Diversionary cheap talk: economic conditions and US foreign policy rhetoric, 1945-2010

ABSTRACT

This study explains how the economy affects the foreign policy rhetoric used by American presidents. When economic conditions deteriorate, presidents criticize foreign nations to boost their approval ratings. Presidents use this “diversionary cheap talk” in response to the misery index of unemployment plus inflation, which poses a unique threat to their popularity. They target historical rivals, which make intergroup distinctions most salient. Diversionary cheap talk is most influential for and most frequently used by Democratic presidents, whose non-core constituents prefer hawkish foreign policy but already expect it from Republican presidents. I test the observable implications of the theory with the American Diplomacy Dataset, an original record of 50,000 American foreign policy events between 1851 and 2010 drawn from a corpus of 1.3 million New York Times articles.