My research explores the interplay between domestic and international politics, seeking to understand, first, when and why foreign affairs becomes salient in the national dialogue, and, second, the ways in which the political climate at home affects state behavior on the international stage. With a substantive focus on East Asia, my dissertation examines first, when and where states strategically pursue aggressive foreign policy for domestic ends, leveraging interstate rivalry to amplify perceptions of foreign threat and rile anti-foreign nationalism, and second, how citizens respond in ways that affect larger political landscapes both home and abroad.
Additionally, I am also interested in political methodology and in separate projects explore applications of LLMs in political research, reducing user-specification sensitivity in survey weighting, and causal inference approaches to observational data broadly speaking.
Hartman, E., Hazlett, C., & Sterbenz, C. (2024). Kpop: A kernel balancing approach for reducing specification assumptions in survey weighting. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae082
Sterbenz, C., Trager, R. “Autonomous Weapons and Coercive Threats.” Pulse, Feb. 2019, website special topic, “AI in Strategic Context: Development Paths, Impacts, and Governance.” Available here
While a vast literature in international relations has examined the drivers of recurrent patterns of international conflict between pairs of rival states, less attention has focused on how a history of bilateral contest shapes relations in more peaceful times. Moreover, while many rivalries center elite-level geopolitical competition, certain dyads additionally foment mutual distrust, resentment, and animosity between their domestic publics. I focus on just these sociocultural rivalries, exploring how rivalry which encompasses not only geopolitical competition, but also a deeply rooted sociocultural antagonism affects relations between states, particularly outside the narrow context of rarely occurring overt conflict. Specifically,
I argue that executives strategically exploit aggressive foreign policy against rivals in a set of historical disputes centering goods of high nationalistic value to consolidate domestic political support in times of domestic insecurity. Drawing on a large literature on historical memory, I contend that these disputes have out-sized symbolic and nationalistic value relative to their material worth due to their direct connection to prior collective suffering. As a result, foreign behavior that challenges core territory, symbols, or events central to these narratives, generates strong threat perceptions and riles fervent, anti-foreign nationalism well before tensions become militarized. Consequently, I expect vulnerable leaders to take aggressive, uncompromising postures in historical disputes through rhetorical, diplomatic, or economic means which generate patriotic “rally-round-the-flag” boosts in public approval with minimal risk of escalation into costly outright conflict. To evaluate this argument, I examine relations in East Asia where regional rivalries are fueled by enduring historical animosity and popular understandings of both Chinese and South Korean identity are structured around narratives of collective suffering under Imperial Japan. I demonstrate support for this argument using a multi-method approach employing qualitative case studies, an empirical analysis of executive rhetoric, and a survey experiment.
Sterbenz, C. “Diversionary Diplomacy: Elite Rhetoric in Nationalist Standoffs.” Working Paper. Fall 2024.
Sterbenz, C. “Autocratic Power Consolidation in Times of Conflict.” Working Paper. January, 2021.
Sterbenz, C. “Conflict and the Fate of Autocratic Leaders.” Working Paper. January, 2020.