How to Win Friends and Influence People Overseas: The U.S., China, and the Microfoundations of Public Diplomacy

Abstract

The Chinese government has been estimated to spend as much as $10 billion annually on its soft power outreach through programs like those associated with the worldwide Belt and Road Initiative (Albert 2018). Meanwhile, much of the contemporary narrative in U.S. foreign policy centers on pushing back against Chinese influence, in part by making attempts to attract global audiences. Both the U.S. and China have used public diplomacy – government engagement with foreign publics – to hasten their missions. But does public diplomacy work? And if so, what exactly does it do?

This dissertation posits that states use public diplomacy in order to influence the perceptions, policy attitudes, and political behaviors of foreign publics. Crucially, it argues that public diplomacy must be seen as more than a set of simplistic attempts to “win hearts and minds,” as it is often framed in the political science literature. Probing the micro-foundations of public diplomacy through political psychology and the domestic politics of foreign policy, this project demonstrates how public diplomacy can be used not only to increase soft power, but also to generate the three P’s: making foreign publics more percipient, persuading them to take on different foreign policy stances, and developing within publics a preference for engaging with the sending state. The dissertation presents three main channels that states use to implement public diplomacy programs: interaction, information, and investment. Throughout the dissertation, case studies show how local environments complicate the work of public diplomacy practitioners and how political science theory helps explain outcomes. At some times, public diplomacy delivers on its goals, and at others, it misses the mark.

By presenting a new conceptual framework that explains public diplomacy goals and then marshaling empirical research to evaluate real-life public diplomacy programming by the U.S. and China, this dissertation helps shed light on how public diplomacy works in hard cases. It shows that language and cultural learning may facilitate greater percipience in the minds of young people, but more nuanced views of the state will not always be beneficial to the state's foreign policies. It finds that states may succeed at using their own ideological brand to attract likeminded audiences to their broadcasts, but the preexisting attitudes of the target audience may limit the bounds of persuasion for public diplomacy practitioners. And it demonstrates that aid and assistance projects that exacerbate political hot topics may only amplify anti-foreign sentiment and lead to backlash. On the other hand, projects that carefully consider public concerns and put a premium on service delivery may succeed at fostering public preferences for engagement with the sending state.

Ultimately, this dissertation provides a new way of thinking about the aims and effects of public diplomacy. It combines multi-method techniques to evaluate the successes and failures of the world’s two most powerful countries in courting foreign publics through public diplomacy strategies. In addition, it elucidates areas for future researchers and policymakers to focus in on when designing, evaluating, and theorizing about public diplomacy.