‘You are not my type’: the role of identity in evaluating democracy & human rights promotion

In this article, we examine the impact of the democracy and human rights promotion efforts that are supposed to bolster positive attitudes among the public abroad and act as a tool to reach hearts and minds. Yet, we suggest that a salient in-group versus out-group dichotomy within a society could activate a reactive devaluation bias, and hence, conditions how individuals perceive and react to foreign actors and their policies depending on the source country and its links with in- and out-groups within the target state. By employing an original public opinion survey from Lebanon, we find that identities, and the level of attachment to the identity, affect individuals’ attitudes towards human rights and democracy promotion efforts. Our results offer important policy implications: practitioners should comprehensively reconsider the benefits of hearts and minds tools, as pre-existing attitudes are the main drivers of how these policies will be evaluated by the public abroad.