As a part of the project, I completed a large-scale survey on a sample of over 1600 respondents in the United States. In this survey, I implemented two experiments. The first experiment aims to explore if international organizations (IOs) suffer audience costs when they break their promises and whether the populist dispositions of the individuals moderate the size of audience costs. Audience cost theory concurs that democratic leaders face higher domestic political costs if they escalate a foreign policy crisis and subsequently back down. Though extensive literature examines its effects on leaders who renege on their threats, no research has studied if audience costs could be generated vis-à-vis IOs. The second experiment was implemented to investigate citizen support for aid conditionality in donor countries. More specifically, I analyzed if governance problems (i.e., corruption, human rights violations, environmental policies) or certain economic and political policy decisions of the recipient country that clash with the interests of the donor trigger support for the use of positive conditionality (rewarding recipient country in exchange of policy changes) or negative conditionality (punishing recipient country until it addresses problematic policies). Second, I explored how specific country characteristics, namely its regime type, development level, and trade ties with the donor, moderate support for aid conditionality. My theoretical expectation was that support for conditional aid is higher than unconditional aid. Second, however, recipient country characteristics significantly moderate support for aid conditionality. Specifically, if the recipient country is a democracy and has close political and economic ties, support for aid conditionality and aid-tying practices would be significantly lower.

Currently, I am in the process of finalizing data analysis for the first experiment and writing a research paper for the second experiment. Additionally, I hope to turn both projects into a comparative study by conducting similar experiments in other major countries, especially Japan. To do that, I will seek additional funding -such as KAKENHI-, and explore avenues for collaboration with other researchers.