Framing Unpopular Foreign Policies

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Abstract
How can governments implement foreign economic policies that are popular among political elites but unpopular among their voters? Studying international financial rescues, we argue that governments strategically frame policies in an attempt to minimize their expected political costs, which increases their ability to implement those policies successfully. We theorize that framing strategies allow governments to offer financial bailouts, and we test the resulting hypotheses using an integrative mixed‐methods approach. We trace the underlying causal mechanism of our argument with a typical case study of the U.S. bailout of Mexico during the 1995 peso crisis, test whether a credible threat of migration increases the likelihood of bailouts using an original data set of bailouts by 36 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries to 108 crisis countries over a span of 40 years and analyze a central assumption of our theory with a survey experiment on over 3,000 U.S. residents.

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