Scripts of Escalation and Restraint: State Messaging and Public Opinion in International Crises

Public opinion can both enable and constrain foreign policy, motivating governments to manipulate media during international crises. This study identifies four recurring communication strategies, one mobilizing and three moderating, each organized around a dominant cue: mobilization relies primarily on emotional arousal to stoke nationalist sentiment and foster assertiveness; censorship centers on the informational restriction of politically sensitive content; delegitimization uses normative appeals to discredit hawkish responses as irresponsible or illegitimate; and posturing employs performative displays of toughness intended to make moderate policies politically acceptable. Using a large-scale survey experiment in China, Vietnam, and the Philippines, the study evaluates how these strategies affect the public’s foreign-policy preferences and tolerance for policy deviation in a simulated fishing dispute in the South China Sea. The results show that mobilization shifts preferences in a more hawkish direction and reduces tolerance for deviation, whereas delegitimization consistently steers the public toward more moderate foreign policy preferences across countries. Censorship tempers policy preferences in all three countries but is strongest in Vietnam; posturing has no significant effect in China or Vietnam and produces a more hawkish response in the Philippines. Although the sources of this cross-national heterogeneity cannot be definitively identified, the findings suggest that propaganda effectiveness may depend partly on how audiences interpret different messages. Explicitly prescriptive strategies, such as mobilization and delegitimization, appear more portable across contexts, whereas informational or performative strategies, such as censorship and posturing, may be more contingent on audience predispositions, including baseline hawkishness, and on broader political and informational environments.