How do alliances trade arms? Political alliance networks and global arms transfers.

The arms trade has come to the center stage of the international political economy. Yet only a few quantitative studies have been conducted on the political economy of the arms trade. This paper focuses on the security rents shared by trading partners in determining their arms trade relationship. We argue that the mechanism of reciprocity is better understood from the perspective of an international alliance network. Because the rents are likely to be transferred to other related members in a community, when a state is engaged in an arms deal with another state, it takes into account not only the direct dyadic relationship but also the alliance community to which the other state belongs. Based on this understanding, we employ social network analysis (SNA) to identify the effect of the international alliance community on the arms trade. Our findings suggest that if two states have a tie in a political alliance network, they are also likely to have a tie in the arms sale network. Moreover, we also find that the alliance network is a strong predictor of bilateral arms sales. Being in the same alliance community encourages two states to trade more arms with each other.

WHO approves? Relative trust, the WHO, and China's COVID-19 vaccines.

This paper aims to answer a general question: whether an international organization (IO) is able to shape public opinion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, countries across the globe have switched gear from prevention to vaccination. Most had to not only secure a sufficient supply of vaccines, but also to curb vaccine hesitancy among their populations. Can endorsement by an international organization like the World Health Organization (WHO) enhance a vaccine's acceptability? Based on a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan, our study leverages the special relationship between China and Taiwan to show that WHO endorsement can induce acceptance of Chinese vaccines among Taiwanese people. However, the effect is found to be contextual in the sense that it only works when people's trust in the WHO is higher than their trust in the vaccine's country of origin. Our study not only contributes to the literature of IO legitimacy by empirically showing IOs' causal effects on public opinion, but also sheds light on how a vaccine's credibility can be enhanced to promote vaccination uptake. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11558-022-09481-1.

Ambiguity and self-protection: evidence from social distancing under the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper studies how people make decisions over preventive behaviors under ambiguity (i.e., Knightian uncertainty) where they do not even know the probability of a loss. In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, scientific uncertainty makes it hard to evaluate not only whether one will be infected, but also probabilities such as the infection rate. We constructed a simple model and demonstrated how its effect was heterogeneous depending on ambiguity-attitudes. Motivated by the model, we further conducted a survey experiment in Japan where we manipulated the information regarding scientific uncertainty on COVID-19. We found that higher ambiguity induced by scientific uncertainty increased the level of social distancing among ambiguity-loving people, but such evidence was nonexistent for ambiguity-averse counterparts. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42973-022-00120-3.

Vaccine nationalism among the public: A cross-country experimental evidence of own-country bias towards COVID-19 vaccination.

What types of vaccines are citizens most likely to accept? We argue that citizens' identification with their nation may lead them to prefer vaccines developed and produced within their national borders, to the exclusion and/or detriment of vaccines from other nations. We administered a conjoint experiment requesting 15,000 adult citizens across 14 individual countries from around the world to assess 450,000 profiles of vaccines that randomly varied on seven attributes. Beyond vaccine fundamentals such as efficacy rate, number of doses, and duration of the protection, we find that citizens systematically favor vaccines developed and produced in their own country of residence. The extent of preference in favor of vaccines developed and produced within the national borders is particularly large among citizens who identify more strongly with their nation, suggesting nationalism plays a role in explaining the bias in favor of vaccines developed and produced locally. This public opinion bias on vaccine preferences has significant theoretical and practical implications.

Political ideology predicts preventative behaviors and infections amid COVID-19 in democracies.

Can one's political ideology predict his or her testing positive for COVID-19 and how? The present study leveraged a recent (April-May 2020) survey of 27,260 individuals across 27 democracies to investigate the associations between political ideology and coronavirus infections. Our individual-level data and mediation analyses allow us to tease out different correlational paths according to which one's political ideology affects his or her infection. We found a more right-leaning attitude to be associated with a higher probability of testing positive both directly and indirectly through conspiracy theory beliefs and physical distancing. Moreover, our cross-national investigation also found that becoming more right-leaning in ideology was associated with a higher level of perceived risk of COVID-19 infection, which made one less likely to test positive. Combined, we provide a more nuanced understanding of the role played by political ideology in the current pandemic, on which the design of a more effective risk communication strategy can be based.

Citizen journalism reduces the credibility deficit of authoritarian government in risk communication amid COVID-19 outbreaks.

During the outbreak of an epidemic, the success in risk communications to make the public comply with disease preventive measures depends on the public's trust in the government. In this study, we aim to understand how media audiences update their trust in the government during the COVID-19 outbreak depending on the information they received. We conducted an online survey experiment in February 2020 in Hong Kong (n = 1,016) in which respondents were randomly provided with a government press release and an endorsement either from an official or a non-official source. This study shows that the information from a non-official source enhances the credibility of official government messages. Our findings imply that dictators can actually "borrow credibility" from their citizen journalists and even nondemocratic leaders can make themselves more trustworthy to potential dissenters through citizen journalism. Allowing information flow from non-official sources can be a practical measure for governments to address the problem of a credibility deficit during a pandemic.