Dissertation

My dissertation comprises three papers which explore questions related to countries’ quest for international prestige. In the first, I use a formal model to examine the implications of the prestige motive on countries’ response to emergencies. The second uses a survey experiment to test whether “prestige projects” interact with racial cues to affect how effective such projects are at changing public perception of a country’s prestige. In the third paper, I use computational text analysis to examine the impact of a strategy some foreign governments use to increase their international prestige: funding US based think tanks. My committee comprises a group of scholars with diverse methodological and substantive expertise and interests: Austin Carson (chair), Rochelle Terman, Molly Offer-Westort, and Zhaotian Luo.