Leaders Without Borders: Familiarity as a Moderator of Transnational Source Cue Effects

Abstract

The role of source cue effects in transnational persuasion (in which a foreign actor attempts to persuade an audience in another jurisdiction) is largely unexplored in both the political communication and international relations literatures. This article investigates transnational source cue effects using two source cue experiments that test the persuasiveness of German chancellor Angela Merkel and UK prime minister David Cameron in a Canadian context. The experiments were embedded in an online survey administered to student participants at a Canadian university in January 2011. As might be expected, the foreign leaders exerted positive source cue effects among participants who held positive impressions of the leaders and backlash effects among those who held strongly negative impressions. These effects, however, were moderated by participants’ level of political awareness, with the largest effects observed among participants who had an intermediate level of awareness. It is argued that this nonlinear moderating effect can be attributed to the countervailing effects of attitude stability and source familiarity (both of which are associated with political awareness) on individuals’ susceptibility to source cue effects. Finally, cueing David Cameron had approximately equivalent source cue effects on participants’ attitudes towards government spending on foreign aid and welfare, suggesting that foreign leaders may be able to move opinion on domestic as well as on foreign policy issues. Overall, these results validate existing models of source cue effects in a transnational context and point to the scope and limitations of national leaders’ ability to engage in direct public diplomacy. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resources: Appendix: Question Wordings for Survey Experiments; Table A1: Balance Tests for Afghanistan and Cameron Cue Experiments; and Table A2: Underlying Salience of Domestic and Foreign Policy Spending.]