public opinion

The pooled judgment or attitude of the public in regard to a specific issue. Public opinion is generally determined by polling a sample of the population, using statistical tools. Elections are formal public opinion polls by which registered voter citizens register their choice of candidates and referenda.

The impact of public opinion on the Supreme Court is a delicate and controversial subject. To the extent that the Court needs to adjudicate specific legal disputes within a defined factual framework pursuant to established legal principles, the justices, like all judges, are supposed to immunize themselves from any form of bias, including public opinion. Given that the Court often must decide politically sensitive issues about which the text of the Constitution and precedent provide no clear answers, the justices often choose among political theories in making their decisions. Although one might expect that such choices reflect a broad congruence with public opinion, the Court sometimes best serves the needs of a pluralistic democracy by standing firm against the opinion of a majority that might tyrannize the minority

The Constitution was framed deliberately to insulate the Court from public opinion. The Founding Fathers, many of whom had misgivings about popular rule, sought to develop an institution that, although not completely disconnected from the political process, would be shielded from the public in ways quite unlike the other so‐called political branches. Justices enjoy life tenure, can be removed from office only through a complicated procedure of impeachment, and may not suffer any diminution in compensation. Appointed rather than elected, their nominations by the president are confirmed by the Senate, which the framers envisioned as being less responsive to the popular will than the House.

The institutional protections that the Court enjoys have survived even though its decisions often have engendered bitter opposition. The unsuccessful impeachment of Samuel Chase in 1805 established the principle that the justices cannot be removed from office for political reasons. Although critics of the Court for two centuries have proposed numerous constitutional amendments and other Court‐curbing measures to make the Court more responsive to the popular will, most failed.

But while the Court has retained its institutional insularity from public opinion, there is ample evidence that public opinion has an indirect and subtle impact upon it. Various studies have demonstrated that the Court throughout its history has often reflected the views of the broader public. In a 1959 study, Robert Dahl concluded that the Court is rarely long out‐of‐step with the wishes of the people. Incongruities, he found, primarily have occurred during brief transitional periods when old dominant coalitions are disintegrating and new ones are forming.

More recently, Thomas R. Marshall found a substantial congruence between the Court's decisions and public opinion as measured by scientific opinion polls. According to these polls, a majority of the public has supported even the Court's controversial decisions on desegregation, reapportionment, and abortion. Marshall and other scholars have concluded that the modern Court's decisions have been generally as congruent with public opinion as the positions of other national policymakers.

Even in relatively rare instances when the Court's opinions have lacked support of a substantial majority of Americans, its decisions have enjoyed substantial and broad‐based support. For example, the Court's generally unpopular decisions on religion in the schools during the 1960s received critical support from major religious denominations and other opinion leaders. Similarly, decisions on criminal procedure that have encountered significant public opposition nevertheless also obtained support from judges, lawmakers, and law‐enforcement officials. Likewise, the Court's controversial decision in Bush v. Gore (2000) enjoyed the support of the vast majority of Bush voters and a significant minority of Gore voters.

To a certain extent, the Court may respond to public opinion in order to deflect criticism and preserve its institutional power during times of political crisis. There is evidence, for example, that the Court's seminal civil liberties decisions of the 1920s and 1930s were influenced at least in part by the Court's desire to ameliorate widespread criticism of its invalidation of economic regulatory legislation by demonstrating that judicial review could be used to protect personal liberties as well as economic liberties. Similarly, the Court during the late 1950s may have protected the rights of political subversives less aggressively because its recent decisions had precipitated serious efforts to curb its jurisdiction.

The most famous example is the Court's validation of economic reform legislation in 1937 in the wake of Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal to increase the Court's membership (see Court‐Packing Plan). The Court's abandonment of doctrines that had impeded such legislation was a major factor in the defeat of Roosevelt's plan. Although there were many complex reasons for this so‐called judicial revolution, many scholars believe that the threat of the Court‐packing plan at least partly influenced two members of the Court, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justice Owen J. Roberts, to become more receptive to the constitutionality of economic regulatory legislation. How long the Court can withstand intense political pressure to conform to the wishes of the majority remains an open question. In large measure, such harmony between the Court and public opinion is inevitable because justices are nominated by presidents and confirmed by senators who are broadly representative of public opinion. Presidents naturally nominate justices who appear to be in harmony with their own predilections and whose views are sufficiently consistent with broad public opinion that the nomination will generate political support for the president or at least not antagonize large numbers of voters. With some notable exceptions, Earl Warren and Harry Blackmun among them, justices generally have conformed to the expectations of the presidents who appointed them.

Even the most deeply conservative observers concede that the Court as an institution changes over time and that such change often places the Court in closer alignment with the preferences of the people. Because of regular turnover on the bench, many presidents have had ample opportunity to appoint justices with contemporary policy views. Thus, changes in public opinion are ultimately reflected in changes in Court composition and policy, but with a lag period. In this sense, the Court follows the election returns, even if belatedly, and even if individual justices are oblivious to the preferences of their fellow citizens (see Selection of Justices).

Moreover, since judges are themselves members of the public, it is not surprising that they are influenced by the same social, cultural, economic, and political forces that shape public opinion as a whole. The Court therefore can maintain consonance with public opinion to the extent that the values of justices change along with those of their fellow citizens.The Court therefore remains in contact with public opinion, even without any conscious effort.

For example, what the justices of the high bench view as “cruel and unusual punishment” has evolved over the past two centuries, just as public opinion on the meaning of cruelty has changed. Similarly, the Court's recent decisions on gay rights, particularly its decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2002), reflect the evolution of changing social and cultural attitudes toward homosexuality. Likewise, the Court's scrutiny of gender discrimination clearly reflects changing attitudes about the rights of women and their role in society. Perhaps the most notable example of congruence between progression in the thought of both the justices and masses of Americans occurred in the context of race. The predicate for Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and other major civil rights decisions was established by profound demographic shifts and a sharp decline in public acceptance of racism.

Similarly, norms such as judicial self‐restraint—the belief that judges ought to restrain their own preferences and defer to the popularly elected branches—may actually tend to make judicial decisions more consistent with the preferences of the majority. To the extent that Congress and the president are attuned to the public and to the extent that legislation therefore represents public opinion, judicial deference to the elected branches promotes more responsive Court policy. The Court therefore again may reflect public opinion even though individual justices are not motivated to conform to the popular will.

Deference to precedent likewise may make justices responsive to prevailing public opinion even when their personal predilections may favor change in the law. For example, the Court reaffirmed abortion rights in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) in a manner that was consistent with prevailing public attitudes and avoided exacerbation of controversy even though the Court might have rejected a right to abortion if it had considered the issue for the first time.

There are also specific areas of law in which the Court openly and explicitly refers to public opinion. For instance, current law on obscenity makes direct references to prevailing community views of what constitutes obscenity (e.g., Miller v. California, 1973). Similarly, there is probably no area of modern law in which the justices have tried to understand public opinion more than Eighth Amendment death‐penalty litigation. To the extent that the Court recognizes an important role for public opinion, there will probably be at least some degree of congruence between what the public wants and what it gets in Court decisions (see Capital Punishment).

There are, however, important areas of the law, such as school prayer, in which the Court has resisted even stable and strong public opinion (see School Prayer and Bible Reading). To the extent that public opinion takes on the tint of majority tyranny, the justices are quite unlikely to defer to public opinion. It is a happy irony that the Court's exercise of its so‐called counter‐majoritarian function has helped to preserve public support for judicial review, since Americans frequently have demonstrated that they greatly appreciate the Court's role in protecting the rights of weak or unpopular minorities.

Recent trends may affect the ways in which the Court responds to public opinion. The tendency of presidents during the past thirty years to refrain from appointing justices who have had careers as elected officials may make the Court less responsive to public opinion, since justices who come from the more insulated realms of the lower federal judiciary, private practice, or academia may be less sensitive to public opinion. Moreover, recent justices, in contrast to more than a few of their predecessors, appear to have lacked presidential ambitions. The fact that justices today serve for longer periods than their predecessors also may make the Court less responsive to public opinion since it tends to distance them from the political currents that influenced their nomination.

