Abstract
Conventional wisdom in political science holds that democratic institutions and norms facilitate international cooperation. We argue that this advantage is fragile to democratic stress-publicly visible challenge to a country's systems of democratic accountability that generates uncertainty about their stability and durability. Specifically, democratic stress in a partner country generates doubts among foreign publics about that country's willingness and ability to cooperate, even if the episode proves temporary. Leveraging the 2024 self-coup in South Korea, we conducted a survey experiment in the United States to test this argument. We find that South Korean democratic stress reduced Americans' perceptions of South Korea's reliability as an ally. This effect is robust across different frames: even when the episode is portrayed as evidence of democratic resilience, American perceptions remained damaged. These findings suggest that acute democratic stress can erode public confidence in an alliance even if a crisis is resolved.
Citation
Horiuchi, Yusaku, Eun A. Jo, and Kelly Matush. n.d. “Democratic Stress and American Public Perceptions of Allies: The Case of South Korea.” Working paper. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=5718082