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Many governments attempt to attract the foreign public, based on a belief that gaining support from them leads to positive outcomes in international relations. Such outcomes include direct benefits such as increases in trade and tourism. Others outcomes are more indirect, as popular support within a foreign country may help pressure governments to accept deals such as opening markets or hosting military bases. In an attempt to attract the foreign public, a country not only relies on coercion and payment, but it also broadcasts its cultural and democratic values, its level of prosperity and openness, and its humility and generosity. In this project, we zero in on the latter, classic concept in international relations – soft power – and conduct an experimental test of the soft power hypothesis (Nye 2004). In this project, we contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we investigate sources of foreign popular support more seriously and ask which disaggregated values attract the foreign public. Second, by exposing individuals to soft power exports from both Japan and China, we examine whether the effect of soft power differs by regime types of soft power “senders” – democracy and autocracy. Third, by fielding our experiments in both Korea and Malaysia, we probe the limitations of soft power by looking at both strained and less contentious international relationships. With the overarching goals in mind, we propose two experiments: (1) Survey experiments exposing respondents in two countries to short video clips of various types of soft power, and (2) a large encouragement design field experiment that randomly assigns respondents in one country to receive a subscription to a media service. This registry is a pre-analysis plan for a series of survey experiments exposing respondents in South Korea and Malaysia to short video clips of various types of Chinese and Japanese soft power. Both Japan and China are not popular in South Korea, thereby expecting the overall effect of soft power to be marginal for both countries, while Malaysia is considered more neutral for both countries. By employing the same videos about Japanese and Chinese soft power in the two target countries, we attempt to examine the effect and limit of soft power and whether they differ by regime types. For any issues unaddressed in this pre-analysis plan, we commit to the defaults described in Version 1.05 of the Lin, Green, and Coppock (2016) standard operating procedures, available at:http://alexandercoppock.com/Green-Lab-SOP/Green_Lab_SOP.pdf.2

The idea of using nuclear weapons against other societies is said to evoke strong moral opprobrium among millions of individuals across the globe, such that national leaders should be constrained from using them even when such a decision would be strategically sensible. Recent survey evidence suggests that this “nuclear taboo” is strong among the Chinese public: by and large, ordinary Chinese citizens report that they would oppose using nuclear weapons under any circumstances. However, we posit that previous findings likely mislead on the extent to which the Chinese public might support the use of nuclear weapons in a real military clash. As a number of important studies have argued, most public opinion surveys fail to adequately specify the trade-off between risking the deaths of home-country soldiers and destroying foreign societies with nuclear weapons—a trade-off that would invariably become salient in any realistic scenario where nuclear use might be contemplated. We propose an experimental design that redresses this oversight and promises to accurately capture the Chinese public’s views regarding the use and non-use of nuclear weapons.