On the other hand, the Court may become more responsive to public opinion because members of the public are increasingly aware of the important ways in which the Court affects their daily lives and are thus becoming more vocal in expressing their opinions about the Court. This is particularly manifest in the substantial growth of participation by public interest groups and private citizens in supporting or opposing nominees to the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts.

See also Decision‐making Dynamics.

Bibliography

• Robert Dahl, Decision‐making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy‐maker, Journal of Public Law 6 (1957): 279–295.
• William Mishler and Reginald S. Sheehan, The Supreme Court as Countermajoritarian Institution? The Impact of Public Opinion on Supreme Court Decisions, American Political Science Review 87 (1993) 87–101.
• Thomas R. Marshall, Public Opinion and the Supreme Court (1989)

— James L. Gibson, as revised by William G. Ross

Views prevalent among the general public: shaping public opinion.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

First used in its obvious, literal sense in eighteenth-century political thought. Began to acquire a more precise meaning (without losing its general one) with the advent of scientific opinion polling in the 1930s. General statements about public opinion, which often turn out to be the opinion of two taxi-drivers and ten consecutive passers-by, should be treated with caution.

James Madison observed that “public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.” Edmund Burke, a member of the British Parliament in the 18th century, expressed a different attitude when he told his constituents, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Members of Congress generally win election because they reflect the views of the majority in their home state or districts. Once in office, senators and representatives keep in constant contact with their constituents. They travel home regularly, hold public meetings, circulate questionnaires in their newsletters, and read public opinion polls. Members of Congress remain keenly interested in the mail and telephone responses of their constituents to current issues, and they take these into consideration when casting their votes. “Without public opinion on its side,” commented Representative Dante Fascell (Democrat–Florida), “Congress can't move very much one way or the other.” Yet polls constantly change, reflecting the public's shifting moods and attitudes and indicating that effective leadership can alter public opinion.

Presidents and the people

In modern times, Presidents have frequently found it in their interest to appeal directly to the public for support on issues. The framers of the Constitution, however, did not expect Presidents to make such appeals or to be popular figures. They were concerned that Presidents might become “hard” demagogues, by dividing the people along class or territorial lines, or “soft” demagogues, flattering the voters in order to mislead them. The system of indirect election by the electoral college was, in part, a safeguard against a President's appealing to the people or holding himself directly accountable to the electorate.

In the 19th century, one of the articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson involved the charge that he had made speeches in an attempt to gain public support for his Reconstruction policies. During his battles with Congress over these policies, Johnson became the first President to give an interview for publication to a reporter. “I want to give these fellows hell,” Johnson said, gesturing toward the Capitol, “and I think I can do it better through your paper than through a message [to Congress], because the people read the papers more than they do messages.” Presidents were not expected to show up at their party's national convention to accept the nomination, nor were they expected to campaign for office. They did not give a State of the Union address to Congress but sent a detailed written message instead. They did not make political or policy speeches but stuck to vague platitudes of “civic republicanism” when addressing audiences. They had no direct dealings with the press.

The first President to depart from these practices (after Johnson) was Theodore Roosevelt, who used the Presidency as a bully pulpit in furthering his Square Deal program and who met regularly with reporters. Woodrow Wilson revived Thomas Jefferson's practice of delivering an annual address to Congress, and he held press conferences. Wilson sent messages to Congress outlining his New Freedom legislative program, and he made three speeches and held conferences to get his ideas before the public and gain support for his program. Wilson believed that Presidential rhetoric was appropriate and did not have to be demagogic, or inflammatory, provided that it attempted to educate the public rather than simply manipulate it and provided it was for the public interest rather than partisan political advantage.

Franklin Roosevelt was the first President to use public opinion polls, taking advantage of polls already being conducted by the Department of Agriculture about support for the New Deal. He also used private pollsters under contract to the Democratic National Committee. To influence public opinion in favor of the New Deal, he used radio “fireside chats,” provided movie theaters with newsreel footage of New Deal programs, and had government agencies send press releases about his programs to newspapers. He created public information offices in New Deal agencies and coordinated them through the White House Press Office.

Modern Presidents use their State of the Union addresses and special messages to Congress as media events to present their position to television audiences. Their communications directors and press secretaries provide the media with briefings and with the White House “spin” on, or interpretation of, events.

Presidents make televised addresses during crises, obtaining free time from the major networks. Occasionally, a request for free time will be rejected if it seems too partisan. Presidents are reluctant to bump popular prime-time programs, and the White House limits speeches so as not to jade its audience.

Presidents also rely on pseudo-events, events staged simply for media coverage. President Ronald Reagan visited schools, where he read from Shakespeare's plays to dramatize his theme that “back to basics” was more important than more federal financial aid. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton held “town meetings” to discuss issues with concerned citizens.

The White House relies on pollsters to conduct public opinion surveys whose results help shape their programs. President Reagan received nightly “tracking” polls that indicated shifts in opinion on issues and support for the President.

Most Presidents have been poor media performers, ill at ease in front of cameras and the press, including Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush. Many Presidential speeches that try to sway public opinion are unsuccessful. President Ford's speech unveiling his economic program, complete with a WIN button (standing for “Whip Inflation Now”), became a national joke. The more President Carter appealed for support for his energy program, the lower his approval ratings fell. One study by political scientists of 56 public issues showed that on only a few did Presidents sway public opinion, and then only when they were popular; otherwise, their efforts often made things worse.

At best, Presidents draw attention to problems and get the media and the public to focus on them. Sometimes they do so by their speeches and messages and sometimes by making decisions that set events in motion. But rarely do they persuade the American public; more likely, they activate opinions that already were present.

Presidents who have high public approval ratings are much more likely to hold press conferences, give speeches on issues, and pressure Congress to pass ambitious legislative programs. Popular President have some persuasive ability in dealing with the public and with Congress. A popular President usually gets more support from members of his party than an unpopular President, especially on veto override votes. The proportion of Presidential requests in Congress that pass often varies directly with Presidential popularity. According to some political scientists, with every percentage point increase in public support, there is an increase in the probability that his bills will pass Congress. Unpopular Presidents are less likely to propose major new initiatives and are more likely to face restrictions on their powers by Congress. The unpopular Presidents are more likely to veto bills but are also more likely to have them overridden by Congress.

Unpopular Presidents may face renomination challenges in an election year. Such challenges caused Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the race. Presidents who win such challenges are likely to lose in the general election, the fate that befell Presidents Ford, Carter, and Bush. An unpopular President may bequeath problems to his party: every 10-point decline in the President's approval rating results, on average, in a 4-point drop in the percentage of the popular vote his party will obtain in the next Presidential election. An unpopular President drives voters away from identifying with his party; a succession of popular Presidents brings voters into the party.

See also Fireside chat; Media coverage of Congress; Messages, Presidential; News conferences, Presidential; Press secretary; Reagan, Ronald; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Roosevelt, Theodore; Speech writers, Presidential; State of the Union address

Sources

• Richard A. Brody, Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion, and Public Support (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).
• George Edwards III, “The Public Presidency: The Pursuit of Popular Support” (New York: St. Martin's, 1983).
• Fred L. Israel, “The Public Looks at Congress,” in “Understanding Congress: Research Perspectives”, edited by Roger H. Davidson and Richard C. Sachs (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1991).
• Samuel Kernell, “Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership”, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Books, 1997).
• Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, The Rational Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
• Stephen Ponder, Managing the Press: Origins of the Media Presidency, 18971933 (New York: St. Martin's, 1999).
• Richard Rubin, Press, Party, and Presidency (New York: Norton, 1978)

Public Opinion has formed a part of American politics ever since the authors of the Federalist Papers declared that "all government rests on opinion." They drew on a long tradition stretching from before Machiavelli's counsel that princes should not ignore popular opinion through Hume's dictum that it is "on opinion only that government is founded." The idea that the right to govern is grounded in the consent of the governed led over time away from instrumental reasons for gauging public opinion (to avoid being overthrown) to normative ones (to govern rightly and justly). This democratic doctrine prevailed in the New England town meetings, although it was only in the latter half of the twentieth century that the "public" whose opinion was to be sought expanded to its present size, concomitant with the extension of the right to vote to almost all adult citizens. The struggles to obtain the franchise and to contest the view of someone like Alexander Hamilton that popular opinion is seldom right are well documented. Today, as Harold Lasswell wrote, the open interplay of opinion and policy is the distinguishing mark of popular rule.

