New research on the effect of nuclear threats in news on leader popularity

Since 2019, the most important research project of mine has been about media coverage of North Korea and Iran’s nuclear threats and its political implications. I started this project in 2019 with Elad Segev (Tel Aviv) and Atushi Tago (Waseda) supported by a Japanese funding agency. We have analyzed how Japanese (Asahi and Yomiuri) and Israeli (Haaretz and Yedioth) newspapers covered North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs between 2009 and 2018 in terms of how liberal and conservative outlets emphasize the threats. We have also conducted online survey experiments in Japan and Israel to understand the effects of such media coverage on leaders popularity. Throughout our study period, both Japanese and Israeli governments were led by conservative politicians, Shinzo Abe and Benjamin Netanyahu, who involved in several political scandals during their time in office.

We published our papers with open access:

• Watanabe, K., Segev, E., Tago, A. (2022) Discursive diversion: Manipulation of nuclear threats by the conservative leaders in Japan and Israel. International Communication Gazette.
• Segev, E., Tago, A. and Watanabe, K. (2022) Could Leaders Deflect from Political Scandals? Cross-National Experiments on Diversionary Action in Israel and Japan. International Interactions.

In the first paper, we found that the conservative newspapers emphasized the nuclear threats more than the liberal newspapers when the conservative leaders were struggling politically: Yomiuri and Yedioth emphasized threats of North Korea or Iran more than Asahi and Haaretz did when Abe faced strong opposition against the National Security Laws (L1) or Netanyahu almost lost in the General Election (E3) (Figure 1). We believe these patterns show the tendency of the conservative politicians’ to overemphasize security threats to boost popularity; and the collusion of the conservative newspapers and the conservative governments.

However, content analysis alone cannot reveal that the conservative politicians’ emphasis on security threats actually boosted their popularity. Therefore, in the second paper, we conducted survey experiment using mock-up news articles with different levels of threats, circumstances of leaders and foreign policy options. The results showed that exposure to news articles that mention imminent threats increases popular support for the leaders: the participants in the high threat condition supported the prime minister significantly more strongly than those in the threat condition did in both Japan and Israel (Figure 2). Such threat-induced political support implies that leaders tend to overemphasize security threats for their advantage.

Since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, we have seen many news articles about Russia’s potential nuclear attacks against NATO members. These articles are different from what we analyzed because their sources were written based on comments made by Russian officials, but they can have the same effect. Emmanuel Macron may have been benefited from it in the presidential election. Boris Johnson hope to divert public attentions to the Partygate scandal, but our research also shows that security threats dose not change people perception of political scandals.