What international issues become national interests worth fighting for, and why? Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that issues without clear economic value, such as barren lands, are more likely to be perceived as national interests because they do not benefit any single domestic group. Since who benefits is unclear, politicians have an easier time framing such issues as benefiting the whole nation. I test this argument using survey experiments on the American public. The results show that first, issues providing diffuse benefits to citizens are more likely to be considered national interests than issues providing concentrated benefits to certain domestic groups. Second, issues with clearer economic value are harder to frame as having diffuse benefits because they are more easily associated with specific beneficiaries. This study proposes a new theory of national interest and offers a potential explanation for why people frequently support conflict over issues without obvious benefits.
INTRODUCTION
Many international conflicts today involve disputes over objects whose economic or strategic value is not immediately clear. Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a war in 1998 that cost more than a hundred thousand lives over the sparsely populated town of Badme. Greece and Turkey faced multiple skirmishes in the Aegean Sea over the two uninhabited islands of Imia/Kardak. These examples are not isolated incidents; a vast majority of territorial conflicts post-1945 have been over uninhabitable areas devoid of natural resources or strategic value (Altman 2020; Goemans and Schultz 2017). Even more puzzling, these disputes are often regarded as central to the nation’s integrity and receive widespread support for conflict from the public.
Previous studies have explained the widespread public support behind these disputes by assuming that some issue areas, such as those concerning a nation’s territory or security, speak more fundamentally to ideas of the nation than others. Because such issues are perceived as important national matters, individuals and leaders alike are willing to escalate conflict over them and undergo immense sacrifices for their cause (e.g., Manekin, Grossman, and Mitts 2019; Penrose 2002). However, these studies leave unanswered a larger question: why are some issues more likely to be understood as important to the nation than others?
In this article, I seek to explain which international issues are more likely to be perceived as national interests—defined as issues that can generate widespread, enduring support for conflict—and why such perceptions of national interest often fail to reflect an issue’s objective material value. I focus on a previously understudied dimension, the domestic distributional consequences of an international issue, to answer this question. While domestic distributional consequences have been widely used to infer policy preferences in the political economy or the public policy literature (Lake 2009; Potter 1980), there has been comparatively little attention to how they affect perceptions of national interest or support for conflict escalation.
I advance two arguments in this article. First, I argue that issues thought to provide widespread, diffuse benefits to all citizens within a country are more likely to be understood as being in the national interest than issues thought to provide concentrated benefits to certain domestic groups. Second, I argue that issues with clear, specific economic benefits are less likely to be perceived as offering diffuse benefits to the nation than those without. This is because having clearer economic stakes makes it easier for the political opposition to frame the issue as benefiting relevant domestic groups instead of the entire nation. For example, gaining new oil fields can benefit everyone in the nation by lowering gas prices and establishing energy security. However, the specific economic reward at stake—oil fields—also allows domestic opponents to plausibly discredit the issue as serving the interest of oil companies even when it may not be true. In contrast, when there is no economically valuable object at stake, it is easier for politicians to attach an abstract value to the issue and claim that the consequences are diffuse, since such benefits are harder to imagine as being concentrated.
I test my theory using three survey experiments fielded on nationally representative samples of the American public. Survey experiments can provide a direct test of the theory by manipulating an issue’s domestic distributional consequences while holding constant other factors that may influence perceptions of issue importance. The experiments demonstrate three main findings. First, respondents are more likely to think that issues providing diffuse benefits to all citizens are more important and worth fighting for than issues providing concentrated benefits to certain domestic groups. Second, economic benefits are harder to persuasively frame as having diffuse consequences for the nation than non-economic benefits such as security benefits. Third, distributional concerns can be powerful to the extent that individuals are lesslikely to support conflict over issues with economic benefits than without if they suspect the benefits would be concentrated.
This article makes several contributions. First, it proposes a new theory of which international issues become more worth fighting for and why. While scholars have extensively examined the conditions that lead to war and how states act given a certain ordering of preferences (e.g., Fearon 1995), we know relatively little about how and why the preferences are ordered the way they are. By approaching the question from a domestic distributional dimension, this article provides a novel explanation for what becomes perceived as national interest and why they often lack clear economic value.
Second, this study complicates our understanding of distributive politics and foreign policy. Previous theories have focused on how distributional consequences promote subnational actors to pursue their interests in foreign policy (e.g., Lake 2009; Rogowski 1987). I flip this argument, arguing that the very fact of having distributional consequences and subnational actors who may stand to especially benefit makes it harder for politicians to frame the issue as broadly beneficial to the nation.
This new theory also contributes to a long-standing debate on whether and to what extent national interest is constructed. Some scholars view national interest as an objective reality that can be assessed and discovered (Morgenthau 1948), while others view national interest as subjective social constructions (Finnemore 1996; Weldes 1996). By showing how issues with higher objective value can fail—and are in some ways more susceptible to failing—to become national interest, this article demonstrates that what becomes perceived as national interest is essentially subjective, but that there also exist objective constraints to how successfully issues can be framed as matters of national interest.
Finally, this study has important implications for many existing theories on domestic politics and international relations. Whether or not an international issue is publicly understood to be in the national interest plays a decisive role in many theories, influencing whether leaders are rewarded for escalating conflict or punished for backing down (Fearon 1994; Kertzer and Brutger 2016); whether foreign policy elites support the use of military force (Tomz, Weeks, and Yarhi-Milo 2020); which states prevail at the bargaining table (Putnam 1988; Weiss 2013); how successfully states can extract resources from the public to fight foreign adversaries (Christensen 1996; Goddard and Krebs 2015); and when nationalist sentiments are triggered and lead to aggression (Vasquez 1993). Consequently, understanding what becomes perceived as a national interest would be fundamental to better comprehending how existing theories apply to various situations.
