Deserving Special Treatment? The Effect of Psychological Entitlement on Support for International Law

Abstract

Previous studies in Psychology have identified Psychological Entitlement (PE) as an important variable that affects a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors in humans. PE is an individual-level character trait that describes a tendency to expect unwarranted and unearned rewards. In this paper, we build on existing research in Psychology and we investigate the effect of PE on foreign policy attitudes. Theoretically, we expect that those who score high on PE will score higher on American exceptionalism and—as a result—they will have more negative attitudes toward international law. We test our hypotheses on a nationally representative sample of the United States adult population. Respondents were asked a number of questions designed to tap into their PE scores, foreign policy attitudes, and general demographic characteristics. Our models provide broad support for our theoretical expectations. An experimental follow-up analysis (in which entitlement levels were manipulated) corroborates our findings.

Des études antérieures en psychologie ont déjà identifié que le droit subjectif (DS) était une variable importante aux effets sur un large éventail d'attitudes et de comportements chez les humains. Le DS est un trait de caractère au niveau individuel qui décrit une tendance à attendre des récompenses injustifiées et imméritées. Dans cet article, nous nous fondons sur la recherche existante en psychologie pour examiner l'effet du DS sur les attitudes relatives à la politique étrangère. En théorie, nous pensons que les personnes obtenant un score élevé en DS obtiendront un score encore plus élevé sur l'exceptionnalisme américain et, par conséquent, qu'elles auront des attitudes plus négatives à l’égard du droit international. Nous testons nos hypothèses sur un échantillon représentatif à l’échelle nationale de la population adulte des États-Unis. L'on a posé aux participants de nombreuses questions conçues pour faire appel à leurs scores en DS, à leurs attitudes en politique étrangère et à des caractéristiques démographiques générales. Nos modèles viennent largement soutenir nos attentes théoriques. Une analyse de suivi expérimentale (dans laquelle les niveaux de soutien ont été manipulés) confirme nos conclusions.

Estudios previos en Psicología han identificado el Privilegio Psicológico (PE, por sus siglas en inglés) como una variable importante que afecta a una amplia variedad de actitudes y comportamientos en los seres humanos. El PE es un rasgo de carácter a nivel individual que describe una tendencia a esperar recompensas injustificadas y no merecidas. En este artículo, nos basamos en investigaciones existentes en el ámbito de la Psicología e investigamos el efecto que tiene el PE sobre las actitudes a nivel de política exterior. En teoría, esperamos que quienes obtengan una puntuación alta en PE también obtendrán una puntuación más alta en materia de excepcionalismo estadounidense y, como resultado, tendrán actitudes más negativas hacia el derecho internacional. Ponemos a prueba nuestras hipótesis en una muestra representativa a nivel nacional de la población adulta de los Estados Unidos. A los encuestados se les hizo una serie de preguntas diseñadas con el fin de conocer sus puntuaciones en materia de PE, sus actitudes con respecto a la política exterior y sus características demográficas generales. Nuestros modelos proporcionan un amplio respaldo a nuestras expectativas teóricas. Realizamos un análisis de seguimiento experimental (en el que se manipularon los niveles de privilegio), el cual corrobora nuestros hallazgos.

Introduction

The main goal of this paper is to investigate US public attitudes toward international law. In particular, we explore why some people support subjecting their home country to global legal arrangements while others oppose such commitments. Existing studies have demonstrated that country-level behaviors toward international agreements are at least partly influenced by public opinion. In particular, previous scholarship suggests that both the choice to create new international rules and subsequent compliance decisions can depend on societal preferences (Dai 2005; Wratil, Waeckerle, and Proksch 2021). Taking these findings into consideration, understanding the sources of people's attitudes about international law is highly relevant for academics and political leaders.

Extant research has established that people's views toward international law are driven by a wide range of individual-level characteristics. For instance, previous work has shown that mass attitudes in this issue area are shaped by partisan identities (Strezhnev, Simmons, and Kim 2019), social identity attachments (Bayram 2017), prior military experience (Wallace 2014), levels of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) (Justwan et al. 2021), and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) (Peitz, Dhont, and Seyd 2018). Still, while past analyses have provided important insights, our current understanding of attitudes toward international law is far from complete. Most notably, psychologists have long known that people differ greatly in the extent to which they expect special treatment for themselves and their country from others (Campbell et al. 2004, 31). This sense of entitlement has been shown to vary systematically across individuals, and it is likely to exert an important effect on people's views about international agreements. However, while individual-level differences in entitlement have attracted considerable interest among political observers,¹ they have received no attention in the scholarly literature on foreign policy attitudes.

Our focus on entitlement is partly motivated by the rise of entitlement-based rhetoric, such as populism, in contemporary political discourse both within the United States and globally Hadiz and Chryssogelos (2017)). While the causes for the rise of populism continue to be debated (e.g., Berman 2021; Rodrik 2021), the central aspects of populist rhetoric are fairly well established (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). The core of populist rhetoric rests on an argument about individual entitlement. Populists contend that modern society has been corrupted by self-serving elites who are both politically unethical and immoral. These elites exercise power in ways that deny ordinary people their rightful share of economic goods and political rights. As a result, populist narratives assert that ordinary people are inherently entitled to greater political power, economic resources, and social recognition. For example, President Trump frequently employs entitlement arguments during his public appearances, framing both personal and national interests in terms of what is owed. Over the course of the past few years, Trump has stated his belief that he is “entitled to a revenge tour” against his political opponents (Bort 2023), “entitled to personal attacks” on competitors (McGraw and Allison 2024), and “probably entitled to another four [years in office]” following a second presidential term (Karni 2024). Likewise, Trump's foreign policy views extend entitlement claims on behalf of the United States, positioning the nation as uniquely deserving of greater international benefits and recognition. This sentiment is reflected in his frequent assertion that the US does not receive the respect or acknowledgment it rightfully deserves (Wolf 2017).

