Framing international cooperation: citizen support for cooperation with the European Union in Eastern Europe.

While there is a large literature studying the determinants of public support for European integration, we know much less about the factors shaping attitudes towards various international cooperation initiatives. In this article, we study the possible influence of framing, a mechanism linking pre-existing values and causal beliefs, on preferences for cooperation with the EU. We develop six thematic frames related to the context of international cooperation: economic benefits, security, shared identity, traditional and liberal values, and rules and norms of governance. We test the effects of these frames using a survey experiment conducted in three countries in Eastern Europe—Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine—that are targeted by the integration projects of both the EU and Russia. We find that thematic framing has only small effects on international cooperation preferences: priming liberal values and governance increases slightly support for cooperation with the EU, but the effects of the remaining frames are too small and heterogeneous to be estimated precisely with our sample. Contrary to expectations, some of these effects are exercised by changing the relevant causal beliefs of citizens, even if the thematic frames were not designed to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]