Tracing Foreign Policy Decisions: A Study of Citizens' Use of Heuristics
Author | Robert Johns |
Published date | 01 November 2009 |
Date | 01 November 2009 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-856X.2009.00388.x |
Subject Matter | Article |
Politics and International Relations
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2009.00388.x
B J P I R : 2 0 0 9 V O L 1 1 , 5 7 4 – 5 9 2
Tracing Foreign Policy Decisions:
A Study of Citizens’ Use of Heuristicsbjpi_388574..592
Robert Johns
Public opinion researchers agree that citizens use simplifying heuristics to reach real, stable
preferences. In domestic policy, the focus has been on citizens delegating judgement to opinion
leaders, notably political parties. By contrast, citizens have been held to deduce foreign policy
opinions from their own values or principles. Yet there is ample scope for delegation in the foreign
policy sphere. In this exploratory study I use a ‘process-tracing’ method to test directly for delegation
heuristic processing in university students’ judgements on the Iranian nuclear issue. A substantial
minority sought guidance on foreign policy decisions, either from parties, international actors or
newspapers. This was not always simple delegation; some used such heuristics within more complex
decision-making processes. However, others relied on simple delegation, raising questions about the
‘effectiveness’ of their processing.
Keywords: public opinion; voting behaviour; survey methods
Students of electoral behaviour have tended to regard the ‘high politics’ of foreign
affairs as the preoccupation of political elites, arguing that voters’ concerns typically
lie closer to home—the economy, taxation, healthcare and so on (Almond 1950;
Rosenau 1961; Hughes 1978). However, this orthodoxy has been called into ques-
tion. Many researchers now argue that voters have genuine policy preferences, that
they react sensibly to changing international circumstances and that their prefer-
ences can influence government and policy (Aldrich et al. 1989; Page and Shapiro
1992; Anand and Krosnick 2003). Meanwhile, foreign affairs are widely seen—by
experts and voters alike—as having been crucial in several recent elections, in the
US (Weisberg 2005), the UK (Clarke et al. 2005) and, most vividly, in Spain
(Colomer 2005). The question of how citizens make decisions in this field is
therefore important for political parties and candidates, and psephologists, as well as
researchers into public opinion formation.
This article reports on a process-tracing experiment (see Lau and Redlawsk 2006)
designed to lay bare the process of foreign policy decision-making. The unusually
direct access to opinion formation offered by this method is relatively new to public
opinion research in general, and to the domain of foreign policy opinion in par-
ticular. Using the case of Iran’s nuclear programme—a relatively obscure issue at
the time of the experiment—I explore the bases on which 100 British undergradu-
ate students reached a decision on the policy that they would prefer their govern-
ment to support. The particular focus of interest is the extent to which citizens
reduce the costs of seeking and processing information by ‘delegating’ the decision
to a chosen elite source, such as a political party or newspaper, and the effectiveness
of this strategy in leading them to the same decision that they would have made on
© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Political Studies Association
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the basis of a more assiduous cognitive approach. Having reviewed the literature on
foreign policy opinion and described the process-tracing method in some detail, I
present results suggesting that simple delegation scores a good deal higher on
convenience than on effectiveness.
Foreign Policy and Public Opinion
In a previous era of opinion research, the more pressing question was not how but
whether foreign policy attitudes are formed. Gabriel Almond (1950) found that the
American public’s stock response to foreign policy questions was indifference; when
opinions were reported, they looked like non-attitudes (Converse 1964), lacking
intellectual structure, factual content and stability. This tallied with the perennial
finding that the average citizen is very short of knowledge on international politics
(Erskine 1963; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). What Paul Sniderman et al. (1991)
call ‘minimalism’—the view that the public lacks both political knowledge and
meaningful political attitudes—was for decades the received wisdom about public
opinion on foreign policy (Isernia et al. 2002, 202; Brewer et al. 2004, 94). Yet, in
recent years, minimalism has been strongly and convincingly challenged, such that
foreign policy attitudes are now considered much worthier of study. This challenge
is based on ‘low-information rationality’ (Popkin 1991; Sniderman et al. 1991;
Lupia and McCubbins 1998). These authors acknowledge the minimalist premises
that citizens lack both knowledge and preformed attitudes on foreign affairs. But
they reject the minimalist conclusion, arguing that citizens can make a policy
decision by finding a link from the issue in question to an existing attitude, value
or predisposition of some other kind (Zaller 1992; Tourangeau et al. 2000, ch. 6;
Alvarez and Brehm 2002). Consider two survey respondents asked ‘do you favour
President Bush’s policy of bombing Iraq?’ The first is a strongly partisan Republican,
the second a committed pacifist. Neither needs to know anything at all about Iraq,
and both can make a decision very simply: the first can answer ‘yes’ along partisan
lines; the second ‘no’ along ethical lines. Both respondents have found a simple
short cut to judgement that obviates the need for fuller information. Such short cuts
are known as heuristics (following Kahneman et al. 1982; Simon 1982).