Early Straw Polls and Social Surveys

A precondition of measuring public opinion is an awareness of who constitutes the public, the potential universe of those whose opinion is to be measured. One of the most authoritative descriptions of the public is the government census, which in the United States was first carried out in 1790. Popular attitudes were not surveyed until newspapers and magazines introduced "straw polls," a term that refers to determining the direction of the political winds, much as a farmer might gauge the direction of the wind by throwing a handful of straw into the air. The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian is held to have carried out the first straw poll in the United States in 1824, showing Andrew Jackson a clear winner over John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay in a survey of 532 respondents from Wilmington, Delaware. Other newspapers of the time carried out similar straw polls.

The development of more extensive public opinion surveys can be credited to the social surveys of the late nineteenth century. Inspired by the sanitary surveys of health and housing conditions conducted by the statistical societies established in England in the 1840s, American surveyors of social conditions sent letters to businesses and conducted door-to-door interviews. None of these efforts was comparable in scope to Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, the first volume of which was published in 1889. Booth developed the theory of a poverty line and produced a poverty map of London, color-coded for eight economic levels. American social reformers used Booth's methods to document poverty in American cities. In one study, Hull-House workers canvassed door to door in a Chicago neighborhood in order to produce maps of nationality and wages, collected in the Hull-House Maps and Papers of 1895. The following year, W. E. B. Du Bois undertook a study that was published in 1899 as The Philadelphia Negro, collecting data on nearly 10,000 residents of the Central Ward.

Encouraged by the example of these social surveys being undertaken by reformers, newspapers and magazines adapted straw polling to their business. In 1896, the Chicago Record mailed postcard ballots to every registered voter in Chicago and every eighth voter in twelve midwestern states. Based on the results, the Record predicted that William McKinley would win 57.95 percent of the Chicago presidential vote; he received 57.91 percent on election day. Outside Chicago, however, the results were far off the mark. Publishers focused on the marketing potential of straw polls; postcard ballots often included subscription offers intended to boost the sponsor's circulation.

At the same time, government began to take a more active interest in public opinion, combining detailed straw polls with methods from the social surveys. For example, the Country Life Commission organized by President Theodore Roosevelt sent out a questionnaire to over half a million rural residents in what is likely the first major quality-of-life survey. The results were starting to be tabulated by the Census Bureau when Congress cut its funding; later, the questionnaires were burned as useless. Undaunted, the Department of Agriculture several years later started its own surveys of farm conditions, collecting the attitudes and opinions of farmers as early as 1915.

Polling in Transition

Scientific research into public opinion proliferated in the 1930s with the development of new statistical techniques. The New Deal was characterized by a growing number of government contracts in applied research, some of which employed surveys. Market researchers also adopted the techniques of applied sampling, but newspapers and magazines tended to be concerned not with technique, but rather with how polls would boost their circulation. Despite methodological problems and errors of often over ten percent, straw polls continued to be published by newspapers and magazines until the 1936 election. The Literary Digest, the largest-circulation general magazine of the time, had claimed "uncanny accuracy" for its previous straw polls and, in 1936, predicted Alf Landon winning with 57 percent of the vote over Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt won the election with 62.5 percent of the vote. The Digest prediction, based on almost 2.5 million un-representative straw ballots, was off by nearly 20 percentage points, and the magazine soon went bankrupt. Meanwhile, pollsters George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley correctly predicted the outcome. In fact, Gallup had written in July—before the Digest had even sent out its ballots—that the magazine's straw poll would show Landon winning with 56 percent. A marketing whiz, Gallup encouraged newspapers that subscribed to his poll to run it alongside that of the Digest, and he sold his column with the money-back guarantee that his prediction would be more accurate. He also pointed out the reasons why the Digest would be wrong: sampling bias based on the above-average incomes of the Digest's readership, and response bias inevitable in mail-in questionnaires. As a result of his success, Gallup quickly became the country's top pollster.

The Gallup, the Roper, and the Crossley polls relied on quota sampling, intended to ensure that the poll sample looks demographically like the general population. However, their polls had a persistent Republican bias. Although he had the outcome correct in 1936, Gallup had actually underestimated Roosevelt's win by 6.8 percent. The pattern continued until 1948, when the Gallup Poll, the Roper Poll, and the Crossley Poll all predicted that Republican Thomas Dewey would defeat Democrat Harry Truman. In a thorough investigation of these 1948 failures, the Social Science Research Council urged replacing quota sampling with probability sampling, the method still employed in contemporary public opinion polls.

The Application of Social Science to Polling

Before World War II, however, and encouraged by the clear superiority of his techniques of survey research over those of the Digest, Gallup famously declared that there was a "new science of public opinion measurement." Indeed, the government's manpower policy and wartime research needs attracted social scientists to work on social research problems. Some of these government units conducted polls and surveys, especially to study wartime morale. The units were interdisciplinary and problem-oriented, and social scientists worked alongside market researchers, advertising and media professionals, and specialists from the armed forces, the Bureau of the Census, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Treasury.

When the war ended, Congress stopped funding these government research groups, and the social scientists they had employed returned to their universities. Three key university research centers were founded: the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), originally at Denver and later at Chicago, and the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of Michigan. Before the war, government research funds had gone primarily to its own agencies. Between 1945 and 1959, however, government research funding to universities and colleges increased tenfold. Although almost all of this funding went into the physical and life sciences, the small share that went to the social sciences was substantial relative to existing standards. For example, the SRC's $230,000 of federal funding for its first year of operations in 1946 was over four times the University of Michigan's annual allocation to the Department of Sociology for salaries and operating expenses.

Modern Developments and Techniques

Polling spread around the world in the postwar decades, and by the 1960s there were several hundred survey organizations in the United States, many of them university affiliated. The SRC started the National Election Studies (NES) in 1948, and the Studies are still carried out every two years. The NES asks respondents hundreds of questions in the autumn before elections and then interviews them again once the election is over. NORC started its General Social Survey in 1971, asking a general set of questions usually repeated from year to year alongside a changing topical module. Both the GSS and the NES interview respondents for several hours in their homes and are thus expensive to carry out, but the data are well-respected and widely used by social scientists.

New techniques for randomly sampling telephone numbers cut the cost of surveys, and the news media once again took an interest in polling: the New York Times and CBS News started polling together in 1976 and they were soon joined by the NBC/Wall Street Journal and ABC/Washington Post polls. Exit polls, developed in the late 1960s, were first used to predict the outcome of a presidential election in 1980, causing complaints that Democrats on the West Coast were dissuaded from voting by the news that President Jimmy Carter had already been defeated. Social scientists remain critical of many commercial and journalistic polls, for example, the popular "call-in" polls, which are the modern version of the straw poll: unrepresentative and self-selecting.

Other public opinion polls are connected with the marketing of political candidates and positions. The darker side of public opinion polling came to light with President Lyndon Johnson's use of polls to manipulate opinion rather than simply report it. In commissioning and interpreting polls, Johnson's staff employed shallow analysis and outright misrepresentation to exaggerate domestic support for the war in Vietnam. Instead of engaging them as a tool to judge public opinion, Johnson thus used poll results to convince the media and policymakers of his personal popularity and that of his policy proposals. A more recent innovation is so-called push polls, in which campaign staff posing as pollsters provide respondents with false information in an attempt to influence their opinion or their vote. The American Association for Public Opinion Research asserts that push polls constitute an unethical campaign practice. Another recent development is decreasing response rates as potential respondents refuse to take part in polls. This raises methodological concerns because people who decline to participate in a survey may differ in significant ways from those who do complete it. A related problem is incomplete surveys, as respondents refuse to answer particular questions on a survey. Pollsters tend to compensate for nonresponse by weighting their results, but the best way of doing so is the subject of much debate.

Conclusion

Although technical questions about the best way of measuring public opinion remain, there have been clear methodological advances since the days when utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham emphasized the difficulty of even defining public opinion. Current public opinion research in sociology and psychology generally focuses on the ways in which individual beliefs interact with those of the wider community or of others within the individual's social network, since public opinion cannot form without communication and social interaction. Political scientists, by contrast, generally tend to study the influence of public opinion on public policy.

