Project Details
Projekt
RISS II project 8: The Impact of Interstate Conflict Threat on Multidimensional Identity, Political Preferences and Behavioral Intentions in Reconfigured Societies
Applicant
Professor Dr. Constantin Ruhe
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Political Science
Political Science
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439346934
The war in Ukraine and the larger confrontation with Russia have revitalized a looming risk of interstate war, fueling widespread fear of an escalation throughout Europe. However, since few interstate conflicts have occurred in the past decades, scholars have focused on other forms of violent conflict. As a result, there is limited academic evidence on how the threat of war affects reconfigured European societies that have been fundamentally transformed by decades of migration, social mobility, social conflict, and cultural change. This project investigates how the perceived threat of interstate war affects social identity, preferences, and behavior. Contributing to the overarching RISS Conceptual Framework, this project theoretically and empirically expands the RISS II framework to incorporate external events that originate from interaction between nation-states rather than within societies. We argue that the perceived threat of interstate conflict activates identification with superordinate groups, making these groups appear more homogenous. Once the group seems more homogenous, individuals develop more similar political preferences and become more likely to sacrifice personal interests for the benefit of the group. However, due to diverging threat perceptions, reactions to interstate conflict risks may not be homogenous, raising the question of whether and how this heterogeneity moderates the postulated effects of interstate conflict risk. The proposed project examines these questions using survey experiments embedded in the cross-national RISS Politicized Identity Survey, using state-of-the-art methods to detect heterogeneous treatment effects. It explores how individuals perceive the risk of interstate war and how it alters individuals' threat perceptions. Furthermore, it evaluates how the risk of interstate war shapes individuals' multidimensional social identity, leveraging an innovative measurement strategy with a conjoint experiment developed and applied during RISS I. In a further step, it assesses how the risk of interstate war alters individual political preferences, specifically, support for military spending. Finally, concerning behavioral intentions in the case of a war, it investigates how the threat of interstate wars alters individuals' willingness to fight for their country, arguably the most extreme form of in-group conformity and self-sacrifice. These questions have implications for the study of International Relations (IR), as they cover central determinants of national capability and resolve. Applying the RISS framework to these questions, the project also proposes a conceptual framework to study the domestic consequences of international relations.
DFG Programme
Research Units