Scholars have begun to argue that one consequence of the rise in populist rhetoric is the undermining of support for established institutions globally—similar to what has been observed in domestic politics (Spandler and Söderbaum 2023). The argument here is that populist leaders attempt to delegitimize established institutions, including international agreements, as mechanisms of elitist political power. However, as we describe below, the rise of entitlement-focused political rhetoric such as populism potentially undermines support for international law in more subtle ways that are not fully appreciated by current studies on attitudes toward international law or populism. Thus, our research aligns with ongoing efforts to develop a focused research agenda on the impact of populist politics on foreign policy (Destradi, Cadier, and Plagemann 2021; Löfflmann 2022).

Formally, Psychological Entitlement (PE) has been conceptualized as “a stable and pervasive sense that one deserves more and is entitled to more than others” (Campbell et al. 2004, 31). Over the past few years, scholars have shown that this variable impacts people's workplace behaviors (Lee et al. 2019), romantic relationships (Hammond, Sibley, and Overall 2014), negotiation settings (Neville and Fisk 2019), compliance with public health recommendations (Li 2021), and sentiments toward personally relevant social out-groups (Anastasio and Rose 2014). Indeed, as Campbell et al. (2004, 29) point out, “Psychological entitlement has a pervasive and largely unconstructive impact on social behavior.” Nevertheless, even though PE has been shown to have strong effects on people's attitudes across a wide range of issue areas, the impact of this character trait on people's political attitudes has not been investigated. This is an important oversight given existing research findings suggesting that PE and a number of associated personality traits may be on the rise in the broader US population (Trzesniewski, Donnellan, and Robins 2008; Twenge and Foster 2010; Twenge 2014).

In this paper, we fill an important gap in the literature by exploring the effect of PE on people's attitudes toward international law. Theoretically, we anticipate that PE reduces public support for global legal arrangements in two different ways. First, given that highly entitled individuals tend to be less concerned about the lives of others (Li 2021), entitlement is likely to have a direct negative influence on support for international agreements. Second, building on previous research in psychology (Endevelt, Schori-Eyal, and Halperin 2021), we predict that highly entitled people will also perceive their home country to have a special status in global affairs. In other words, we anticipate that those with high scores on this character trait should be more likely to support the notion of US exceptionalism than other individuals. Since exceptionalism has been previously identified as an important predictor of mass attitudes toward international law (Gilmore 2015), we thus expect that entitlement also influences people's views in this issue area through a second, indirect, causal pathway.

Our empirical analysis is based on a nationally representative online survey conducted in June 2021. Overall, our data provides strong support for our theoretical expectations. We show that highly entitled individuals are significantly less willing to subject the United States to existing international rules and less likely to favor negotiated compromise to conclude future global agreements than individuals with lower levels of PE. Importantly, we find that these effects operate via multiple causal pathways. In addition to a direct effect that runs from entitlement to people's attitudes toward international law, we also find that PE influences how people perceive the global status of the United States. This, in turn, then indirectly affects respondent attitudes about international legal structures. In a follow-up study in early 2024 (in which we manipulate people's entitlement levels experimentally), we obtain near-identical results. Taken as a whole, our paper therefore adds to the existing literature on foreign policy attitudes and to scholarship on the attitudinal effects of PE.

The remainder of this article has five sections. First, we discuss previous scholarship on mass attitudes toward international law. Second, we develop a series of testable hypotheses. Third, we describe our survey, the questionnaire used to measure all variables, and we present our empirical results. Fourth, we discuss a follow-up analysis in which we manipulate people's entitlement scores experimentally. The fifth section concludes the paper and discusses avenues for future research.

Previous Research on Mass Attitudes about International Law

Over the course of the past few decades, scholars in IR have made significant progress in the study of mass attitudes toward international law. Across a wide body of research, studies have shown that people's views about participation in global agreements are influenced by a wide range of respondent-level variables. Based on this research, we know that support for international law is higher among liberals than conservatives (Wallace 2013), among the highly educated relative to those with low education levels (Cope and Crabtree 2020),² among civilians relative to veterans (Wallace 2014), and among those who perceive low costs associated with following global agreements (Zvobgo 2019). Finally, party ID has been repeatedly identified as a strong predictor of people's views in this issue area, but the direction of this effect is highly context-dependent. More specifically, Chilton and Versteeg (2016) show that Republicans are less moved by international legal arguments about torture than Democrats. At the same time, Republicans appear to be more receptive to law-based arguments about solitary confinement and aerial combat (Chilton 2014, 2015).

Going beyond surface-level political characteristics, a number of recent studies have found that people's views toward global agreements are also strongly influenced by deep-seated psychological features. In other words, in addition to more easily observable individual-level variables (such as party ID), people's underlying personality traits also strongly influence attitudes in this issue area. For instance, several studies show that people's base propensity to trust strangers has consistent effects on individual-level support for international law. Fair, Kaltenthaler, and Miller (2013) find that citizens “‘who are generally more trusting of other people are [. . .] more accepting of a constraining international regime, such as the NPT, while those who are less trusting [do] not want to be hampered by its strictures’” (p. 126). Similarly, Bayram (2017) shows that policy-makers who score high on cosmopolitanism are significantly more likely to endorse international legal principles than other subjects. Put differently, those who identify with the international community are more likely to support their country's deference to global laws, whereas people with narrower social identity attachments are less likely to do so.

