International Relations Speaker Series: Andrés Schelp (Northwestern), Eagle Eyes on the South: American Foreign Policy Preferences toward the Diplomatic and Economic Rise of Emerging Powers

Please join the International Relations Speaker Series as they host Ph.D Candidate Andrés Schelp, Northwestern University. Session title and abstract forthcoming.

In this paper, I examine how a rising middle or weaker power's regime type and the nature of its ascent shape foreign policy preferences in the United States. I rely on a survey experiment that varies whether an emerging country’s influence increases primarily through greater relevance in the global economy or in diplomacy and international politics, and whether the rising country is described as democratic or autocratic. In a representative U.S. sample of 480 individuals, I examine the implications for foreign policy preferences, including the normative perception of the trend, support for efforts to limit a rising country’s influence, and views on U.S. compliance with international organizations. Results indicate that political and diplomatic status gains shift foreign policy preferences more strongly than these countries’ economic growth. Moreover, they also increase Americans’ support for the United States’ disregarding the decisions of international organizations. Regime type strongly conditions the intensity of these reactions, with a democratic rise eliciting weaker support for constraining policies than an autocratic rise. Given the modest sample size, I report HC3 robust standard errors and randomization-inference p-values, conduct a retrospective design-based sensitivity analysis of statistical power, and test whether the main pattern replicates in a student sample. The findings are consistent across specifications. Taken together, they expand the literature's understanding of American preferences toward weaker but rising states beyond a China-centered reference point.

Andres Schelp is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. He studies how international evaluations of countries' performance are constructed and how they shape elite decision-making and public opinion. His work focuses primarily on formal democracy evaluations, such as Freedom House ratings, and secondarily on informal cross-national comparisons that shape foreign policy and domestic preferences.

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