2025 Theses Doctoral

Unpacking International Status in the Japanese Context

Mathieu, Alexandra

While the resurgence of interest in the study of status in international politics has brought forth new insights into how status influences political decision-making and the behavior of states internationally, there are still areas where our understanding of status is hampered by inconsistent theorizing and a lack of empirical testing of the many assumptions these theories rest on. Over the course of three separate papers, I address three issue areas within the study of international status with the goal of clarifying theoretical gray areas and substantiating hypotheses that are key pillars within in this research program. In particular, across the three papers, I show how the current application of social identity theory, though flawed, not only can still push the field’s understanding of status further, but can also fill in gaps in the existing literature that other frameworks have yet to do.

In my first paper, I point out fundamental issues with the Larson and Shevchenko (2014, 2019) reinterpretation of SIT for the international political context. Like Ward (2017), I show that their framework conflates the related, but distinct concepts of social mobility and individual mobility in such a way that destroys the boundaries between individualistic and group-oriented strategies and introduces a level of analysis issue not originally present in the original conception. I offer a reconceptualization of the social identity approach to international status that introduces a two-tiered framework that differentiates status strategies available based on whether the social identity of study is nationality or whether it is the state’s membership in informal and formal international groups and organizations. While the former is a social identity that is salient for most members of a nation at any given time, I theorize that the latter is a social identity likely most salient to those who engage in foreign policy or represent the state internationally in a formal capacity. This reconceptualization not only addresses a fundamental issue present in the current framework, but also connects sub-national and individual level causal processes implied by many state level theories of status in international relations to state action and policy. Through this paper, I show the continued importance of SIT to our understanding of the influence of status concerns on political decision-making.

In my second paper, using Japanese national survey data from 2013, I provide evidence that status is not just the projection of an individual’s personal belief regarding a nation’s international standing. Individuals not only differentiate between their personal evaluations of their own country’s status and the evaluations they assume of others outside their nation, but these evaluations hold even in the face of incentives to downplay another’s status due to ongoing animosity between their countries. Furthermore, I show that individuals who are dissatisfied with the international status of their country not only are more supportive of status-seeking behavior from their state in the form of hosting the Olympics, but are in favor of increased government spending to potentially acquire more international status and national prestige. Status is not only a differentiable belief, but it also impacts support for status-seeking behavior.

In my final paper, I again use Japanese national survey data from 2011 to investigate the relationship between status dissatisfaction, nationalism, and patriotism. Social identity theory suggests that individuals will pursue international status due to a desire to positively distinguish their country from other countries and maintain national pride. Given that national pride can manifest as either nationalism or patriotism, which have diverging effects on intergroup relations, to what extent is the desire for status rooted in nationalism and/or patriotism? Using public opinion data from the October 2011 wave of the Survey on the Image of Foreign Countries and Current Topics (SIFCCT) I conduct a regression analysis and find that between nationalism and patriotism, status concerns that drive status seeking behavior are rooted in the former and not the latter. Holding nationalist beliefs makes an individual more likely to be in a state of status dissatisfaction, whereas no significant relationship was found between patriotism and status dissatisfaction. This relationship holds regardless of whether the indicators for patriotism and nationalism are tested independent of one another or when both are included in the same model. These results have important implications regarding what kind of behavior is to be expected from status dissatisfied actors in international politics and the nature of international status seeking