship between threats and attitudes toward security commitments by fielding a pre-registered survey experiment in Japan. 1 Our experiment explores the micro-foundations of international security cooperation by using information about the probability of war between China and Taiwan to increase the perception of threat among our survey respondents. We find that information about the threat of war does, in fact, significantly increase public support for security cooperation in Japan, regardless of whether the posited cooperation is with Australia, India, South Korea, or the United States. Our findings suggest that while the public may oppose security cooperation in peacetime, there is more support for cooperation when threats are made salient.