Foreign Policy Analysis (2019) 0, 1–20 Domestic Attitudes toward Regional Leadership: A Survey Experiment in Brazil F ELICIANO DE S Á G UIMARÃES University of São Paulo I VAN F ILIPE F ERNANDES Federal University of ABC, São Paulo AND G ERARDO M ALDONADO Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) In this paper, we analyze citizens’ attitudes toward regional leadership, employing two sets of survey experiments. Using Brazil as a case study, we analyze the first set of experiments with two types of regional leadership—structural and institutional—across three different regional issues—economic integration, regime change, and regional con- flict. We found that Brazilians do not support either type of leadership, whether in regional conflict or in regime change issues, but support institutional leadership in economic integration scenarios. In the second set, we included specific South American countries both in regional conflict and in regime change scenarios. We found that Brazilians prefer Brazil to stay away from acting as a leader once neighboring countries are named in the experiment. Our findings indicate that the literature on regional leadership should incorporate the level of domestic support to understand its implications to the exercise of regional leadership. We embedded our experiments within the project “The Americas and the World: Public Opinion and International Politics, 2014–2015.” We used a nationally representative sample of eighteen hundred respondents undertaken in 2014. Introduction Are public attitudes relevant to understanding regional leadership? Can a regional leader exert its leadership without the support of its own domestic audience? Can the levels of public support affect the exercise of regional leadership? The litera- ture on regional leadership has not answered these questions properly, and it has only shown scarce and aggregated evidence about public attitudes toward regional powers. Moreover, the literature is silent about the type of regional leadership the public tends to support or whether the interaction of specific neighboring countries affects the way domestic audiences perceive regional leadership actions. In this sense, we argue in this paper that the domestic support for regional lead- ers’ initiatives is neither natural nor automatic and that the level of support varies according to both the type of leadership and the interaction with specific neighbor- ing countries. Our findings indicate that public attitudes toward regional leadership are a key component for the establishment of regional leaders and that this aspect should be incorporated in the debate. The level of domestic support received while acting as a leader should affect the ability of democratic regional leaders to sustain such a stance over time. Guimarães, Feliciano de Sá et al. (2019) Domestic Attitudes toward Regional Leadership: A Survey Experiment in Brazil. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1093/fpa/orz002 © The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fpa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/fpa/orz002/5320429 by Yale University user on 19 February 2019