Charles Crabtree (University of Michigan) will present his work "A Backlash to International Refugee Law: Evidence from Survey Experiments in Turkey and the U.S."

How do international laws and norms affect citizens' willingness to accept refugees? In full and partial democracies, citizens' attitudes can influence national policy on refugees across several dimensions: whether and how many the country accepts, and how they are treated once they arrive. And a growing literature suggests international institutions can influence these citizen attitudes on different foreign policy questions, but those studies are almost entirely confined to U.S.- based respondents, and none consider refugee policy. Using a survey experiment administered in September 2017 via 1335 face-to-face interviews with Turkish citizens, we investigate how different international norms affect citizens' willingness to accept refugees. Our findings are surprising: reminding people about the government's responsibility under the Refugee Convention to accept refugees decreases support for accepting them. This effect is driven by less educated respondents and those who support the nationalist-populist incumbent party. We replicate this result in independent work in the United States. Taken together, our results suggest that international refugee law in particular -- and perhaps international institutions generally -- can sometimes trigger political backlash that undermines the very policies they promote.

Charles Crabtree is a PhD candidate at University of Michigan whose work focuses on repression, human rights, and discrimination.  He has an extensive publication record that includes journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and British Journal of Political Science.