While both social trust and cosmopolitanism have been found to exert positive influences on individual-level support for international law, other character traits have the opposite effect. Justwan et al. (2021) show that SDO—an individual-level difference that describes to what degree a person “desires that one's in-group dominate and be superior to outgroups” (Pratto et al. 1994, 742)—has a significant negative impact on people's attitudes toward costly international rules. Similarly, several studies show that people who score high on nationalism are less likely to favor compliance with global agreements than people with looser ties to their national in-group (Bayram 2017; Simmons 2017; Brutger and Strezhnev 2022). Lastly, Peitz et al. (2018) investigate the relationship between general support toward global governance and RWA. Conceptually, the RWA scale captures how much people tend to (1) submit to authority figures, (2) exhibit aggressive behaviors toward norm violators, and (3) adhere to conventional societal values (Rattazzi, Bobbio, and Canova 2007). The authors show that right-wing authoritarians are significantly less likely to express support for supranational decision-making methods than subjects with low scores on the RWA scale.

Taken as a whole, these findings are important, yet they are not comprehensive. Indeed, the above-mentioned character traits are only a small subset of those personality dimensions that have been found to be politically relevant in previous research on human psychology. Indeed, as we argue below, previous scholarship has yet to explore the impact of PE on mass attitudes about international law. As noted, PE is an individual difference that describes to what extent people feel they deserve or are entitled to more than others. Importantly, it does not necessarily refer to entitlement in the context of any specific situation. Instead, “psychological entitlement is a sense of entitlement that is experienced across situations” (Campbell et al. 2004, 31).

Empirically, PE differs from other personality traits commonly examined in political behavior research. For instance, people's scores on the PE Scale (PES) exhibit little meaningful correlation with traits like extraversion, openness, neuroticism, or conscientiousness (Pryor, Miller, and Gaughan 2008). Furthermore, while individuals with high PES values do often display lower levels of agreeableness, the observed correlations are generally very small (Campbell et al. 2004; Grubbs, Exline, and Campbell 2013; Brunell and Buelow 2018). This suggests that the PES is both conceptually and empirically distinct from other personality frameworks such as the Big Five inventory. More broadly, this implies that the beliefs and behaviors associated with PE are not necessarily tied to the general personality traits contained in the Big Five framework.

Over the course of the past few years, PE has been identified as a strong predictor of people's attitudes, desires, and behaviors in a wide range of contexts. In particular, extant analyses have shown that individuals with high scores on the PES are significantly more likely to seek social status and power in their personal lives (Lange, Redford, and Crusius 2019), more likely to defect in collective action problems (Campbell et al. 2004), less likely to follow instructions (Zitek and Jordan 2019), more likely to act aggressively and selfishly in their social interactions (Campbell et al. 2004; Zitek and Jordan 2021), and more likely to adopt dominant and unethical approaches during negotiations (Neville and Fisk 2019).

Despite this wealth of findings about the attitudinal effects of PE, political science scholarship has yet to explore the impact of this character trait on politically relevant outcome measures. To our knowledge, there are only two recent studies that investigate the impact of entitlement on individual-level policy support: Li (2021), as well as Zitek and Schlund (2021), find that highly entitled subjects are less likely to comply with public health mandates intended to limit the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, given the breadth of the established attitudinal effects discussed above, there are strong reasons to expect that entitlement exerts important influences on a wider range of domestic and international policy preferences. In this paper, we build on existing research in political science and psychology, and we study the link between this individual-level difference and people's attitudes about international law.

PE as Predictor of Foreign Policy Attitudes

Recent survey research suggests that US citizens are generally fairly supportive of international legal principles. This conclusion is consistent with experimental scholarship that finds that international legal clues influence people's substantive policy preferences (Kreps and Wallace 2016; Strezhnev, Simmons, and Kim 2019) as well as recent observational survey research. For instance, Chu (2019) finds that more than half of Americans agree with the statement that the “US should follow international law even if other countries do not.”

At the same time, surveys also demonstrate significant variation in mass attitudes about global agreements. Indeed, both experimental and observational studies find that support for international legal structures is influenced by a wide range of individual-level dispositions and character traits (Bayram 2017; Peitz, Dhont, and Seyd 2018; Brutger and Strezhnev 2022). Our primary contribution in this paper is to explore the effect of PE on people's support for international law. Theoretically, we predict that those at the high end of the entitlement scale will be significantly more skeptical toward international legal frameworks than other people. This expectation is grounded in several different considerations.

First, international law is generally based on the principle that all actors are treated equally (Cohen 2012). While some character traits (such as cosmopolitanism) have been shown to generate support for the idea of “sovereign equality” (Bayram 2017), PE is likely to have the opposite effect. Previous studies show that entitlement causes people to expect special treatment or unearned rewards throughout their daily lives (Campbell et al. 2004). As Zitek and Jordan (2019, 172) point out, “individuals with a higher sense of entitlement [. . .] are more likely to believe they are owed valuable resources or benefits [. . .] regardless of their effort or performance relative to others.” Based on these research findings, we expect highly entitled individuals to reject US commitments to international legal frameworks since they do not want their home country to be held to rules that may potentially be harmful to the interests of its citizens (Li 2021). Relatedly, previous studies show that those high in entitlement also have a particularly pronounced psychological need for autonomy, which leads them to reject demands placed upon them by others (Rose and Anastasio 2014; Zitek and Jordan 2019). Since international law requires countries to (1) give up at least some degree of autonomy and (2) subject themselves to a set of rules heavily influenced by other nations, highly entitled individuals should be less supportive of their home country's submission to international legal frameworks than other subjects.

