Striving for greatness: status aspirations, rhetorical entrapment, and domestic reforms

How do leaders use external events or pressures as political levers to facilitate domestic reforms? In this article, we build a theory of aspirational politics to address this question. We show that aspirations to improve a country’s international status can help leaders justify the implementation of their preferred domestic policies. For instance, the aspiration of wanting to join prestigious international organizations or agreements creates focal narratives that reformers can use to highlight the need to catch up and rhetorically constrain domestic actors who oppose reforms. We illustrate this mechanism through the Chinese leaders’ counterintuitively positive statements towards the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) from 2013 to 2016. By framing the TPP as an aspiration through which China can enhance its international status, Chinese leaders were able to justify domestic economic reforms. Unlike conventional explanations, this was done without the onset of crises or actually signing the TPP. We substantiate this claim using evidence from computer-assisted text analysis of Chinese news coverage of the TPP from 2008-2018 (N = 10189) and process-tracing of the establishment of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone.