What’s Fair in International Politics? Equity, Equality, and Foreign Policy Attitudes

• Author: Stephen G. Brooks,Joshua D. Kertzer,Kathleen E. Powers,Deborah J. Brooks
• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Date: 01 February 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027211041393
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 66(2) 217 –245

What’s Fair in

International Politics?

Equity, Equality, and

Foreign Policy Attitudes

Kathleen E. Powers

1

, Joshua D. Kertzer

2

,

Deborah J. Brooks

1

, and Stephen G. Brooks

1

Abstract

How do concerns about fairness shape foreign policy preferences? In this article, we

show that fairness has two faces—one concerning equity, the other concerning

equality—and that taking both into account can shed light on the structure of

important foreign policy debates. Fielding an original survey on a national sample

of Americans, we show that different types of Americans think about fairness in

different ways, and that these fairness concerns shape foreign policy preferences:

individuals who emphasize equity are far more sensitive to concerns about burden

sharing, are far less likely to support US involvement abroad when other countries

aren’t paying their fair share, and often support systematically different foreign

policies than individuals who emphasize equality. As long as IR scholars focus only on

the equality dimension of fairness, we miss much about how fairness concerns

matter in world politics.

Keywords

public opinion about foreign policy, political psychology, fairness, burden sharing

1

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

2

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kathleen E. Powers, Dartmouth College, Department of Government 3 Tuck Mall, Hanover, NH 03755,

USA.

Email: kathleen.e.powers@dartmouth.edu

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Article

218 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(2)

From alliance politics to climate change, many of the central challenges in interna-

tional politics today relate to questions of fairness. Superpowers who cont ribute

more to collective defense complain about burden sharing (Oneal 1990), while

rapidly growing economies like China bristle at the prospect of suffering dispropor-

tionate economic harm to protect the global environment. Fairness concerns pervade

territorial disputes (Goddard 2006), peace negotiations (Albin and Druckman 2012),

international cooperation (Kapstein 2008; Kertzer and Rathbun 2015; Efrat and

Newman 2016), and the domestic politics of crisis bargaining (Gottfried and Trager

2016). Among policymakers, fairness appears to be a bipartisan principle:

Democratic President Obama once declared that “free riders a ggravate me” and

warned British Prime Minister David Cameron to “pay your fair share” in military

spending or risk the “special relationship.”

1

A few years later, Republican President

Trump echoed Obama’s concerns that NATO allies’ reliance on U.S. defense spend-

ing was simply “not fair”

2

while also decrying China’s “unfair trade practices.”

3

What makes a foreign policy action “unfair”? We argue that fairness has two

faces. IR scholars tend to discuss fairness primarily in terms of equality—in which

something is fair if everyone receives the same outcome (see, e.g., Baldwin 1993;

Albin and Druckman 2012; Kertzer and Rathbun 2015; Gottfried and Trager 2016).

This is consistent with a voluminous body of research on the ultimatum game, which

finds that players often reject offers that deviate from a 50-50 resource division

because unequal allocations are perceived as unfair (Gu

¨th, Schmittberger, and

Schwarze 1982). The IR literature on relative gains reaches similar conclusions,

finding that actors dislike agreements that cause them to gain less than the other

side (Grieco 1988; Mutz and Kim 2017).

Yet equality is not the only criterion used to judge what’s “fair”—many actors are

also motivated to maintain equity. Equity implies that differential rewards are fair if

they are proportional to actors’ relative contributions (Adams 1965). Capturing this

distinction is especially important given ideological divides in American politics.

Although most Americans report a commitment to fairness in the abstract (Graham,

Haidt, and Nosek 2009), they disagree on what fairness looks like in practice, with

liberals expressing more concern about equality than conservatives, for example

(Haidt 2012; DeScioli et al. 2014; Jost, Federico, and Napier 2009; Meegan

2019). As Hochschild (1981) and Fiske and Tetlock (1997, 276) note, the tension

between these two fairness conceptions animates many of the key debates in

American political culture. Yet apart from research on inequity aversion in interna-

tional political economy (IPE; Lu

¨, Scheve, and Slaughter 2012; Bechtel, Hainmuel-

ler, and Margalit 2017), IR scholars who invoke fairness have almost exclusively

focused on equality rather than equity, thereby neglecting fairness’ second face.

In this article, we argue that both equity and equality have important implications

for the study of international politics, and we seek to make three important contri-

butions to research on fairness in foreign policy. First, we introduce a new way to

measure individual differences in equity and equality concerns that we believe will

be useful for future research on fairness in both IR and political science more

2Journal of Conflict Resolution XX(X)