Second, extant analyses show that those scoring high on PE tend to act more selfishly in social settings and to be less concerned about the lives of others (Li 2021). This leads them to engage in more competitive behaviors during collective action problems (Campbell et al. 2004). These findings should have important implications for people's attitudes toward international law. Since entitled people are less concerned with the fates of others, those who score highly on this character trait are unlikely to consider how the United States’ commitment to international law contributes to the global political order or how it can potentially affect the lives of citizens from other countries. For instance, the 1967 protocol to the 1951 Refugee Convention prohibits discrimination against refugees on the basis of nationality (Strezhnev, Simmons, and Kim 2019). Thus, Washington's membership in this treaty has had concrete benefits for a particularly vulnerable group of people outside of the United States' borders. Theoretically, we expect that these types of considerations should be less salient to people scoring high on PE. Taken as a whole, the above discussion motivates our first hypothesis.

 

Above, we have argued that PE will increase individual-level opposition to international law. Going beyond this baseline expectation, we further predict that at least some of this effect runs through one specific causal channel: US exceptionalism. More explicitly, we anticipate that PE influences people's views on the principle of US exceptionalism. This, in turn, should influence mass attitudes toward international legal frameworks.

US exceptionalism is the idea that “the United States is a singular country, one that is superior [. . .] among the countries of the world” (Gilmore and Rowling 2018, 48). Empirical research on foreign policy attitudes has demonstrated that notions of US exceptionalism have important effects on foreign policy attitudes. Most relevant for our present purposes, Gilmore (2015) finds that individuals who score highly on US exceptionalism are significantly more likely to indicate that the country should be exempt from international rules than other subjects. As the author notes, “because the United States is perceived to have a special mission on earth that it shares with no other country, many conclude that it should not be hindered by the rules and laws that govern other countries in the world” (p. 307).

PE should be an important predictor of perceived US exceptionalism. At the micro level, entitled people tend to think of themselves as being higher in status and prestige than other individuals (Campbell et al. 2004). Theoretically, this should also translate to citizen-evaluations of their own country. In addition to being perceived status holders, entitled subjects have also been shown to be status-seekers (Lange, Redford, and Crusius 2019). As Hammond et al. (2014) point out, “psychological entitlement [. . .] manifest[s] in efforts to gain esteem, status, and resources.” Given that that the evaluation of one's national in-group is an important source of self-esteem (Gilmore 2015), those scoring highly on entitlement are likely to attribute a particularly high global standing to their home country. Simply put: if people have a built-in psychological bias to ascribe themselves high status or prestige, they are likely to adopt similar considerations to their most salient social identity groups. Previous studies in psychology provide evidence for this claim. As Endevelt et al. (2021) show, PE at the individual level is strongly associated with the sense that one's national in-group “is entitled and deserving, regardless of specific situations and not in comparison to any other concrete group” (p. 352). This, in turn, has been demonstrated to influence status assessments of people's home countries in global affairs (Cai and Gries 2013). Thus, our theoretical expectations are in line with previous studies in the field of psychology.

The above discussion motivates the following two theoretical expectations. Considered jointly, Hypotheses 2 and 3 posit an indirect effect of PE on support for international law that is mediated by support for the principle of US exceptionalism.

  

Data and Methods

Here, we evaluate these three hypotheses using two modes of analysis. First, we conducted a representative survey to examine the impact of PE on support for international law. Our observational analysis (described in greater detail below) isolates the impact of PE by controlling for variables known to influence people's preferences. Specifically, we control for individuals' levels of militant internationalism, cooperative internationalism, and isolationism, as these dispositions shape how people in the United States perceive global issues. Additionally, we include two control variables to measure social identity attachments: nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Finally, we account for a standard set of demographic control variables. We use a set of structural equation models to establish the relationship between PE and support for international law and to determine the relative strength of that relationship compared to other factors.

Second, we conducted a follow-up study in the form of an experiment, where we directly manipulated entitlement before measuring attitudes about international law. This experiment serves two related purposes. First, it addresses the limitation of our initial survey, which cannot establish a causal relationship between people's entitlement scores and their preferences on international law, making this manipulation necessary. Additionally, as noted earlier, entitlement-based political rhetoric may undermine support for international law by convincing individuals that they deserve a better deal. We explore the conditions under which entitlement-based political rhetoric might undermine support for international law. This involves examining two key issues through our experiment: (1) whether entitlement can be “manufactured” by prompting individuals to think about specific reasons why they believe they deserve more than others, and (2) whether, once manufactured, this entitlement has a similar impact on attitudes toward international law as suggested by our observational survey.

Data Collection and Dependent Variables

In the following observational study, we rely on original survey data collected in June 2021. Partnering with Qualtrics, we recruited 2,710 respondents for a study on “Foreign Policy Attitudes.” As demonstrated in Online Appendix E, our final sample matches the US population distribution on six major dimensions: age, gender, income, education, race, and Census region. Before launching the survey, we obtained IRB exemption from our respective institutions.

In order to operationalize our dependent variable, we rely on two separate measures. This allows us to put our empirical analysis on a broad foundation. First, we employ a survey item that asks respondents how much they personally agree that “the United States should obey international law even if it goes against its own interests.” Answer options ranged from (1) not strongly at all to (5) extremely strongly. This question has been used in previous scholarship as a measure of general respect for established international law (Bayram and Graham 2015). Second, we also asked our survey-takers how much they agreed or disagreed that the United States should “take into account the interests of its allies even if that results in making compromises with them.” Here, individuals could place themselves on a five-point scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree. While this question does not directly capture people's views about existing legal obligations, it taps into the psychological mindset necessary for the conclusion of future agreements. In other words, since compromise is an important precondition for the successful negotiation of international treaties, this item allows us to evaluate people's views about the establishment of new rules that put constraints on US power.

