Public Opinion on War and Peace in Ukraine and Taiwan

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Ukraine and Taiwan are flashpoints that can potentially escalate to a world war today. The authors employ experimental surveys to study public opinion on war and peace. The first two papers test how American public opinion responds to the crisis in Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively. Yoon, Mattes, and Weeks articulate how Americans perceive wartime bargaining between Russia and Ukraine. Inouye and Yusaku reveal how aggressor status and racial and religious factors affect Americans’ support for the government to provide military assistance in the China-Taiwan conflict. Next, by surveying people in Czech and Japan, Tago investigates how distance drives public support for military intervention in Ukraine and Taiwan. The last two papers deal with the sender-receiver gaps in trilateral signaling. Quek and Ni unpack the causal mechanism of conciliation when war apologies by Japan (sender) are perceived by China (receiver) and the United States (observer). Pan examines how three US political actors release signals with various credibility and consistency and how people in the US, China, and Taiwan evaluate the US security commitment to Taiwan.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Discussants

• Jennifer Jerit Dartmouth College

• Eddy Yeung Emory University

Individual Presentations

• Wartime Negotiation Behavior and Third-Party Public Support - Hohyun Yoon, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Michaela Mattes, UC-Berkeley; Jessica L. P. Weeks, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• American Support for the Possible Cross-Strait Crisis: Conjoint Analysis - Rikio Inouye, Princeton University; Yusaku Horiuchi, Dartmouth College

• From Ukraine to Taiwan: How Distance Affects Support for Foreign Intervention - Atsushi Tago, Waseda University

• How to Conciliate: Counterfactual Experiments on Pathways to Conciliation - Kai Quek, University of Hong Kong; Jiaqian Ni, University of California, Berkeley

• Signals in Security Commitment: Evidence on US-China-Taiwan Relations - Hsin-Hsin Pan, Soochow University