In the November 2006 midterm elections, voters swept Republicans out of power in what was widely interpreted as a rebuke of the Bush administration's Iraq policies. In subsequent polls, nearly two-thirds of the public opposed President George W. Bush's postelection proposal for a “surge” in the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. Undeterred, the president declared on January 14, 2007, “I've made my decision and we're going forward,” and his press secretary, Tony Snow, said on January 9, “The president will not shape policy according to public opinion.” How can a U.S. president sustain a deeply unpopular foreign policy, seemingly uninfluenced by electoral setbacks or popular disapproval? Should the president be more responsive to public preferences? In an important and ambitious new book, Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton bring to bear an impressive array of survey data in order to answer these and other questions central to the study of public opinion and U.S. foreign policy.
Page and Bouton offer two core propositions, one descriptive and the other prescriptive. Beginning with the former, they argue that public opinion regarding foreign policy is purposive and rational, both collectively and individually. Concerning collectively, they argue that contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the public's foreign policy preferences are neither volatile nor impulsive, but rather mostly reasonable and consistent over time.
As for individually, Page and Bouton do not consider typical Americans to be ideologues, in The American Voter (Angus Campbell et al. 1960) sense. They do not find evidence of prevalent horizontally constrained foreign policy belief systems, whereby attitudes in one issue domain (e.g., national security) are functionally related to attitudes in other domains (e.g., trade). Rather, drawing on cognitive schema theory, they argue that most people possess vertically constrained, purposive belief systems, whereby opinions on specific issues follow sensibly from broader policy goals, which, in turn, follow from core values, all within the general domain of foreign policy. The authors thus challenge the near-ubiquitous post–World War II “Almond-Lippmann consensus” (Ole Holsti, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Challenges to the Almond-Lippmann Consensus,” International Studies Quarterly 36 [December 1992]: 439–66) that mass opinion is unhelpful—even dangerous—as a source of guidance for policymakers.
Page and Bouton's prescriptive proposition is that political leaders are insufficiently responsive to public preferences in foreign policy. To establish the need for increased responsiveness, they demonstrate a shortfall by analyzing two recent surveys by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations (CCFR), conducted in 2002 and 2004. These unusually comprehensive surveys include separate modules posing identical questions to foreign policy elites and the general public. This allows for wide-ranging comparisons of attitudes across the two groups. Wherever feasible, the authors also employ prior CCFR surveys to investigate longer-term trends.
Page and Bouton first show that the public cares about numerous foreign policy issues, that its priorities have remained largely stable over time, and that where public preferences have changed substantially, such changes were reasonable reactions to external events, like the end of the Cold War. They then turn to individual-level analyses, in order to demonstrate that the opinions of typical Americans are purposive, following logically from their foreign policy goals (e.g., defending national security) and values (e.g., multilateralism). They find that across nearly all areas of foreign policy, individuals' goals and values outperform socioeconomic characteristics (e.g., education, ethnicity, and gender), as well as partisanship and ideology, in predicting their foreign policy opinions.
Although the book is grounded in social science theories, the authors want to reach a broad audience. They state early on that they do not intend to “spell out any very elaborate theory in this book” (p. 39). There is often some trade-off between theoretical rigor and accessibility. Where to draw that line is a judgment call. A consequence of the particular line they draw is that the statistical results can frequently be interpreted in ways more or less favorable to their preferred interpretation. For instance, they argue that demographic factors primarily influence opinions indirectly, through their effects on goals and values. However, their approach to hypothesis testing—varying the specifications of ordinary least squares models, and then comparing magnitudes and significance levels on causal variables, as well as model R2 values—does not allow strong causal inferences. The evidence, though highly suggestive, is thus inconclusive. Stronger causal inference would require stronger theoretical assumptions and more nuanced statistical methods. This, however, could reduce the book's accessibility and narrow its audience. On balance, though not ironclad, the impressive consistency of the authors' findings across a wide array of issue areas makes their argument mostly persuasive.
In the remainder of the book, the authors first compare mass and elite attitudes across identical issue dimensions—finding frequent, large, and persistent gaps—and then consider the normative implications for democracy of elites consistently discounting usually sensible citizen preferences. Though fascinating, and often highly suggestive, the evidence here is somewhat less compelling, especially with respect to normative implications.
Page and Bouton report substantial disagreement between elites and the general public on nearly three-fourths of the issues they investigated. This figure, however, is based on a seemingly arbitrary definition of “disagreement” as any instance where elites and the public diverged in their support for a policy by at least 10%. In fairness, on many issues the gap is considerably larger, averaging around 20%. It is nonetheless unclear that even this larger figure necessarily represents a politically consequential “disconnect.” If, say, 90% of elites and 70% of the public support a policy, elites would presumably best represent the public by pursuing it. The authors counter that at 90% support levels, elites are likely to pursue “more” of a policy than a 70%-supportive public might want. Yet, this interpretation is debatable. Moreover, many questions—like whether to fight a war or sign a treaty—are dichotomous; either you pursue the policy or not.
Page and Bouton also investigate the proportion of issues on which absolute majorities of the two groups came out on opposite sides of an issue. This is the case for 26% of the issues in the study. Yet, as they admit, this indicates that elites and the public agree nearly three-fourths of the time. Is the glass one-quarter empty or three-quarters full? The authors favor the former interpretation. This too is debatable, as is their assumption that the opinions of mostly midlevel foreign policy officials—White House decision makers are largely absent from the elite samples—represent a good proxy for U.S. foreign policy actions. Still, the data are illuminating—at times startling—and do reveal significant and persistent differences in the relative magnitudes, if not always the fundamental valence, of public and elite foreign policy preferences.
The brief discussion of policy recommendations in the conclusion is the weakest part of the book. One such recommendation is that policymakers read this book. This begs the question of whether U.S. foreign policy would look very different if elites were more responsive to the public. The authors implicitly answer yes. But this is not obvious, at least not in many instances. The proverbial “devil” lies in the often-opaque details of foreign policy. Public opinion surveys are ill suited for capturing the many nuances necessary for connecting general attitudes to specific policy courses of action.
The authors offer a litany of suggestions for increasing elite responsiveness to mass opinion, such as reversing the gerrymandering of House districts, making election day a national holiday, automatically registering all citizens to vote, and fining them for failing to do so. They argue that the media and interest groups should better publicize instances where politicians do not follow the public will. These all appear to be reasonable ideas. But their precise relationship to foreign policy decision making is not spelled out. Given the breadth of the intended audience, it would have been nice to see a weightier discussion of policy implications.
Notwithstanding this last critique, I agree with the authors that foreign policy practitioners, as well as scholars and students, would benefit from reading this book. At minimum, doing so might help to correct some of the misconceptions political leaders clearly continue to hold about American public opinion.