Both items discussed above gauge individual-level views toward international law, and they share a notable feature. Rather than merely assessing people's general inclinations toward global agreements, they evaluate how respondents view international law in the context of potential costs. As noted, the “Respect for International Law”-variable specifically probes whether respondents think their country should obey global rules even if they conflict with US interests. Likewise, our variable that captures support for compromise with allies assesses to what extent people believe that the United States should take allied interests into account even if that results in potentially costly concessions. As such, these items go beyond some of the more general survey questions in the literature that capture people's general views toward global agreements without referencing potential costs (e.g., Kertzer et al. 2014; Gravelle, Reifler, and Scotto 2017).

Exogenous and Mediator Variables

Our main independent variable is a given respondent's level of PE. In order to capture this concept, we rely on the PES developed and validated by Campbell et al. (2004). The PES is the most widely used instrument to capture people's scores on this personality dimension (Campbell et al. 2004; Neville and Fisk 2019). Respondents are asked to indicate their level of agreement with nine different statements on a seven-point scale. Example items are “I honestly feel I'm just more deserving than others,” “People like me deserve an extra break now and then,” and “Great things should come to me.” The full list of survey items that are part of the PES is provided in Online Appendix A. We performed principle-component factor analysis and estimated one latent scale to be used in the subsequent statistical analysis. Details are presented in Online Appendix C. Higher scores on this latent construct correspond with higher levels of PE for a given individual.

According to our theoretical framework, we hypothesize that people's PES scores should influence how much they believe in US exceptionalism. According to Hypothesis 2, these sentiments should then also affect attitudes about international law. Expressed in more formal terms, we expect an indirect effect of PE on attitudes about international law that is mediated by individual-level views on US exceptionalism. We measured this mediator variable by asking respondents which of the following two views comes closer to their own: “the United States has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world” (54.7 percent) or “every country is unique, and the United States is no greater than other nations” (45.3 percent). This survey question constitutes a widely used measure for the concept of US exceptionalism (Brooks 2013; Forsythe and McMahon 2017).

The following statistical analysis also accounts for other individual-level predictors that have been demonstrated to influence mass attitudes toward international law. To begin, we control for people's levels of militant internationalism, cooperative internationalism, and isolationism. These concepts represent general frameworks that have been shown to inform how voters in the United States think about global events (Kertzer et al. 2014).

Militant internationalism captures “beliefs about willingness to meet the world with a clenched fist” (Rathbun et al. 2016, 125). More formally, people who score high on this dimension tend to hold more hawkish, assertive, and hardline attitudes. Those with high MI values favor robust defensive capabilities for their nation, and they believe that military force is the primary way to achieve goals in the international arena.

Cooperative internationalism, by contrast, is a perspective on global politics according to which cooperation between nations leads to mutual gains. As such, people who score high on CI tend to support “working through international organizations such as the United Nations, working with allies, the pursuit of global leadership through building international consensus, and an emphasis on diplomacy [. . .]” (Gravelle, Reifler, and Scotto 2017, 767). Importantly, CI is conceptually distinct from both of our dependent variables. It refers to people's general inclinations toward international institutions and multilateralism (Kertzer et al. 2014). By contrast, the dependent variables in our paper go beyond this notion, since they tap into someone's willingness to commit to international legal frameworks even if they bring clear costs to their country. As such, cooperative internationalism is a likely predictor of (rather than a synonym for) costly deference to international legal frameworks.

Lastly, isolationism refers to a general tendency to support global disengagement. As such, individuals scoring high on this dimension often times reject US participation in international institutions and multilateral agreements (Kertzer et al. 2014) and they prefer to avoid meaningful engagement with other countries (Gravelle, Reifler, and Scotto 2017).

We measure these concepts with a series of eight survey items in which respondents are asked to indicate their level of agreement on a five-point scale (ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree). This approach follows previous scholarship on foreign policy attitudes (Rathbun et al. 2016). For instance, the questions used to capture cooperative internationalism are “the United States needs to cooperate more with the United Nations,” “the United States should contribute forces to international peace-keeping efforts,” and “it is essential for the United States to work with other nations to solve problems such as over-population, hunger, and pollution.” The full list of questions can be found in Online Appendix Section A. We conducted a principal-component factor analysis with promax rotation, which indicated that responses to all eight items indeed group into three latent dimensions: militant internationalism, cooperative internationalism,³ and isolationism. More details about this procedure are provided in Online Appendix Section D.

Next, we also include two control variables that tap into people's social identity attachments. Previous studies suggest that individuals with high levels of nationalism are particularly sensitive to the costs of international cooperation. As a result, we also expect subjects who score highly on this dimension to be skeptical of international law. We measure nationalism with a standard survey question from the literature (Bayram 2017). In particular, respondents are asked: “When someone says something bad about the American people, how strongly do you feel it is as if they said something bad about you?” Answer options range from (1) not strongly at all to (4) very strongly. While attachment to the nation should lead to less support for international law, cosmopolitan social identity should have the opposite effect. Past studies suggest that those with strong emotional ties to the international community are significantly more likely to support global legal frameworks than individuals with narrower social identity attachments (Justwan et al. 2021). In order to measure cosmopolitanism, we follow existing studies by asking respondents how much they agree that they see themselves as “citizens of the world.”

Lastly, we also account for a standard set of demographic control variables: age, gender (male 1/0), education, income, ideology, race (White 1/0), ethnicity (Hispanic 1/0), and party ID. All survey questions can be found in Online Appendix A. Descriptive Statistics for all variables are provided in Online Appendix B.