A question of an entirely different nature from technical concerns is that of the relationship between public opinion and public policy. Walter Lippmann argued that the "pictures in our heads" that form our opinions can be manipulated by organized interests. He concluded that the public should choose political leaders, but that policy ought to be set not by the public or their leaders, but by expert social scientists working within a "machinery of knowledge." Lippmann refused to consider that these policy specialists might also hold opinions divergent from pure reason, admitting only that the methods of social science were still far from perfect.

Recent research emphasizes the fact that most journalistic polls merely report horse-race information, such as between two or more candidates for office, and thus cannot actually influence policy. There is normative debate about the extent to which changes in public opinion should influence policy. Political leaders today rarely follow the model of Pericles, who thought the role of the leader was to convince the public to back policies they might originally have resisted. Advances in communications technology mean that modern democratic leaders can more often represent public opinion, which has led to calls for more direct democracy. However, a final argument is the suggestion that, simply by posing questions in a certain way, polls may actually create opinions about matters that had previously remained unexamined. The relationship between public opinion and democratic governance remains in question.

Bibliography

Converse, Jean M. Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 1890–1960. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Erikson, Robert S., and Kent L. Tedin. American Public Opinion: Its Origins, Content, and Impact. 6th ed. New York: Longman, 2000.

Key, V.O. Public Opinion and American Democracy. New York: Knopf, 1961.

Lasswell, Harold Dwight. Democracy through Public Opinion. Menasha, Wisc.: George Banta, 1941.

Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.

Public Opinion Quarterly. A periodical publishing articles dealing with the development and role of communication research and current public opinion, as well as the theories and methods underlying opinion research.

In 1500, the term "public opinion" had no currency in any European language. By 1789, not only had the phrase entered the vocabulary of virtually every language in Europe, but conscious efforts to affect or even control public opinion had come to play a key role in some of the most crucial intellectual and political events of the epoch—the origins of the French Revolution itself being only the most famous case in point. It is hardly surprising, then, that both the idea and the reality of public opinion in the early modern period should have been the object of an exceptional amount of scholarly attention in recent decades.

Pre-History

The component parts of the term, noun and adjective, had long histories of their own, prior to their union in the modern concept. Descending from classical Latin, opinio and its cognates were burdened with a primarily pejorative connotation in the vocabulary of Renaissance humanism. Typically contrasted with "reason," "opinion" tended to designate ungrounded belief, subject to the psychological distortions of the "imagination" and the "passions." The widely circulated humanist cliché, asserting that "opinion governs the world," was thus an expression of regret at the domination of the irrational in human affairs. This negative judgment persisted throughout the early modern period, though the eventual union of "opinion" with the adjective "public" weakened it significantly. "Public," meanwhile, descended directly from the Latin adjective (publicus) and noun (publicum) used to refer to that which pertained to the state, as opposed to the private household—the collective body of its citizens or its property, above all. For obvious reasons, these terms and their cognates acquired a new currency with the onset of the modern processes of state-building at the end of the Middle Ages. No less important, however, was the eventual extension of the noun, in particular, beyond the boundaries of the state itself. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was possible to refer to a variety of different "publics," in the sense of a critical "audience"—as in the "publics" for plays, music, and novels. As for the actual term public opinion itself, finally, the first usages seem to have been in French, in the later sixteenth century: the phrase can be found, for example, in Montaigne's Essays. Most authorities agree, however, that the term only really gained currency, in French and in English, about a century later.

"Public Opinion and the Public Sphere"

What brought "opinion" and "public" together, to form a new concept? As it happens, nearly all recent research on the topic owes something to a seminal work of social theory that first appeared some forty years ago. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) was the earliest major work of the eminent German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. Its influence on German-speaking scholarship was immediate, but its greatest impact came with its long-delayed translations into French (1978) and English (1989). The appeal of Habermas's book is not hard to explain, for it offered a sweeping and sophisticated interpretation of the history not just of "public opinion," but of "publicity" itself, from the end of the Middle Ages to the present. A Frankfurt-school Marxist in intellectual background, Habermas traced the origins of a specifically bourgeois "public sphere" to the impact of the transition to market capitalism, on the one hand, and the emergence of the modern sovereign political state, on the other. It was between the two characteristic social institutions produced by these changes—the modern private or "nuclear" family and absolute or divine right monarchy—that a "sphere" for the free exchange of information and opinion developed, sustained by new technologies and institutions of communication, including the newspaper, journal, salon, and Masonic lodge. The heyday of the "bourgeois public sphere," Habermas argued, came in the eighteenth century, when its promotion of the fundamental values of the Enlightenment—liberty, equality, fraternity—brought immense critical pressure to bear on the social and political institutions of the Old Regime. In the long term, however, success ruined the bourgeois public sphere. The spread of representative political institutions in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, and the rise of modern mass media, combined to rob the public sphere of its capacity for autonomous criticism of society. Far from governing the modern world, Habermas concluded, "public opinion" was itself now fully subordinated to the routines of electoral politics and the blandishments of consumer advertising.

Public Opinion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Not surprisingly, Habermas's pessimistic account of the decline of the public sphere in the modern world has proved controversial. His description of its original emergence in early modern Europe, on the other hand, has met with far greater acceptance, although with significant alterations. For one thing, the confident Marxism of Habermas's explanatory framework has tended tacitly to be set aside over time. The adjective "bourgeois," assigning a central role in the story to an emergent social class, has all but disappeared from the recent literature on the "public sphere" and "public opinion." At the same time, the result of several decades of research has been to assign both concepts a rather longer period of gestation than Habermas did in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas did in fact draw attention to the print revolution of the early sixteenth century as a crucial condition of possibility for the emergence of the public sphere. Today, it seems even clearer that both the print revolution and the onset of religious Reformation were watersheds in its development. The breakup of the ideological unity of Christianity unleashed propaganda campaigns, designed to sway opinion in one direction or another, on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The ferocious "religious" warfare that followed in Germany and France was accompanied by equally strenuous struggles in print. By the early seventeenth century, the most advanced political thought in Europe, the "reason of state" traditions in France and Spain, expressly recognized the power of public sentiment, which every ruler ignored to his or her peril. What were once theorized as the first of the great "bourgeois" revolutions—the Dutch Revolt and the English Civil War—brought propaganda warfare of this kind to an even higher pitch, far more explicitly tied to the fates of states than ever before. The condemned king of England made a powerful appeal to the "public" virtually from the scaffold. Less lethally, the end of the seventeenth century saw the arrival of a relatively novel phenomenon, secular intellectual controversies in a national context. "Public opinion" itself seems to have entered circulation, in France and England, in the midst of the ideological contests known as the querelle des anciens et des modernes in the first, the "battle of the books" in the second.

The Eighteenth Century: Institutions

Despite this long windup, however, Habermas was surely right to insist on the qualitative difference of the role of public opinion in the eighteenth century, when both idea and reality assumed unprecedented forms. Intellectually, there is little doubt that the impact of the Enlightenment was crucial in this respect. Educated elites in Europe were now far more willing than ever before to acknowledge the sovereign power of an anonymous public, in regard to the evaluation of everything from imaginative literature and music to governmental policy itself. At the same time, the expansion in the sway of public opinion in the eighteenth century depended not merely on ideological shifts, but also on the arrival of new modes of communication and social institutions. Probably the greatest contribution of Habermas's work in the long run has been to inspire an extremely lively social history of the technological and institutional underpinnings of public opinion in the age of Enlightenment. On the one hand, the eighteenth century saw a vast expansion in both the production and the consumption of printed matter. The increase in volume was matched by variety, with the full maturation of new forms of literature, from the newspaper, feuilleton (serial publication), and periodical, to the novel. "Authorship" itself increasingly came into its own, under the protection of emergent copyright laws and other forms of recognition of literary property; for the first time in European history, the "writing public" came to include significant numbers of women. On the other hand, this whole spectrum of new "reading publics" was sustained by a set of "semi-public" social institutions. Three of these stand out, now the objects of a rich historical literature. One was the literary and intellectual salon, which descended from the Renaissance court to play a pivotal role in promoting Enlightenment values, in France above all; not the least striking feature of eighteenth-century salon culture was the central role assumed by women within it. Secondly, the eighteenth century was the great age of the public drinking establishment, where the commingling of classes and consumption of stimulants encouraged a freer flow of ideas than ever before. The proliferation of taverns, alehouses, wineshops, and cafés was recognized by contemporaries as crucial to the formation of public opinion in the Enlightenment. The same went, finally, for a third institution, Freemasonry, whose spread across Europe in the eighteenth century created sites of egalitarian sociability and communication—with, on occasion, evidence of female participation as well.