Contributors to the literature on foreign policy attitudes have specified a range of
general guiding principles that citizens can use to lead them to decisions on specific
policy issues. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm (2002, ch. 9) list four value
dimensions—moral traditionalism, militarism, a sense of the dangerousness of the
world, and political trust—and show that the first three at least are clearly related
to foreign policy preferences. Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley (1987) and Eugene
Wittkopf (1990) provide further evidence along the same lines, focusing on an
internationalism–isolationism value dimension and its structuring of attitudes
towards military interventions, defence spending, overseas aid and trade policy.
Similar structuring principles have been identified by Larry Bartels (1994), William
Chittick et al. (1995) and Richard Herrmann et al. (1999). And Paul Brewer et al.
(2004) demonstrate significant correlations between levels of international trust
and a range of foreign policy preferences (see also Popkin and Dimock 2000).
International images are also available as guiding principles: Hurwitz and Peffley
(1990; Peffley and Hurwitz 1992) compile evidence that US citizens used images of
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R O B E R T J O H N S
the Soviet Union to simplify the world and to derive attitudes to foreign policies
concerning the Soviets (see also Herrmann et al. 1999).1
There is an important contrast between the foreign policy studies cited above and
research on heuristic processing in political attitudes and behaviour more generally.
This contrast hinges on a distinction between two types of heuristic: ‘deduction’ and
‘delegation’. Studies of foreign policy decision-making have mostly been based on
the first type, with citizens deducing specific issue positions from abstract principles.
Yet, in the broader heuristics literature, equal if not more emphasis is placed on the
second type, whereby citizens, rather than gathering and assessing lots of informa-
tion pertinent to a decision, simply adopt the choice made by someone else. In
short, the cognitive processing involved in political judgement is delegated. The
phrase ‘someone else’ is deliberately vague, because policy decisions can be del-
egated to a wide range of actors. Political parties are the pre-eminent example in the
literature: it has long been established that partisan voters adopt their party’s
standpoints on domestic issues, and their party’s candidates in elections (e.g. Lodge
and Hamill 1986; Rahn 1995; Huckfeldt et al. 1999). But there is also evidence of
such delegation to interest groups, to newspapers and to friends or neighbours (see
Sniderman 1993; Lupia and McCubbins 1998, 40; Lau and Redlawsk 2001, 953–4).
The contrast between the domestic and foreign policy opinion literatures should not
be overdone. John Zaller’s (1992) demonstration of citizens’ use of partisan cues to
form policy opinions was based in part on attitudes to the Vietnam War. More
recent work on support for military action has revealed similar findings (Berinsky
2007; Baum and Groeling 2009). Nevertheless, the claim made by the authors of
one such recent study—that ‘[w]ith relatively few partial exceptions ... most theo-
retical discussions of public opinion and foreign policy do not account for partisan
differences in public opinion’ (Baum and Groeling 2009, 160)—still holds true.
Why, then, has there been this relative neglect of delegation heuristics by those
researching into public opinion on foreign policy? The answer probably lies in the
fact that foreign affairs were considered relatively remote both from voters and
from everyday party politics. Electoral competition in western democracies has
been based on economic and social/moral left–right value dimensions, and foreign
policy issues do not fit neatly...
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