When to Not Respond in Kind? Individuals’ Expectations of the Future and Their Support for Reciprocity in Foreign Policy

Osman Sabri Kiratli and Sabri Arhan Ertan

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2024, vol. 46, issue 2, 1013-1035

Abstract: This paper investigates if individuals’ negative assessments of the future drive micro-level reluctance for international cooperation and reciprocal behavior, a core principle of multilateralism. To test our theoretical expectations, we field online survey experiments on a sample of over 3000 respondents in the US and Turkey in October–November 2020. The experimental results show that on average, individuals are fairly sensitive to target countries’ policy actions and are inclined to reciprocate when contemplating whether to increase contributions to UN or consent to bilateral trade liberalization. Yet, further analyses concur that individual inclinations to reciprocate are substantially moderated by their future expectations. Specifically, individuals who are more pessimistic about their material prospects remain fairly indifferent to the positive actions of other countries, but are more likely to penalize negative foreign policy actions by reciprocating in kind.

Keywords: International cooperation; Reciprocity; Public opinion; International institutions; Trade liberalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/268907/1/F ... rtan-When-to-Not.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:268907

DOI: 10.1007/s11109-023-09857-y

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().