Public Opinion in England

Steadily climbing literacy rates, multiplying reading publics, and the spread of salons, cafés, and Masonic lodges created the conditions of possibility for widespread appeals to public opinion across eighteenth-century Europe. Although few countries were untouched by these phenomena, England and France have attracted the vast bulk of scholarly attention—not least for the contrast between the two. Nearly all authorities agree that the idea of public opinion attracted far more attention in France, and played a more pivotal role in its political history in the eighteenth century, than it did in England. At first glance, the contrast might appear paradoxical. For not only had England made a successful transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy, transferring political sovereignty to a representative institution that, for all of its narrowness, certainly had no equivalent in contemporary France. England, too, enjoyed a far freer press in the eighteenth century, and pioneered many of the most characteristic social institutions of the Enlightenment, including newspaper, café, and Masonic lodge. In fact, the role of public opinion in the political culture of eighteenth-century Britain was far from negligible. Whig control over Parliament down to the 1760s provoked a lively political opposition, centered on a "country" or "patriotic" party, which made a central use of newspapers, periodicals, and books in its appeals to a "political public." The ruling Whigs themselves, meanwhile, orchestrated powerful propaganda campaigns on behalf of British war efforts, promoting an incipient nationalism that reached a kind of climax with the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). Public opinion in England then seems to have come of age with the political radicalism that flowed in the wake of that war, beginning in the 1760s. The Wilkesite movement marked a watershed in the emergence of a popular radicalism, obsessively focused on manipulating public opinion for its ends. These currents were swelled by the publicity accorded political ideas during and after the American Revolution. By the end of the 1780s, the stage was set for the English reaction to the French Revolution, which involved unprecedented attempts to mobilize public sentiment for geopolitical ends. As many commentators have noted, a key feature of public opinion in Britain was the tendency toward xenophobia—all to be greatly enhanced in the 1790s, of course, by the onset of war with France.

Public Opinion in France

It was in eighteenth-century France, however, that public opinion seems to have enjoyed the greatest fortune as idea—and perhaps as reality—in the early modern period. Everything suggests that this was related to the success of the Bourbon absolute monarchy in avoiding the political revolutions and religious reformation that had transformed its counterpart across the Channel in the seventeenth century. In the context of the High Enlightenment—whose capital, of course, was Paris—appeals to public opinion seem to have compensated for precisely the lack of representative political institutions and civic freedoms enjoyed by the English. In fact, a keen sense of the importance of public sentiment and support to the exercise of political power was a feature of early modern French political theory from the start—strikingly prominent within absolutist apology itself, from Jean Bodin to Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. By the turn of the eighteenth century, direct appeals to public opinion were to be found in the literature of aristocratic opposition to the regime of Louis XIV. From here, it was a short step to the two major political theorists of the French Enlightenment, each of whom, in their different ways, insisted on the crucial importance of ideological power in political life. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu advanced a theory of the subjective "principles" that gave life to the different forms of government; in On the Social Contract, Rousseau advocated a patriotic "civil religion." Meanwhile, practice did not run far behind theory. By the time Rousseau wrote, the Bourbon court had long since begun to lose its grip on political life in France, as one kind of dispute after another spilled into the public sphere. Not all of the contention was owing to the Enlightenment. In fact, the most serious political strife of the period resulted from collisions between the Bourbon monarchy and the parlements or upper law courts, whose magistrates were fired by Jansenism, a crypto-Protestant tradition of resistance to absolutism (religion was a factor curiously marginalized by Habermas in his account of the public sphere). By the time the monarchy attempted—without success—to quell parliamentary resistance by brute force in the early 1770s, however, Jansenist sentiment and Enlightenment values had converged in a single, "patriotic" current of criticism. Far from staying above the fray, the Bourbon monarchy itself now went to the opposite extreme, vying with Jansenist and Enlightenment critics alike in appealing to French public opinion.

Conclusion

The most striking sign of the triumph of the idea of public opinion in eighteenth-century France came in 1781. Dismissed as finance minister to the monarchy, the Swiss banker Jacques Necker took the unprecedented step of publishing an account of the royal budget, in violation of every norm of absolutist secrecy. The meaning of this appeal to public opinion over the head of the king was lost on few observers. Eight years later, the bankrupt Bourbon monarchy confirmed this symbolic transfer of sovereignty by summoning the Estates-General, a representative assembly for the expression of public will that had not met for a hundred and fifty years. With the start of the French Revolution, the idea of "public opinion," a gift of a long process of development in the early modern period, was ready to begin its modern career.

Bibliography

Baker, Keith Michael. "Public Opinion as Political Invention." In his Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 167–199. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.

Blanning, T. C. W. The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789. Oxford and New York, 2002.

Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1994.

Gunn, J. A. W. Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought. Montreal, 1983.

——. Queen of the World: Opinion in the Public Life of France from the Renaissance to the Revolution. Oxford, 1995.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. Translation of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962).

Klaits, Joseph. Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV: Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion. Princeton, 1976.

Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1988.

Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Ozouf, Mona. "Public Spirit." In A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, pp. 771–780. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989.

—JOHNSON KENT WRIGHT

The public's role in the American foreign policy process is a controversial subject. Generations of diplomats, political theorists, and historians have argued about the nature of the elusive opinion policy relationship. They have been concerned about the abilities of American leaders to operate according to democratic precepts in a pluralistic international system often dominated by autocratic powers.

In arguing for greater authority in foreign affairs for the proposed new Senate in the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton saw the senior house of the U.S. Congress as serving as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions. Striking a similar theme almost a half-century later, that perceptive observer of the American scene Alexis de Tocqueville was not very sanguine about the prospects for a democratic foreign policy. Writing during a period when the diplomatic activities of the United States were relatively unimportant, he explained:

Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which a democracy possesses; and they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all of those faculties in which it is deficient…. [A] democracy is unable to regulate the details of an important undertaking, to persevere in a design, and to work out its execution in the presence of serious obstacles. It cannot combine measures with secrecy, and it will not await their consequences with patience…. [D]emocracies…obey the impulse of passion rather than the suggestions of prudence and…abandon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary caprice.

According to Tocqueville and other so-called realists, diplomacy should be the province of a small group of cosmopolitan professionals who perform their duties in secret and with dispatch. Leaders must not encourage their constituents to mix in heady matters of state because the uninformed and unsophisticated mass public is unable to comprehend the subtle rules of the game of nations. Democratic leaders are severely handicapped in diplomatic jousts with authoritarian rulers who are able to contain the foreign policy process within chancellery walls.

Defenders of popular participation in international politics maintain that despite the clumsiness and inefficiency inherent in open diplomacy, the alternative is worse. Leaders who employ devious means to defend a democratic system will, in the long run, pervert or transform that system. At the least, the public and its representatives must have as much influence in the making and execution of foreign policy as they have in domestic policy. A foreign policy constructed and controlled by the people is stronger than one that rests upon a narrow popular base. The victory of the United States in the Cold War can be offered to support that contention.

Historians are just as contentious as political theorists. Despite an enormous amount of rhetoric, speculation, and research, very little is known about the actual relationship between public opinion and foreign policy. Since the late 1940s, survey researchers have explored the dimensions of public opinion while political scientists have considered the ways in which decision makers perceive opinion. Nevertheless, a broad consensus about the nature of the opinion-policy nexus has yet to emerge.

Many studies describe the power of the public and how it has forced presidents into wars and crises against their better judgments. The journalist Walter Lippmann, among others, felt that Tocqueville's prophecies have been fulfilled:

The people have imposed a veto upon the judgements of informed and responsible officials. They have compelled the governments, which usually knew what would have been wiser, or was necessary, or was more expedient, to be too late with too little, or too long with too much, too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in war, too neutralist or appeasing in negotiation or too intransigent. Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this century. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decisions when the stakes are life and death.