Analysis of Observational Survey Results

We use a series of structural equation models to test for both direct and indirect effects.⁴ Calculations were performed using STATA 14. We start by discussing the results for our first dependent variable (respect for international law). Results from Model 1 are summarized in table 1. Our main findings are visualized in figure 1.

Our data suggest that US exceptionalism has a negative association with people's views toward international legal obligations. The coefficient for this variable is negative and statistically significant (p < 0.05), which suggests that individuals who consider the United States to be superior to other countries are less likely to agree that “the United States should obey international law even if it goes against its own interests.” This finding is in line with Hypothesis 1. Focusing on our main independent variable (PE), we find that those who fall at the high end of this metric also tend to harbor much more skeptical views toward international law than individuals who score low on this character trait. Expressed more formally, our data analysis demonstrates that there is a direct negative association of entitlement with respect for international law (p < 0.05). Lastly, Model 1 shows that entitlement also influences people's views on US exceptionalism.

As predicted by Hypothesis 2, respondents at the high end of the entitlement scale are significantly more likely to believe that the United States is superior to other nations than respondents with lower scores on our primary independent variable (p < 0.01). Taken as a whole, these findings imply that there is also an indirect effect of PE on support for international law that is mediated by US exceptionalism. The estimated size of this indirect effect is −0.006. This corresponds to about 11.4 percent of the total entitlement effect on our dependent variable (β = −0.053). Taken as a whole, Model 1 provides strong and consistent support for our theoretical framework.

In the next step, we investigate to what extent entitlement influences people's views about the establishment of new global rules that put constraints on US power. Broadly speaking, our results are similar to the ones reported above. In Model 2 (summarized in table 2 and figure 2), we find that individuals who score high on US exceptionalism are less likely to agree that the United States should “take into account the interests of its allies even if that results in making compromises with them” than other respondents (p < 0.01). Likewise, highly entitled subjects are also less willing to compromise with partner nations than individuals who score low on this dimension (p < 0.01).

In addition to this direct association between PE and attitudes toward compromise with allies, we also find evidence for an indirect effect. Similar to above, our path model reveals that entitled individuals are significantly more likely to consider the United States as “the greatest country in the world” (p < 0.01). Statistically, this corresponds to an indirect effect of −0.004 (p < 0.05). Taken as a whole, Models 1 and 2 provide strong evidence for our theoretical framework, and they demonstrate that PE shapes people's views about international law.

Discussion of Control Variables

How big are the effects of our main variables of interest relative to other common predictors of US attitudes toward international law? In order to investigate this question, we calculated standardized effect sizes for a number of predictors that have been previously identified as important influences on foreign policy attitudes (Kertzer et al. 2014; Rathbun et al. 2016). Results are summarized in table 3. Taking all causal pathways into account, the total effect of PE is 0.05 (respect for international law) and 0.08 (support for compromise with allies).⁵ The corresponding estimates for US exceptionalism are −0.06 (respect for international law) and −0.06 (support for compromise with allies). As such, the substantive impact of our two primary variables of interest is similar to other correlates that have been shown to predict mass attitudes in this issue area. The standardized effect of nationalism on respect for international law, for instance, is –0.07. Similarly, militant internationalism has estimated effects of −0.09 (respect for international law) and 0.05 (support for compromise with allies). Finally, Model 2 also shows that individuals who score high on isolationism are less supportive of international law than other people. In particular, the influence of this variable on support for compromise with allies is −0.08 (but it is statistically insignificant for our dependent variable that captures respect for existing international agreements).

The three biggest associations in our statistical models belong to ideology, cosmopolitanism, and cooperative internationalism. Substantively, cooperative internationalists are considerably more willing to submit their country to global legal frameworks. The calculated effect sizes are 0.28 (respect for international law) and 0.26 (support for compromise with allies), respectively. With regard to ideology, we find that conservatives are less supportive of international law than their liberal counterparts. The standardized estimates for this variable are −0.15 (respect for international law) and −0.10 (compromise with allies). Lastly, Models 1 and 2 suggest that cosmopolitanism has a positive effect on people's attitudes toward global agreements. In particular, the calculated impact of this character trait on both dependent variables is 0.12. Taken as a whole, the findings for our control variables mirror those of previous studies in international relations (Rathbun et al. 2016; Bayram 2017; Justwan et al. 2021).

Experimental Evidence

Research Design

As noted, Models 1 and 2 provide consistent support for our theoretical framework. Still, the analyses presented above are not without weaknesses. Most importantly, our structural equation models cannot conclusively determine whether people's entitlement scores are truly causally related to mass attitudes about international law. Instead, it is possible that our path models only pick up various empirical associations between our variables of interest.

In order to assess whether the above-described effects of PE on attitudes toward international law are not merely correlational but causal, we conducted a follow-up study in early 2024 (February 8–18). More specifically, we partnered with Prolific Academic, and we collected a dataset of 2,308 survey responses balanced by age, gender, and political orientation. In this survey, we experimentally manipulated PE using an approach developed by Zitek and Vincent (2015). Respondents in the “high entitlement”-condition were asked to provide one reason for why they (1) should demand the best in life, (2) deserve more than others, and (3) should get their way in life. By contrast, in the “low entitlement”-condition, subjects were asked to list one reason each for why they (1) should not demand the best in life, (2) do not deserve more than others, and (3) should not expect to get their own way in life.⁶

It is important to note that the goal of this experimental setup is not to assess the effectiveness of a given stimulus relative to a neutral control condition. Instead, the purpose behind Zitek and Vincent's (2015) research design is to ensure that survey takers in both experimental conditions differ in their level of PE. While this methodology makes it impossible to evaluate if any potential between-group differences are caused by entitlement increases or decreases relative to a base condition, the approach described above maximizes the probability that subjects exhibit variation on the main psychological concept of interest.

