Question

How does public opinion influence foreign policy?

Answer 1

Answer:

The last 50 years have seen a substantial increase in citizen questioning of their governments’ security policies, beginning with citizen protest against the Vietnam War and continuing in the more recent popular disillusionment with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, scholars now argue that the study of foreign and national security policy can no longer be based solely on the military aspects of deterrence, coercion, and war. Rather, as Michael Howard put it, governments and scholars must pay attention to reassurance, the requirement of governments to “persuade one's own people, and those of one's allies, that the benefits of military action, or preparation for it, will outweigh the costs” (1983, p. 317).

This article proceeds from the assumption that public opinion will continue to be an important concern in debates about international issues, especially concerning issues of war and peace. It is therefore all the more important to clarify exactly what “public opinion” means, how it can be measured, and how it behaves. There is fertile ground for such an inquiry. Over the last 40 years, public opinion polling has spread to most corners of the globe, making international comparisons much easier than was the case previously. Moreover, scholarship on public opinion and foreign policy has produced a virtual revolution in the way scholars understand the process of opinion formation and change. In particular, research has brought new answers to four sets of important questions:

1. What do public opinion polls measure? How do citizens, who are generally uninformed about foreign policy and world affairs, form opinions on these matters? Quite simply, how can we measure “public opinion”?

2. How “rational” is public opinion? Is it stable or volatile? Are opinions coherent? Do opinions plausibly reflect the flow of world events? Does public opinion respond to what governments do? Precisely what is the form of that response?

3. What factors influence the formation of citizen opinions? Specifically, what is the impact of fundamental attitudes toward war and military force? How important are partisanship, ideology, and gender?

4. How universal are the determinants of citizen opinion, especially on crucial issues of war and peace? Are the findings in cross-national comparisons the same as those in the U.S. or European contexts?

In this article, I review the scholarly literature on these questions and present data from public opinion surveys to illustrate the discussion. The immediately following section describes why the answers to an individual survey question can be close to meaningless. However, I also present two examples to show that the combination of many questions on policy issues can measure the public’s “mood” on policy choices. Subsequent sections examine the questions of how “rational” these opinions are; precisely how opinion moods fluctuate in response to government policies; and the impact of ideology, partisanship, and gender, as well as the importance of fundamental attitudes toward war. Finally, I discuss the extent to which citizen opinions across the globe reveal both universal logics and the logic of specific national characteristics.

Answer 2

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• Media acts as a check on the governments. it ensure that the government should not abuse its power.
• it insures that elected representatives carry out their tasks properly.
• it encourages the participation of citizens in policy making
• it in lights the people and helps create an enlightened public opinion
• it exposes corrupt activities of the leaders or influential people.

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