Lippmann's position is supported by a host of historical legends: that congressional war hawks, responding to popular jingoism, compelled James Madison to ask for war in 1812, during a period of improving British-American relations; that a spirit of manifest destiny swept James K. Polk along in its wake into the Mexican War of 1846; that expansionist fervor and humanitarian impulses created by an irresponsible yellow press propelled William McKinley into war against hapless Spain in 1898; that myopic popular isolationism restrained Franklin D. Roosevelt's realistic anti-Axis program in the late 1930s; that antiwar protesters humbled the once-omnipotent Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and forced both his withdrawal from public life and his de-escalation of the war in Southeast Asia; and that the bitter memories of that war made it difficult for presidents to intervene militarily in the Third World during the last quarter of the twentieth century. All of these examples lend credence to the principle that the public is sovereign in the United States, even when it comes to matters of weltpolitik.

But all of those historical cases have been interpreted in a very different fashion. Many reputable historians contend that war hawks were not elected in 1810 and that an unimaginative Madison merely lost control and mindlessly drifted into war in 1812; that Polk was the prime instigator of jingoism in 1845 and 1846 with his blunt messages to Great Britain about the Oregon dispute and his provocative movement of troops into an area claimed by Mexico; that McKinley, who exercised weak leadership in 1897 and early 1898, created a serious political problem for the Republicans—a problem whose solution depended upon a declaration of war against Spain; that Roosevelt underestimated his ability to move the nation and, in any event, was more of an isolationist than an internationalist; that Johnson backtracked in Vietnam because the military policies he had pursued for four years had failed on the battlefield; and that when necessary, as in Grenada in 1983 and the Persian Gulf in 1991, presidents had little trouble convincing their constituents to accept their interventions.

To be sure, there is a certain degree of truth in both sorts of interpretations; but, in the last analysis, a careful reading of American history reveals few clear-cut situations in which public opinion has forced presidents to adopt important foreign policies that they themselves opposed. Furthermore, in most diplomatic confrontations, American decision makers were able to act in secrecy and with dispatch to meet challenges from rivals representing authoritarian systems. Indeed, during his administration, the secretive Richard Nixon may have exercised more personal control over his nation's foreign policy than did his counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev, the ruler of the totalitarian Soviet Union. At the least, there was more genuine debate in his Politburo than in Nixon's National Security Council.

Historians, political scientists, and even the participants themselves report that American decision makers pay little direct attention to public preferences, especially in a crisis. Presidents have maintained that it would be unseemly to worry about the public's often uninformed views, and thus their own political futures, when the nation's security is threatened. All the same, fear of outraged public opinion undoubtedly serves as an implicit veto against such extreme options as the preemptive bombing of North Korean nuclear facilities or unilateral disarmament. Moreover, popularly elected statesmen are loath to adopt policies that could lead to a loss of personal prestige. Thus, with their votes U.S. citizens allegedly hold the ultimate club over the heads of their representatives.

Nevertheless, despite the occasional case of a Robert Kennedy who worried openly about popular reactions to a sneak attack on Cuba in the fall of 1962, most decision makers do not consciously consider public opinion when they discuss responses to external threats. As for that ultimate club, foreign policy has rarely figured prominently in national or local elections. The personalities of the candidates, party loyalties, and domestic politics have obscured such major electoral issues as imperialism in 1900, the League of Nations in 1920, the escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1964, and the apparent renewal of the Cold War in 1984.

It is true, however, that although elections may not frequently turn on foreign policy issues, foreign policy sometimes turns on electoral politics. Beginning in October 1968, Americans became aware of the "October Surprise," a dramatic diplomatic or military démarche in the weeks before an election that appeared to have been orchestrated to affect that election. That year, Lyndon Johnson announced a breakthrough in peace talks with the communists in Vietnam a week before what was going to be a very close election. Four years later, the shoe was on the other foot when Richard Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, announced a breakthrough in his peace talks with the North Vietnamese in late October.

Other nations may also "participate" in U.S. elections. The Russian leader Nikita S. Khrushchev claimed he helped elect John F. Kennedy by refusing to release U.S. flyers who had been shot down and captured by the Soviets until Kennedy, and not his opponent Nixon, was elected. In 1988, as Vice President George H. W. Bush genuflected toward the anticommunists in his party during his run for the president, he sent a message to the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to not pay much attention to his campaign rhetoric about U.S.–Soviet relations.

The Public As Goal Setter

The lack of compelling evidence for direct popular influence in diplomatic interaction does not necessarily make American foreign policy undemocratic. On the contrary, theorists see the public as sovereign, because it establishes parameters for action and sets goals for presidents and their agents. Broad national policy is said to originate with the people. For example, during the Cold War, the public's foreign policy mandate was clear. It included the desires to defend U.S. interests around the world against the onslaughts of communism and anti-Americanism, to refrain from direct involvement in unnecessary wars, and to engage in diplomatic conduct becoming to a great democratic power. Theoretically, such a mandate was implemented by policymakers who developed shorter-term tactical programs. This widely accepted view is not without its logical and evidential flaws.

In the first place, because of their preeminent roles in the opinion-making process, presidents generally define the relationship of the United States to international events. Consequently, they can make almost any of their actions appear to defend the national interest and to be within the bounds of decorous democratic foreign policy. Further, the limits that the public ostensibly sets for them are remarkably flexible. They can be expanded because of the exigencies of a changing international climate that, according to the policymaker, demand new approaches. In early 1946, for example, Americans looked forward to a long period of normalcy and nonentanglement. Apparently, joining the United Nations was all the internationalism they desired. At the time, few would have approved of the permanent stationing of military units in Europe, nor would they have accepted giving away millions of dollars to foreign friends. By 1948, however, the impact of events—events interpreted by the foreign policy establishment—convinced a majority of citizens that unprecedented interventionist activities were needed to maintain national security. The limits that restrained American diplomats in 1946 were expanded by 1948 through a combination of events and propaganda.

The view is also inadequate when analyzed from the bottom up. The abstract differentiation between the public's task of defining strategic interests and the government's task of developing tactical policies is difficult to make operational. During the early 1960s most Americans supported their government's general attempt to stop "communism" in Southeast Asia. Yet, the bombing of North Vietnam, putatively a tactical policy decision implemented to achieve that goal, became a matter for widespread public debate. Both hawks and doves refused to leave the bombing issue to the planners in the Pentagon. And rightly so, for most major military policies are fraught with serious political implications.

In sum, despite widespread scholarly agreement about its basic outlines, the dominant paradigm delineating the public's role is faulty. The suggestion that the public sets goals and limits while the president executes policy does not adequately describe the opinion-policy relationship in American diplomatic history.

The public and the policymaker do interact in a more fundamental way. Historic periods are marked by unique climates of opinion. From time to time, Americans have been more isolationist than expansionist, more tolerant than intolerant, or more pessimistic than optimistic. Such general moods, which develop as a result of a concatenation of social, economic, and, to some degree, psychological factors, cannot be rapidly changed through elite manipulation.

Those who challenge the notion that national mood is impervious to sudden transformation point to the Spanish-American War and the manner in which the yellow press supposedly created mass interventionist hysteria. Interestingly, many of the explosive elements present during the crisis of 1895–1898 were also present during the Cuban Revolution of 1868–1878. However, the earlier stories of atrocities, gun running, assaults on American honor, and the struggle for Cuban freedom did not arouse a population recovering from its tragic and bloody Civil War. During the 1890s, a different generation of Americans was receptive to the inflammatory accounts in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. The "psychic crisis" of the Gilded Age produced an audience primed for jingoist journalists and politicians.

Similarly, Richard Nixon, the architect of détente with the People's Republic of China in 1972, could not have proposed such a démarche in 1956. According to most indicators of public opinion, American citizens then would not have been willing to consider such a drastic reorientation of national policy. No one could have been elected to a position of power in 1956 who talked openly about sitting down with Mao Zedong, the "aggressor" in the Korean War. Five years later, President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat from the party that "lost" China in 1949, believed it impossible to alter U.S. policy in Asia. A majority of Americans would first have to unlearn the propaganda lessons of the early 1950s before such a dramatic program could be safely broached by a national leader.

