How Geopolitical Crisis Events Affect Public Opinion on Foreign Policy: Evidence from the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

How do dramatic international crisis events change ordinary citizens’ foreign policy preferences, and how long might these changes last? Scholarship on public opinion has found that the public’s views on foreign policy are generally remarkably consistent and coherent. However, due to the relative rarity of extreme foreign policy events, evidence on how they might affect and change these views and preferences is scare. We present experimental evidence from the February 24, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, a watershed moment for the post-World War II international order that will likely shape global economic and political relations for decades. Our study presents unique panel data from a pre-registered three-wave survey experiment on economic sanctions, collected immediately before, at the height of, and one year into the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We find that the invasion caused a substantial short-term increase in public support for economic sanctions, much of which persisted one year later. This shows how, in contrast to the usual persistence of public opinion on foreign policy, international crisis events can meaningfully affect preferences in the short and medium term. Our results also provide rare and important insights on the external validity of survey experiments in International Relations. We show that measures taken based on hypothetical scenarios are indeed good indicators of public opinion in moments of real-world foreign policy crisis as it relates to policy priorities.