Interestingly, the public's feelings on a third issue have moved in the opposite direction. This issue is the intangible but important question of U.S. relations with the rest of the world, and specifically with Muslim countries. During the period between the two surveys, the U.S. public grew marginally less worried about anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and elsewhere. The number of respondents who said they "worry a lot" about growing hatred of the United States in the Muslim world decreased from 40 percent to 34 percent, and the share of those who were deeply concerned about losing the trust of people in other countries declined from 40 percent to 29 percent, one of the larger changes in the survey. (The Public Agenda, 2010) The reasons for these changes are not self-evident. The sense of shame about the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, so strong in 2005, seems to have receded with the passage of time.
- The responsiveness to the public opinion
Having discussed on the public opinion and its main drivers at the moment, it is of a crucial importance to know how the policymakers perceive and respond to it.
It should be emphasized that there exist differences among groups in their influence. It wouldn’t be very realistic to believe that the opinions of relatively uninformed citizens have as much impact on government as the beliefs of CEOs of large corporations. In a tentative to make a rough division of the public opinion, the informed public category would represent the people who do not hold institutional leadership positions but who are the kind of people with whom political leaders have the most contact between elections. When politicians want to check their popularity this is the group they revolve to. Generally speaking the informed public is assumed to have a medium influence on government, less than the elite groups but considerably more that other parts of the general public. The importance of the views of the other category, the relatively uninformed public is quite high when a foreign policy becomes an important election issue such as the Iraq case, but on other more specific cases it is safe to suppose that this category is not perceived as a pressure from the government. According to Laulicht, however, there is no reason to believe that a single hierarchy of influence exists for all the foreign policy issues. Overall, it is certainly clear that public opinion provides an important input to policy decisions.
In cases such as the current political context, when the popular support for the president and its party is eroding the public opinion is in a very good position to shape the foreign policymaking. Low standing in the polls has encouraged the current American administration to speed up the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and lately considerably cut the Pentagon’s budget which are two points strongly emphasized in recent polls.
The military spending is historically associated with the public opinion (Hartley and Russet 1992; Shapiro and Page 1994; Wlezien 1995, 1996). For example Jencks (1985) found that the correlation between public opinion and military spending and annual changes in spending between 1973 and 1980 was exceptionally high.
Although the above empirical and theoretical arguments clearly show the policymakers’ responsiveness to public opinion there is no shortage of analysts who are skeptical about these conclusions.
The range of such appraisals stretches from those who dismiss the possibility of coherent public views, and that there is little direct connection between what the public thinks and what policymakers do.
Politicians may prefer to please activists – who provide important sources of money – over general voters who may be viewed as routinely voting for one party or the other and can largely be taken for granted (Wright 1989; Aldrich 1995). Politicians and policymakers may have their own (and often strongly held) policy preferences and these too may come into conflict with public opinion, thereby prompting non-responsiveness (Cohen 1997; Jacobs and Shapiro 2000, p. 19).
Powlick (1995) and Kull and Destler (1999, pp. 219-21) report evidence from separate studies of the impact of public opinion on foreign policymaking that the primary sources drawn upon by government officials (Powlick) and members of Congress (Kull and Destler) are the media and the current state of Congressional opinion. To the extent that such sources of public opinion are biased, they may lead political elites to policies not desired by the mass public.
Another set of mechanisms differentiating responsiveness in policy domains is the overall structure of the domain (cf. Laumann and Knoke, 1987 and Burstein, 1991). Some foreign policy domains are influenced by powerful interest groups and have long-established policies in place that are more difficult to alter. In such cases, (such as oil-dependent energy) responsiveness is likely to be low. In other domains, especially those with new or emerging issue controversies and devoid of well-organized interest organizations, responsiveness is likely to be greater.
Finally, a number of scholars have developed a version of the pessimistic thesis that asserts that responsiveness has declined over time. For example, Monroe (1998) and Jacobs and Shapiro (1997) report evidence that suggests declining overall responsiveness in recent years.
- Media
If foreign policymakers respond to a certain degree the public and the public responds to the media, studying the nature and degree of media influence on public opinion is crucial. Page et al. (1987) note, “It would be premature to celebrate the triumph of democracy before knowing how and by whom the public is itself influenced”.
