The role of societal cues in explaining attitudes toward international organizations: the least likely case of authoritarian contexts

Abstract

How strong are societal cues–understood as the linkage between heuristics present in society and the object of evaluation–compared to elite cues in influencing citizens’ attitudes toward international politics? Our general argument is that societal cues have so far been underestimated in their effectiveness. More specifically, we argue that societal cues may have a direct effect or significantly diminish the effect of elite cues even in authoritarian contexts, when both cues are used at the same time. To test our hypotheses, we turn to cueing effects on citizens’ UN attitudes in two Middle Eastern countries: Saudi Arabia and Jordan. First, we depict that anti-Americanism is a significant and substantial heuristic in shaping Arab attitudes toward the UN. Thereafter, the results of a self-administered survey experiment show that governmental cues significantly and substantially affect public UN favorability. While cueing citizens with a heuristic linking the US to the UN has no direct effect in itself, it substantially weakens the effect of the governmental cues when both are employed at the same time. We outline the important implications of these findings at the end of the article.