Following the experimental manipulation, individuals were prompted to complete the PES (discussed above). Here too, we performed principle-component factor analysis, and we estimated one latent scale to be used in the subsequent statistical analysis.⁷

In order to capture our dependent variables, we asked respondents whether they believed that “the United States has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world” (45.0 percent) or whether “every country is unique, and the United States is no greater than other nations” (55.0 percent). Furthermore, survey-takers indicated their agreement with the statements that (1) “the United States should obey international law even if it goes against its own interests” and (2) “the United States should take into account the interests of its allies even if that results in making compromises with them.” For both items, answer options ranged from (1) not strongly at all to (5) extremely strongly. The survey concluded with a standard set of socio-demographic questions. The survey questionnaire from this study, as well as descriptive statistics, can be found in the Online Appendix (Sections G and H).

Analysis of Experimental Survey Results

To begin our empirical analysis, we perform a manipulation check, and we compare average entitlement scores across our two experimental conditions. Results are shown in figure 3 (Panel A). In the low-entitlement condition, the mean PES value is 2.29 (on a scale from 1 to 4). By contrast, the corresponding value in the high-entitlement condition is significantly higher (2.75). These findings show that our experimental manipulation had a significant effect on subjects’ responses to the items on the PES scale. In other words, while our study is not a direct test of the impact of populist rhetoric, this experiment confirms that PE can be manipulated by simply prompting individuals to consider why they deserve more. To the extent that entitlement-based political rhetoric similarly frames individuals' perceptions of their deservingness, our results suggest that ideologies like populism not only affirm individual entitlement but, more importantly, demonstrate that entitlement can be actively manufactured.

Next, we perform a direct test of Hypothesis 2, and we evaluate whether our treatment also influenced people's views on US exceptionalism. Results are summarized in Panel B of figure 3. In line with our theoretical framework, we find that those in the high-entitlement condition are significantly more likely to agree that the “United States is the greatest country in the world” than other respondents. In particular, the proportion of survey-takers who agree with this statement increases from 41 percent in the low-entitlement group to 46 percent in the high-entitlement condition (p < 0.05). This shows that our experimental manipulation had a significant effect on individual-level perceptions about the global status of the United States. Simply put, asking people to reflect on reasons why they deserve more than others does not only affect their self-perceptions but also how they view their own country.

According to Hypothesis 3, respondents who endorse the principle of US exceptionalism should be less likely to support international law than other subjects. In order to test this proposition, we run two linear regression analyses in which our dependent variables are the two items that capture people's support for global agreements and compromise with allies. The main independent variable in these models is individual-level perceptions about US exceptionalism. We control for the same concepts that were part of our observational analysis discussed above. Results are provided in table 4.

In line with our theoretical prediction, we find that subjects who consider the United States to be the greatest country in the world are significantly less likely to agree that the United States should obey international law than other subjects. Substantively, the regression coefficient in Model 3 suggests that respondents who agree with the notion of US exceptionalism tend to score 0.35 points lower on the variable that captures Respect for International Law than other subjects. The results in Model 4 are roughly similar. Here, our analysis suggests that US exceptionalism is also associated with less support for compromise with allies. Substantively, people who score a “1” on our main predictor fall about 0.28 points lower on this second outcome variable than other subjects. Taken as a whole, these findings provide consistent support for Hypothesis 3.

So far, we have shown that our experimental manipulation has a significant effect on people's views toward US exceptionalism. Furthermore, Models 3 and 4 suggest that respondents who believe in the principle of US exceptionalism are also significantly less likely to support costly deference to international law and compromise with allies. Taken as a whole, these findings imply an indirect effect of entitlement on US attitudes about international law that runs through perceptions of US exceptionalism. In the Online Appendix (Section J), we present results from two causal mediation analyses (Tingley et al. 2014) which corroborate this interpretation of our experimental data. In order to evaluate the substantive effect of our experimental manipulation, we calculate average treatment effects of our experimental manipulation on both dependent variables (see figure 4).

In Panel A, we see that respondents in the “low entitlement”-condition are more likely to agree that the United States “should obey international law even if it goes against its own interests” than subjects in the “high entitlement”-group. Substantively, the average level of support for this statement is 3.18 (on a scale from 1 to 5) for subjects who were told to reflect on reasons why they do not deserve more than others. By contrast, individuals who considered reasons why they should receive unearned rewards score somewhat lower on this variable (3.06). This effect, while small in substantive terms, is statistically significant (p < 0.05) and it further shows that entitlement affects people's views toward international law (Hypothesis 1). Thus, once manufactured, ideologically induced entitlement undermines support for international law in a manner consistent with previously internalized entitlement beliefs.

In Panel B, we compare respondent scores on Support for Compromise with Allies. Here, we find no statistical difference between both experimental conditions. While the mean value in the “high entitlement”-condition (3.28) is slightly lower than the corresponding value in the “low entitlement”-group (3.31), this difference does not meet conventional levels of statistical significance (p = 0.58). This suggests that the substantive magnitude of the indirect entitlement effect discussed above is much more limited for this outcome variable. This finding is not surprising. In Models 3 and 4, we find that the link between US exceptionalism and Support for Compromise with Allies is substantially weaker than the connection between US exceptionalism and Respect for International Law. As a result, a much smaller fraction of our experimental treatment gets channeled to people's attitudes about concessions to partner nations.⁸ Overall, this indicates that the impact of entitlement on attitudes toward allies is relatively minor compared to its influence on respect for existing international agreements.