The majority of citizens particularly lack, or lack access to, information and understanding of international events, which by their very nature are more complex (Graubatz 1995; Holsti 1996; Nelson 2001). The media play a key role in reporting and interpreting such events for the broader public (Beaudoin and Thorson 2002).
In general, most scholars perceive the media system as a channel or mechanism linking the public to policymakers (Bloch and Lehman-Wilzig 2002; Ruddock 2001). Grosswiler (1996) claimed that the media affect the way in which the public perceives information about political matters.
Examining the relationship in the post–cold war period, Bennett et al. (1997) concluded that media coverage of events affected public opinion on foreign policy issues. Entman (2004) argued that when the media’s independence increased after the cold war, filling a vacuum in policy definitions, the influence of decision makers on public opinion diminished; in contrast, Shapiro and Jacobs (2000) suggested that the complexity of the new world order increased the opportunities of decision makers to lead the media and public opinion.
Although some scholars suggest that the impact of the media on the government reflects public opinion (Brown 2001), most claim that these two actors mutually influence each other. Iyengar and Kinder (1987) suggested that one of the most important effects of the media is in setting priorities for the public, which, in turn, can have an impact on government. Overall, however, there is a lack of consensus as to the nature and extent of mutual influence between the media and government policy and on how public opinion fits into this relationship.
Although many scholars agree that the media’s influence on the public has increased during the past two decades (Mowlana 1996), the implications of this influence in state-society relations and the connections between foreign policy and public opinion (Holsti 1996; Seaver 1997) are not widely understood. Some claim that the media shape public opinion considerably (Naveh 2002; Paletz 2002), with the thought that politicians assume that the degree of media attention to a specific issue expresses its importance to the public (Linsky et al. 1986).
The media thus act as a selection device for the public’s and government’s agendas. At the same time, the influence of public opinion on policy depends on several factors: the type of political decision being made (e.g., security/economics), the specific stage in the political process, the existence of an external threat, the media goals or philosophies prevalent at the time (e.g., “watchdog” or government mouthpiece), the context of the decision (e.g., during crises), and perceived relevance of public opinion (Seaver 1997).
The failure to consider all sides of this media, public opinion, and foreign policy triangle leaves fundamental questions inadequately answered.
In the post–cold war era, understanding the interrelations of these elements has become even more important (Entman 2000; Nacos et al. 2000).
The end of the cold war influenced key perspectives on public opinion with regard to international relations and the role of the media (Bissell 2002; Holsti 1996). It appears that the media have attempted to fill the vacuum by searching for a suitable new framework in which to report events (Entman 2004; Kuypers 1997) and foreign policy issues—making foreign policy an even more complex matter to comprehend (Shapiro and Jacobs 2000). It is possible that the stability and the rationality that had formerly characterized public opinion corresponded to the existence of a stable international system and clear definitions of war and peace.
Perhaps public opinion underwent change in light of uncertainty in the new international reality (Entman 2004; Everts 2000).
- Conclusion
The views of policy responsiveness to public opinion in the United States outlined in this paper reach different conclusions which cannot be easily reconciled. For some analysts, the relationship between citizen’s opinions and the policy output of governments is strong.
Some other analysts contest claims that there is a systematic association between public opinion and policymaking. They think that the public opinion can be influenced by political elites, either through the strategic use of polling and political rhetoric to change the salience of issues in the public mind or outright changing opinion on a particular issue.
At this point, I think several conclusions can reasonably be drawn. Where measured public opinion expresses a coherent view on a particular policy question in a way that is recognizable by political elites, it is more likely that the movement of policy will be in the direction of public opinion. However, within the broad parameters established by public opinion, politicians and policy entrepreneurs often have substantial room to manoeuvre policy in detailed ways that are not visible to the public. For example, there are many different ways to reform welfare, combat the spread of communism in less developed countries, fight crime, reduce unemployment, or address energy shortages.
Also, while public opinion clearly sets important parameters on policymaking, the combination of contradictory public views on many key foreign policy issues and the capacity of political elites to shape or direct citizens’ views significantly reduces the independent impact of public opinion.
The changing institutional vortex – including the rise of the mass media and the growing importance of money in the political system – has simultaneously increased our capacity to understand public opinion and made it easier for elites to manipulate or work around it. The vexing question of how much influence citizens have over democratic governments, frequently asked and answered in the past, remains frustratingly indefinable.
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