Public Opinion and Framing Effects of Argentine Foreign Policy Toward Brazil: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Urban Centers in Argentina

Abstract

Studies about the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy are rare in Latin America as civic participation in these issues is a recent phenomenon. The following research explores the general perception of Argentine citizens about the orientation of foreign policy towards Brazil. Also, it explores the effects of information and its influence on citizens. In particular, it studies the psychotropic and socio-tropic attitudes of Argentinians about foreign policy toward Brazil. Based on a survey experiment, the research evaluates the impact of economic and political information (framing-effects) on the public's opinion of foreign policy (dependent variable). The experimental treatment was designed in an ordinal model by providing different pieces of information. The experiment also introduces 'Citizen Perception' as a covariate generated from a summation index with the scores of two variables (Preference for the actions of Argentina toward Brazil and the Position of Brazil in a charted preference of potential investor countries). The results show that the previous ideological bias is very significant and that the effects of information reinforce it. The work was run as part of a survey conducted by the Instituto PASCAL Universidad Nacional de San Martin, in Argentina´s major urban centres during 2015.