RAPID - Russia, Ukraine and The Dynamics of Public Attitudes Towards U.S. and Global Security

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This project examines a pressing, time sensitive, topic with strong potential to threaten U.S. national security. How the U.S. public reacts to the deepening Ukraine crisis and other possible aggressive moves by Russia will have significant consequences for U.S. and global security. The project will investigate the dynamics of U.S. public attitudes towards the Ukraine crisis and other possible Russian actions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. Recognizing the growing relevance of public attitudes for foreign policy, researchers have begun to delineate factors shaping citizen decision-making about military intervention, economic sanctions and humanitarian relief efforts. To date, however, progress in testing important theoretical ideas has been constrained by serious data limitations. Most studies examining forces affecting stability and change in public opinion have relied on aggregate data, thereby restricting the ability to explain what is happening at the individual level. Limited research analyzing individual-level attitudes typically has relied on data created for other purposes and important explanatory variables are unavailable. In contrast, the present study uses data gathered in multi-wave representative national panel surveys of the U.S. adult population to analyze a wide variety of theoretically motivated hypotheses about factors affecting public attitudes regarding the Ukraine crisis, ensuing events, and U.S. foreign policy more generally. Hypotheses tested will focus on understanding how basic value orientations and personality characteristics, benefit-cost calculations, cues provided by leader images and partisan attachments, and moral considerations combine to drive reactions to the Ukraine crisis and subsequent events as well as foreign-policy attitudes more generally. Building on recent work in cognitive psychology and experimental economics, newly available statistical techniques will be marshaled to investigate sources of heterogeneity in the effects of these factors. This project will conduct four large (N = 5000), representative national panel surveys of the American public over the next 12 months. Building on recent survey research funded by the U.K. Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) on American, British and French reactions to the Syrian crisis and more general foreign policy attitudes among the publics of these three countries, the proposed study will produce very high quality, cost effective, science. The resulting multi-wave survey data set will provide information needed for to conduct sophisticated, leading-edge multivariate analyses of the etiology and dynamics of the American public's foreign policy attitudes in a period when relations between the United States and Russia are evolving in consequential ways. To leverage the project's impact, all survey data will be made available to the scholarly community within three months after the completion of fieldwork via a widely publicized project website. Major findings will be presented in papers submitted for publication in leading peer-reviewed journals and in a book-length manuscript. This study will facilitate expert and lay understanding of possible alternative reactions towards relations with Russia and America's foreign policy stance more generally during a time when significant threats to national security and world security are growing. To magnify its impacts outside the scholarly community, key findings will be conveyed to non-specialist audiences via graphs and short summary documents on the project website, as well as by "columns" and "blogs" in widely accessed print and electronic media.