Domestic Attitudes toward Regional Leadership: A Survey Experiment in Brazil

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze citizens' attitudes toward regional leadership, employing two sets of survey experiments. Using Brazil as a case study, we analyze the first set of experiments with two types of regional leadership - structural and institutional - across three different regional issues - economic integration, regime change, and regional conflict. We found that Brazilians do not support either type of leadership, whether in regional conflict or in regime change issues, but support institutional leadership in economic integration scenarios. In the second set, we included specific South American countries both in regional conflict and in regime change scenarios. We found that Brazilians prefer Brazil to stay away from acting as a leader once neighboring countries are named in the experiment. Our findings indicate that the literature on regional leadership should incorporate the level of domestic support to understand its implications to the exercise of regional leadership. We embedded our experiments within the project "The Americas and the World: Public Opinion and International Politics, 2014-2015." We used a nationally representative sample of eighteen hundred respondents undertaken in 2014.