In the years after the Vietnam War, the American public was in no mood to intervene in other distant struggles in the Third World. It is possible that had the public not felt so strongly about this issue, Ronald Reagan would have intervened with U.S. troops in El Salvador in 1981. And while Americans had apparently licked their so-called Vietnam syndrome by 1991, when George H. W. Bush led the nation into war in the Persian Gulf, Bush was convinced he had to terminate the war before marching on Baghdad because he feared his constituents would not support a longer war or more GI casualties. Bush's chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, supported that decision with what came to be called the Powell Doctrine. The United States could not again participate in a lengthy, Vietnam-style war unless the public expressed enthusiasm about such a venture at the outset.

Presidential Powers

Aside from participating in the development of a climate of opinion and possessing a latent electoral veto over major foreign policy decisions—two not insignificant functions—the public's direct influence in the making of foreign policy is minimal. Here, more than in domestic affairs, presidents are dominant over both Congress and the mass public. Their ability to create opinion and dominate the opposition assures them a relatively free hand in planning and executing foreign policies.

Because of the vast information-gathering and information-disseminating facilities at their disposal and because they are the only truly national spokespersons, presidents are the most important source of information on foreign affairs. Through their public attention to specific international problems, they can go a long way toward determining the agenda of the national foreign policy debate. Although congressional committees and the mass media have developed their own informational and promotional capabilities, until recently they have not commanded the resources available to the president. It was only during the last decade of the twentieth century that round-the-clock cable television news and Internet sources, available everywhere around the world, began to level the information and propaganda playing fields.

The president's ability to conduct day-to-day diplomacy, free from public pressures, rests on the fact that most Americans are not very interested in esoteric international issues. Naturally, some obscure policies that the public does not care to monitor eventually become major issues. One such example was the unpublicized U.S. assistance to forces opposing Salvador Allende's socialist regime in Chile during the early 1970s.

If presidents' freedom of action in the development of foreign policy depends in good measure upon public inattention, their power in a crisis depends upon public helplessness. During sudden crises citizens must accept their accounts of fast-breaking events or risk further loss of American lives. In May 1846, Americans had no option but to accept President Polk's misleading account of the way American blood had been shed on American soil by Mexican soldiers. Given the apparent need for immediate retaliation and Polk's relative credibility, the public rallied behind his policies and asked questions later. In similar situations Americans supported their leaders during the Korean crisis in the summer of 1950 and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964. Surprisingly, the public does not always withdraw its support when crisis diplomacy or military intervention fails. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, John F. Kennedy's popularity rose in the polls, as did Jimmy Carter's after the failed rescue mission in Iran in April 1980.

In noncrisis periods the president can develop support for a program by selectively suppressing or releasing secret information. Madison published letters from a turncoat British spy in an attempt to demonstrate that Federalists who challenged his British policies had been conspiring with the enemy. More than a century later, Woodrow Wilson's release of the purloined Zimmermann telegram contributed to the onrushing torrent of anti-German sentiment on the eve of American entry into World War I.

As for the suppression of important information, Harry S. Truman decided to withhold General Albert C. Wedemeyer's 1947 report on China because it was potentially offensive to Jiang Jie-shī (Chiang Kai-shek). More important, its conclusions ran counter to official policies. From 1970 to 1973, Richard Nixon suppressed information on the bombing of Cambodia while some of his aides participated in a cover-up that involved falsification of military records. In one of the most celebrated cases of all, Franklin D. Roosevelt concealed the extent of his involvement as a silent partner in the Allied effort in World War II for fear that such revelations might lead to his electoral defeat and a change in the direction of national policy. His defenders contend that the president and his advisers had a better grasp of what constituted national security than did the well-meaning but untutored public. Like the doctor who tells his patient that the bitter but vitally important medicine tastes good, Roosevelt obscured the issues and misled the people for their own alleged best interests.

Such a position might seem tenable in the light of the times, but its acceptance as a legitimate procedure for all presidents is unlikely. Many of those sympathizing with Roosevelt's position were displeased when Lyndon Johnson was not entirely forthcoming with the electorate about his plans for the war in Vietnam during the 1964 election campaign. Yet both presidents later cited national security in defense of their tactics.

Conceivably, an alert, crusading press can counterbalance the awesome power of the president to mold foreign policy opinions. However, editors move with caution when it comes to printing material potentially detrimental to national security. The New York Times learned of the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation on the eve of the attack. After conferring with the White House, its editors decided not to run the story because they were convinced that the success of that covert operation was a matter of the highest national interest. In a related vein, when columnist Jack Anderson published excerpts from the minutes of the National Security Council during the Bangladesh war of 1971, many reporters joined with the government to criticize his "impropriety." Nixon's aides went beyond mere criticism as they contemplated ways to do away with the columnist who told Americans that contrary to what the White House was saying, the administration was supporting the rapists of West Pakistan against the freedom fighters in East Pakistan.

In general, the press has been far more circumspect in printing diplomatic than domestic exclusives. For journalists, it is one thing to uncover scandals and quite another to publish material that could render aid and comfort to a foreign enemy. Since the 1990s, however, unaffiliated investigative reporters on the Internet have not been so circumspect.

Despite their general mastery of the opinion problem, American leaders have traditionally claimed that the people are important to them as a source of support and inspiration. Since the Jacksonian period, most have probably believed that they were duty-bound to heed the people. Thus, they have constantly attempted to assess public opinion, or at least the opinions of relevant publics. Of course, the opinion evaluated and used by decision makers does not always meet the social scientists' definition of public opinion.

Public officials have traditionally relied heavily upon newspapers and other mass media to discover what people are thinking about. The media, however, are better indicators of the topics in the current foreign policy debate than of the range of opinions on those topics. Despite charges about the biases of the "liberal press," most U.S. newspapers have been owned by Republicans who fill their editorial pages with materials that do not always represent majority opinion in their communities.

Many leaders consider newspaper and magazine columnists to be peers whose approval they covet. Occasionally, they use friendly journalists to float trial balloons for them, so that they can test the political waters before committing themselves to a new course. In some cases columnists may become directly enmeshed in the policy process. In the fall of 1962, Walter Lippmann proposed the dismantling of U.S. missile bases in Turkey as a quid pro quo for the dismantling of Russian bases in Cuba. Nikita Khrushchev mistakenly interpreted the trade-off presented by America's most distinguished columnist as a cue from the White House. This misunderstanding about the nature of Lippmann's relationship to the inner circles of the Kennedy administration contributed to the tension during the Cuban missile crisis. Moscow may have been confused by the fact that the Americans were using John Scali, a television journalist, as an unofficial go-between with one of their diplomats during the affair.

Congress has been the policymakers' second most important source for public opinion. Primarily, they are concerned about the activities of committees with interests in foreign affairs, but they also view senators and representatives as reflecting constituents' interests. From time to time such an interpretation of opinion on Capitol Hill has affected policy outcomes. During the late 1930s, President Roosevelt may have underestimated the public's interventionist sentiment when he treated congressional isolationism as an accurate reflection of the national mood. Today, social scientists suggest that though legislators may reflect the majority opinion in their respective districts on domestic issues, they frequently support foreign policies that run counter to their constituents' preferences. In part, they tend to vote their consciences or party lines on international issues because foreign policy is not important to their constituents. In most cases, members of Congress will be neither rewarded nor punished for their endeavors in the international sphere.

Even when they attempt to reflect faithfully their districts' foreign policy attitudes, the aggregation of their views is not always an accurate reflection of national public opinion. After all, there is no guarantee that national opinion leaders, to whom the president looks for guidance, will share the opinions of local leaders to whom legislators may listen.

During the first twenty years of the Cold War, the handful of congressional critics of presidential foreign policy on both sides of the aisle was not influential. The concept of bipartisanship meant that the opposition was expected to approve executive programs while the president went through the motions of prior consultation. As a product in part of the Vietnam War, in the late 1960s, Congress began to flex its long-atrophied muscles and offer programs and ideas independent of the president and, to some degree, more representative of the range of opinions in the country.