Conclusion

The main goal of this study was to investigate the impact of PE on people's views toward international law. Based on existing research in Psychology, we predicted that those with high scores on the PES should be significantly less supportive of international legal arrangement than individuals with low values on the same dimension. Furthermore, we expected that at least some of this effect would be channeled through people's views on US Exceptionalism.

Our data analysis is based on an original online survey conducted in June 2021. Our models provide consistent support for our theoretical framework. We show that entitled individuals are significantly less likely to support (1) the United States’ commitment to existing legal obligations and (2) negotiated compromise to conclude future global agreements. Furthermore, our path model demonstrates that this effect is partially mediated by perceived US exceptionalism. Expressed more formally, our models show that PE has both a direct and an indirect effect on individual-level support for international law. These findings are similar to the ones we obtain in an experimental follow-up analysis in early 2024. Here too, we find that entitlement influences respondent attitudes about international law largely through its effect on perceived US exceptionalism.

Taken as a whole, our study makes a number of important contributions to the existing literature. First, we show that PE is not only an important predictor of behaviors in people's social lives (Campbell et al. 2004; Neville and Fisk 2019) but also a significant influence on political attitudes in the United States. As such, this paper formally introduces a novel and important individual-level characteristic to the field of political science. We hope that future research will build on our work and investigate the impact of this character trait on other politically relevant attitudes. Indeed, it is likely that highly entitled subjects will also exhibit different domestic policy preferences than other individuals. Moving forward, scholars should investigate the impact of this variable on support for various redistributive policies. For instance, given that entitled individuals expect special treatment or unearned rewards throughout their daily lives, it is possible that they also hold distinct preferences on matters regarding taxation or government spending.

Second, we build on existing work about people's attitudes toward international legal structures. Past research has demonstrated that foreign policy executives can effectively rely on legal arguments to shift people's views on various political questions (M.M. Kreps and Wallace 2016; Lee and Prather 2020). At the same time, individual-level receptiveness to such cues differs across a wide range of socio-demographic characteristics (Wallace 2014; Chilton and Versteeg 2016). Given our research findings, subsequent work should investigate to what extent perceived US exceptionalism moderates the effect of international legal cues on people's policy preferences. Based on our theoretical framework, we would expect that those who ascribe particularly high status or prestige to their home country should be less responsive to arguments grounded in international law than other individuals.

Third, with respect to scholarship on populism and foreign policy, many scholars are attempting to disentangle populism from other identity group-based sentiments as independent threats to international legal and institutional structures (e.g., Copelovitch and Peavehouse Copelovitch and Peavehouse 2019). Our research suggests, by contrast, that these two dynamics are at least partially linked through the concept of PE in ways that deserve greater attention. Most critically, our experiment demonstrates that PE can be elicited directly by focusing people on the reasons why they should expect more. This strongly suggests that any political discourse that elicits entitlement thinking undermines support for international legal commitments both directly and through perceptions of US exceptionalism.

Taken as a whole, our research demonstrates the corrosive impact of PE on support for international law. One clear implication for policymakers seeking to build domestic support for new initiatives is to avoid entitlement framing whenever possible. Entitlement-based rhetoric is not confined to populism. Common phrases used by political leaders across the spectrum—such as calling America “the leader of the free world” or the “defender of democracy”—suggest that the United States deserves special treatment from international partners and the global community. In addition, when addressing long-term issues like climate change, appeals to protect future generations are unlikely to resonate with those who score high in PE or have been influenced by entitlement rhetoric. Such individuals, who believe they are more deserving than others, are unlikely to be swayed by arguments that stress the need to make sacrifices for future, unborn citizens. It remains an open question as to what extent entrenched elements of American political discourse hinder efforts to mobilize support for new initiatives, and how leaders might effectively engage entitled citizens in addressing long-term challenges.

Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion of limitations which provide additional avenues for future research. To begin, our study only investigated support for international law in the abstract. However, it is possible that entitlement has a more nuanced effect on individual-level attitudes across different types of international agreements. For example, additional research should explore whether escape clauses or veto rights make global commitments more palatable to highly entitled citizens and whether this effect varies across different issue areas. Furthermore, our questionnaire did not allow us to probe deeper about why some of our survey respondents consider the United States to be politically exceptional. However, recent research suggests that perceived national exceptionalism can be a multi-dimensional concept (Gilmore 2015). We thus have to leave it to other scholars to investigate what specific aspect of the United States’ global status is affected by people's level of PE. Lastly, given the single-country focus of our survey, the generalizability of our findings is a somewhat open question. While we do not have any ex ante reasons to expect that the effect of entitlement on foreign policy attitudes would differ according to the national context, we do hope that similar studies on the nexus of entitlement and foreign policy attitudes be conducted in other countries and social contexts. As such, the political consequences of this individual-level character trait are a fruitful ground for future research.

Author Biography

Florian Justwan (corresponding author) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Idaho. His core research agenda is devoted to the study of attitudes toward international conflict and international law.

Jeffrey D. Berejikian is a Professor of International Affairs and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on decision-making in security and foreign policy.

Shawn Mazdeyasnan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science & International Affairs at the University of Georgia. His research centers on civil conflict, political violence, human rights, human security, and foreign policy issues.

Notes

Authors Note: The authors would like to thank Christopher Fettweis and the anonymous reviewers at Foreign Policy Analysis for their feedback and suggestions. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2023 Meeting of the International Studies Association.

Funding

This project was funded by a University of Idaho, College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences, Humanities Excellence Endowment as well as the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs.

Footnotes

References