Cultural Threats and Backlash in International Politics?

• In Event: How People React to Societal Threats

Abstract

The spread of pop culture across borders is often seen as an opportunity to enhance a country’s soft power, and to build cross-national ties. For example, contact theory (and its variants like parasocial and vicarious contact theory) imply that such interactions can warm relations between different identity groups. In contrast, we investigate the potential negative effects of global culture spread, focusing on the case of K-Pop or the K-Wave. We theorize about how exposure to foreign pop culture, and K-pop in particular, can evoke backlash among foreign audiences when it poses any of the following types of threat: threats to national identity, threats to national status, and threats to values (and specifically traditional masculinity norms in the case of K-Pop). We test the implications of our theory using a vignette-based survey experiment fielded in the United States. Our results show that the different types of threats can all lead to backlash but under certain conditions and for particular identity or value-salient subgroups of the population. While shedding new light on a major cultural phenomenon, we also contribute to general theory on how social identity, contact, and threat affect political behavior in international relations.

Authors

• Jonathan Art Chu, National University of Singapore

• Jiyoung Ko, Korea University