Threat perception, reciprocity, and Foreign-Policy preferences: a two-stage conjoint experiment on reactive foreign policy attitudes across five continents.

This paper investigates how citizens form foreign-policy preferences when confronted with actions taken by other states. We field a two-stage survey experiment in April 2025 on representative samples in Brazil, Nigeria, Italy, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. In a first randomized scenario-setting module, respondents are informed about a target country’s internal political practices, defence posture, and trade behaviour. Then, in the following conjoint module, respondents choose preferred responses across trade, industrial, and military instruments. Across countries, reactive preferences are shaped primarily by reciprocity—support rises for punitive measures when the target imposes restrictions—and, importantly, by pre-existing attitudes toward the target country (recorded earlier in the survey). Our preliminary results show that, differently from many policy-related conjoint experiments, which typically show that policy features are more important – in their direct effects – than many pre-existing attitudes, when it comes to foreign policy pre-existing perceptions of friendship or enmity associated with other countries play a fundamental role in shaping mass foreign-policy attitudes, along with the perceived symmetry of actions