PREVIOUS LITERATURE ON ISSUE VALUE AND NATIONAL INTEREST
The question of what states fight over has long been considered integral to understanding international conflict (Holsti 1991; O’Leary 1976; Rosenau 1966). However, there is less agreement on what exactly is understood as a national interest worth fighting for and why (Diehl 1992). Some scholars believe that certain issues are inherently more important than others, while others believe that an issue’s value is more or less decided by elites’ domestic political concerns and their ability to successfully frame the issue as important. I show that although both views advance our understanding of what states fight for, both leave unanswered many questions.
Inherent View of National Interest
High–Low Politics
The realist tradition has long argued that military-security issues related to power and survival are fundamentally more important than issues related to welfare because power and survival are often preconditions to any other objects states may want (Evangelista 1989, 150). The public is also assumed to be aware of this hierarchy: in his influential book on national interest, Krasner (1978, 70) remarks that “it could be assumed that all groups in society would support the preservation of territorial and political integrity.”
However, while it is reasonable to assume that states and the public would place foremost importance on self-protection and survival, what exactly counts as issues related to survival is ambiguous (Wolfers 1952). Many studies have noted how welfare issues also contribute to a state’s survival and military capability in the long run (Barnett 1990; Narizny 2003b), and even if we knew which issues were security related, there is no reason why such issues should necessarily be considered more important than other issue areas. Except in extreme circumstances, many “low-politics” issues have a more direct impact on an individual’s or even on a nation’s well-being than security issues. For instance, trade agreements and firm expropriation cases often involve hundreds of millions of dollars on average and directly affect the livelihood of those living within the country (Hajzler 2012), while disputes over barren, uninhabited lands are hardly related to a state’s survival or an individual’s well-being (Altman 2020).
Value by Issue Category and Benefit Type
Similarly, some scholars have argued that an issue’s value is decided by the type of goods involved, and that issues involving certain goods are inherently more valuable than others. For example, many believe that conflict over territory is fundamentally more important to the nation for biological or symbolic reasons (Johnson and Toft 2013; Penrose 2002; Vasquez 1993). Yet assuming that some goods are inherently more important than others cannot explain the variation in the importance and conflict proneness of issues even within the same substantive category (Hensel and Mitchell 2005; Potter 1980): for example, not all territories are equally conflict-prone, and some territories are much more likely to be considered fundamental to the nation and worth fighting for than others (Hassner 2003; Huth 1996; Shelef 2015).
To address this shortcoming, other scholars have taken a more fine-grained approach of examining what types of benefits are involved in each issue. Notably, the Issue Correlates of War Project (ICOW) provides a new typology of issues that allows issues even within the same category to have different values depending on their tangible or intangible qualities (Hensel and Mitchell 2017). 1This approach has enabled scholars to compare the importance of benefit types and find that issues with intangible value tend to escalate more frequently into militarized conflicts than those with only tangible, material benefits (Hensel and Mitchell 2005; Toft 2006; Vasquez 1993).
While this approach highlights the importance of studying intangibility in international relations, it also raises several questions. First, it is unclear why and to what extent intangible benefits are more valued than tangible ones. For example, Zellman (2018) finds in his study of the Serbian public that intangible framings do not always engender stronger feelings for reclaiming lost territory than do economic framings. Second, intangibility is often hard to objectively measure because even the same object can hold multiple meanings for different people depending on their ideology, pocketbook considerations, and framing of the dispute (Shelef 2015; Tanaka 2016; Zellman 2015).
More importantly, the existing literature leaves largely unanswered why some issues tend to hold more intangible value than others. For instance, ICOW classifies trade and industry disputes as having lower intangible value compared to other issue areas such as territorial disputes, but little has been theorized about why exactly they are less likely to hold intangible values in the first place. To be clear, I am not arguing that intangible benefits are unreal or unimportant. Rather, the aim of this section is to point out that we need more investigation into why some issues are more likely to acquire intangible meanings and develop into important national matters than others.
Domestic Politics as National Interest
Contrary to an inherent view of national interest, others have claimed that an issue’s value is malleable and heavily driven by domestic elites. For example, scholars have explored which specific policies are implemented when certain coalitions are in power (Brooks 2013; Narizny 2003a; 2007; Trubowitz 1998). These policies, however, are often domestically contentious or polarizing because they tend to reflect the interests of a specific group. This is contrary to the concept of national interest that this article is trying to explore, which are issues that can receive widespread consensus about their importance across coalitions.
Another group of scholars has examined how sectoral interests manage to co-opt the national interest and rationalize it to the public (Hobson 1902; Snyder 1993). These studies are closer to the article’s focus, but as Snyder himself acknowledges, justifying select policies to the public is harder when there are diverse interests in the society. This article expands on this existing literature to explore how some issues have an easier time remaining justified as national interests when faced with multiple discourses about what is important to the nation.
Finally, scholars have also argued that leaders may have incentives to ramp up the value of an issue in order to gain domestic support or gain leverage in international bargaining (Mueller 1973; Weiss 2013). However, while leader cues would certainly influence public opinion, a leader-driven approach cannot tell the full story. Leaders are often criticized for backing down in conflicts or for escalating unnecessarily (Kertzer and Zeitzoff 2017; Tomz 2007), and their attempts to frame an issue as important or unimportant are not always successful (Druckman 2001; Krebs 2015; Zellman 2015). In fact, leaders do not enjoy a completely free hand in portraying issues as national interests even in many authoritarian regimes (Li and Chen 2021; Weeks 2012). Therefore, the question of which issues have an easier time being widely framed as the national interest and why still remains. In the next section, I investigate this question by turning to a domestic distributional approach, examining what kinds of issues are more likely to resonate with the public as having important consequences for the entire nation.