One of the more common sights in the cramped itinerary of heads of state are foreign visits to burnish relationships with friends and rivals.  While these visits are often highly publicized and especially valued for the status they bring to smaller states, do they actually influence domestic policy?

That was the question posed by new research from Dartmouth, which explored how such visits affected public approval in the host country and found a significant positive impact.

“Bilateral meetings provide world leaders with a forum to talk about the real issues; yet, a visiting national leader will also often spend a significant amount of time on image building, as the visiting country strives to improve its image around the world,” the researchers say.  “The simple fact that time and money is allocated for image-building activities as part of these high-level visits suggests that many countries actually think that these public diplomacy campaigns matter.”

On display

The researchers examined visits by 15 leaders from 9 countries (US, UK, Russia, India, Japan, Germany, China, and Canada) over an 11 year period between 2008 and 2018.  The researchers combined data on the high-level visits with that from the Gallup World Poll on public opinion in the days leading up to the visit and immediately after it.

The analysis reveals that public approval of the visiting leader grows by around 2.3% after a foreign visit.  What’s more, this boost endures for around two and a half weeks, and is especially pronounced when the visit, and the various diplomatic events it entails, is covered by the media.

This boost is especially strong when the leader takes their diplomatic trip in their first year in office, which the researchers refer to as a “soft-power honeymoon period”.  During this period, the boost is roughly twice that of a leader who has been in office for five years or more.

Leadership dividend

What’s more, the boost seems to be far stronger for the visiting leader than for the host leader, which suggests there is no “coattail” effect whereby the host leader gains from the popularity of their visitor.

“Our results suggest that ‘soft power,’ a term coined by Joseph Nye referring to a country’s ability to influence international outcomes by attraction and persuasion rather than by coercion or payment, can impact foreign public opinion,” the researchers say.

Interestingly, the researchers found no real impact of the “hard power”, or military power, balance between the two countries, which the researchers believe illustrates the importance of soft power and the fact that these diplomatic trips should not be dismissed quite so easily as worthless pantomime.