Examining Public Attitudes towards Recent Foreign Policy Issues: Britain's Involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan Conflicts
| Author | Ben Clements |
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.2011.01404.x |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Research and Analysis |
Research and Analysis
Examining Public Attitudes towards
Recent Foreign Policy Issues:
Britain’s Involvement in the Iraq
and Afghanistan Conflictsponl_140463..71
Ben Clements
University of Leicester
This article assesses which factors underpin public attitudes towards two recent and controversial
foreign policy issues: Britain’s involvement in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using data from
the 2005 and 2010 British Election Studies, it undertakes a statistical examination of which
sociological and political factors are related to support for and opposition to British involvement in
these conflicts. It shows that attitudes are structured both by social characteristics and by beliefs and
evaluations rooted in domestic politics. The former include gender, age and ethnic group, while the
latter include partisanship and newspaper readership. It demonstrates the need for further inves-
tigation of foreign policy attitudes among the British public.
Introduction
This article assesses which sociological and political factors influence public atti-
tudes towards two recent and controversial foreign policy issues: Britain’s involve-
ment in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraq War and the related foreign
policy initiatives and events leading up to it were politically controversial for much
of the 2001–2005 period, with the Liberal Democrats becoming ‘identified as the
anti-war party’ from 2003 onwards, in sharp distinction to the position held by
Labour and the Conservatives before and after the conflict (Russell, 2005, p. 748).
The Iraq War, as Whiteley et al. observed, was ‘a classic, and highly contentious,
position issue’ during New Labour’s second term (Whiteley et al., 2005, p. 811),
contributing to a clear decline in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s approval ratings after
the invasion in Spring 2003. As Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Rhiannon Vickers
observed: ‘Blair’s decision to join Bush in the invasion of Iraq has not only affected
how Britain is seen internationally, but has also fuelled domestic anger at British
foreign policy’ (Kennedy-Pipe and Vickers, 2007, p. 206). Controversy over the Iraq
War and its aftermath also featured prominently in the later stages of the 2005
general election campaign, although it was cited by only around 3 per cent of the
British electorate as the most important issue facing the country (Whiteley et al.,
2005, p. 811).
The Afghanistan conflict itself featured in the 2010 general election campaign,
again in the later stages after receiving coverage in the discussion on foreign affairs
POLITICS: 2011 VOL 31(2), 63–71
© 2011 The Author.Politics © 2011 Political Studies Association
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