A defining feature of public (and, often, scholarly) discussion of international affairs is the treatment of states as unitary actors, that is, akin to individual persons. Drawing upon social–psychological research, we theorize that such unitary actor (UA) framing increases the degree to which adversarial states are perceived as entitative—that is, as relatively united—and, thus, the perceived complicity of a country's people in their government's actions. We therefore hypothesize that UA framing increases citizens’ support for indiscriminate, coercive policies against target states. In a content analysis of US elite statements spanning three decades, we first establish that UA framing is exceedingly common, occurring in nearly two-thirds of all references to adversarial states. We then conduct a series of survey experiments on US adults, finding that, compared to frames in which a state is described as more factious and disunited, UA framing is associated with significantly greater willingness to impose harmful, indiscriminate economic sanctions and military strikes against target states. Our results highlight the utility and applicability of entitativity to political science research, and have important implications for the role of elite discourse in bolstering public support for hawkish foreign policymaking.

中文翻译：

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框架国家：单一行为体语言和公众对强制性外交政策的支持

国际事务的公共（通常是学术）讨论的一个决定性特征是将国家视为单一行为者，即类似于个人。根据社会心理学研究，我们认为这种单一行为者 (UA) 框架增加了敌对国家被视为实体的程度，即相对统一的程度，因此，一个国家的人民在其政府的共谋中的感知程度动作。因此，我们假设 UA 框架增加了公民对针对目标国家的不分青红皂白的强制性政策的支持。在对跨越 30 年的美国精英言论的内容分析中，我们首先确定 UA 框架非常普遍，几乎三分之二的敌对国家引用都出现了。然后我们对美国成年人进行了一系列调查实验，发现，与一个国家被描述为更加分裂和分裂的框架相比，UA 框架更愿意对目标国家实施有害的、不分青红皂白的经济制裁和军事打击。我们的结果突出了实体性在政治科学研究中的效用和适用性，并对精英话语在加强公众对鹰派外交政策制定的支持方面的作用具有重要意义。