Military Threats and Blame Attribution: Evidence from Cross-Strait Relations

• In Event: China and Its Neighbors

Abstract

Do foreign threats invariably unite domestic audiences? The rally ‘round the flag literature suggests that foreign threats unite the nation and focus national attention on resisting the foreign actor, yet tools of coercive diplomacy are often designed with the goal of turning the public against their own government. We adjudicate these contrasting views by investigating the roots of blame attribution for foreign threats. We argue that blame attribution is mediated by the way media frame foreign threats, but their framing is not static over time. As threats heighten, media across the political spectrum will appeal to more moderate segments of their readership, diversify the sources of blame, and thereby split the unity of domestic audiences. We test our theory through China-Taiwan interaction from 2022-23. We first conduct text analysis on more than 5,000 editorials and op-eds published by two ideologically opposed Taiwanese media outlets. We find that as threats intensify, proxied by the number of Chinese fighter jets invading Taiwan’s ADIZ, both media outlets converge in their blame attribution to a mix of domestic actors and foreign countries, including domestic political parties, the US, and China. We then show that domestic audiences have misaligned sentiments regarding different levels of China’s threats, mediated by the blame attribution of Taiwanese news media, as demonstrated in interviews and an upcoming follow-up survey experiment. This study offers fresh perspective and evidence to bridge the gap between the rally-round-the-flag effect and the impacts of coercive diplomacy through the lens of media blame attribution.

Authors

• Samuel Liu, Cornell University

• Jackie S.H. Wong, Princeton University