In a newly published article “Trading Values? Experimental Evidence on Attitudes Toward Arms Exports Among Citizens and Political Elites”, our researcher Tobias Risse and his colleague Christoph Valentin Steinert analyze whether citizens prioritize human rights concerns over political and economic benefits of arms exports for their own states more than politicians do.
Using four survey experiments among citizens and parliamentarians in the United Kingdom and Germany, their study finds that while human rights violations and benefits significantly influence support for arms exports, there is no evidence of an elite-public gap in weighing ethical versus instrumental concerns in arms exports attitudes. In other words, citizens are not more likely to prioritize human rights commitments when forming attitudes on arms exports than politicians are.
Moreover, their data shows that respondents across all samples tend to oppose rather than support arms exports to states which violate human rights, even when they are associated with high benefits. Thus, their findings cannot explain why recipient states’ human rights records matter little to arms export decisions by democratic governments despite public opposition.