Since the 1930s, policymakers have employed polls as a third indicator of opinion. Even the best of them, however, are not always reliable, especially when they attempt to elicit opinions on foreign affairs. Survey instruments do not lend themselves to sophisticated treatment of such questions and, moreover, rarely cover enough contingencies to be of immediate use to decision makers. During the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a majority of those polled thought that the United States would go to war in the near future and recommended such a course if it appeared that England was about to go under. But up to December 1941, only a very small minority told interviewers that they favored an immediate declaration of war. It is impossible to determine on the basis of these data how Americans would have responded to a presidential request for war in the absence of a direct attack on U.S. territory. In addition, some polls are worded so ambiguously that antagonists derive support from the same poll. So it was during the 1960s, when hawks and doves often utilized the same poll to prove that they spoke for the majority concerning the Vietnam involvement. During the last decade of the twentieth century, particularly during the administration of Bill Clinton, policymakers used their own sophisticated polling techniques and focus groups to see how various foreign initiatives might be received by the public. This reliance on first trying out foreign policies on focus groups drew a good deal of criticism during the presidential campaign in 2000 from those who argued that presidents must do what they think is right without checking the nation's pulse and then lead the public to accept their policies.

Phone calls, mail and e-mail, telegrams, and faxes received by the White House and other executive branches represent a fourth source of information about public opinion for the president. Modern administrations keep careful count of the weekly "scores" on specific issues, paying attention to communication that does not appear to be mass-produced by a lobby or political organization. Presidents view significant changes in the direction of opinion or in the number of complaints or commendations on an issue as possibly representing shifts in national public opinion, even though they understand that their sample is very small and hardly a random one. When the mail flow is going their way, presidents often trumpet the news, hoping to affect those who did not write in to climb aboard the bandwagon. Richard Nixon took this part of the activity so seriously that he organized secret Republican operatives around the country to send in supportive letters and telegrams on demand after a speech or a foreign policy initiative.

Last, and most important, politicians claim they have developed finely tuned antennae that enable them to "sense" public opinion. Through an unscientific sampling of opinion from newspapers, Congress, and the polls, and from talking to family members, friends, advisers, and influential leaders, they contend that they can accurately read public opinion on any major issue. Harry Truman told his friends that the polls were wrong in 1948. As he traveled across the nation, he sensed a swing to the Democrats that did not show up in the polls.

To some degree Truman's faith in his political intuition was warranted. Social scientists report that leaders of small groups are better able to assess the range of opinion in their groups than other members are, and, in fact, their rise to leadership status may relate to their superior ability to assess group opinion.

Nevertheless, the politicians' antennae sometimes pick up only opinions that conform to their preconceived notions. Thus, when William McKinley toured the country in 1898 to determine what Americans thought of expansion, he apparently saw and heard only those who favored acquisition of the Philippines. In a slightly different case in the fall of 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly proposed that the United States begin to take a more active role in curbing expansionists in Asia and Europe. According to most opinion indicators available today, a majority of Americans supported his bold quarantine speech. However, before the fact, the president had convinced himself that his remarks would launch a storm of isolationist protest. Consequently, after scanning the newspapers, telegrams, and letters, he found more opposition than was merited by the empirical data. It is irrelevant to students of the foreign policy process that presidents and their advisers often assess public opinion in an unscientific manner and confuse opinions stated publicly with public opinion. When officials act on the basis of an inaccurate reading of opinion, the opinions they hear represent effective public opinion. Naturally, this might indicate that they use public opinion to rationalize or justify a course already decided upon.

The public is usually most important to the decision maker after a major policy has been implemented. At that point, dissenters who challenge both the legitimacy of the policy and presidential authority may be heard. In most cases, presidents have been able to cope with those who oppose their foreign programs. When they are confronted with some negative and little positive reaction to a policy, they can argue that the absence of widespread dissent is the same as tacit support—the silent majority assents by remaining silent. When the ranks of the dissenters swell in Congress and in the media, presidents can dismiss them as partisans who sacrifice national security for political gain. When, as in the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of dissenters march on Washington and support moratoriums, presidents can call attention to the 250 million who stay home. Most citizens would never think of protesting publicly or marching in open opposition to an official foreign policy. Such behavior appears unpatriotic, especially when it is confounded by officials and the media, sometimes purposely, with the scattered violence and revolutionary rhetoric present on the fringes of contemporary mass protests.

In general, presidents can secure their positions by assailing critics for their irresponsibility—they do not know what the presidents know, nor do they have access to the intelligence reports that flow across a president's desk. Furthermore, critics lack knowledge of the intricate linkages between all diplomatic activities from Asia to Latin America. However, this line of argumentation lost some of its power after the 1970s. Many of the more sensational revelations contained in the Pentagon Papers merely documented rumors and leaks that perceptive citizens gleaned from fragmentary accounts in the media during the 1960s. The spirited public debates over the wisdom of intervention in Vietnam demonstrated that critics in the opposition often have as accurate intelligence and knowledge about the issues as those in the White House.

In the last analysis, presidents can usually contain their critics because they hold the office of president, the most visible symbol of the American nation. Many who may privately express skepticism about certain foreign policies are reluctant to speak up for fear of insulting the dignity of the presidency and, perhaps, the prestige of the United States in the international arena.

The power of the president to mold opinion has been enhanced in the twentieth century by electronic media. During much of American history, national leaders encountered difficulties when they tried to appeal to the mass public. In the 1840s, James K. Polk threatened to "go to the people" whenever Congress challenged him. His threat, however, lacked credibility because he did not possess the physical means to reach them. Almost seventy-five years later, Woodrow Wilson might have succeeded in developing irresistible public pressure for his League of Nations had national radio hookups been available.

In the 1920s radio began to play an important role in the political life of the nation. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a consummate master of the new medium, increased his popular support through frequent direct contact with the public. Television, in the right hands, is an even more powerful tool than radio. During the period following World War II, Americans began to suffer from information overload, a condition brought on by constant bombardment with all sorts of material on complex problems. This condition can produce both frustration and confusion. It is only natural, therefore, that Americans turn to the president for relief; he appears on television as a reassuring father figure to simplify reality and ease anxiety. During most of the post–World War II era, contemporary presidents enjoyed easy access to the airwaves. Even when network executives were skeptical about the importance of a presidential speech or a press conference, they could not resist White House demands for free airtime. According to the journalist Tom Wicker, writing in October 1974:

This is a Presidential "power" that no one wrote into the Constitution, or even "implied" in that document…. It is the power to command a vast audience almost at will, and to appear before that audience in all the impressive roles a President can play—from manager of the economy to Commander in Chief…. This "power"…gives a President an enormous advantage over his political opposition, as well as over the other branches of government, in molding opinion. It magnifies a thousandfold what Theodore Roosevelt, long before television, called the "bully pulpit" of the Presidency.

Naturally, after presidents lose credibility, even the cleverest television and media experts are unable to help them regain their audiences. And with the advent of cable television, which meant that Americans could view scores of stations, the major networks began to refuse to carry many presidential appearances, arguing that interested viewers could always find the president on a public-service channel.

Presidents have been assisted by agencies and departments of the executive branch in their dealings with the public. The Department of State has assumed the major responsibility in foreign affairs. Through the years it has been more interested in information and lobbying functions than in survey research. In 1909, Secretary of State Philander C. Knox established the Division of Information, which was responsible for placing news releases into newspapers and other information channels. In 1934 the department became especially active when it launched a lobbying campaign to assist passage of Secretary of State Cordell Hull's Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. During World War II, the department began systematically to survey the press and to provide opinion studies to foreign service officers. In 1944 all of its information functions were placed under an assistant secretary for public affairs. During the Cold War, the promotional aspects of the department's work with the public were expanded through liaison with such influential private foreign policy groups as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association.

The government has had one unfortunate experience with a formal propaganda agency. The Committee on Public Information (also known as the Creel Committee), operating during World War I, angered legislators and other influential leaders because of the methods it used to sell the war effort to Americans. When the Office of War Information was established during World War II, Congress explicitly prohibited domestic propaganda work. The United States Information Agency and the Voice of America are similarly banned from operating in the United States.

Who Is the Public?

No matter how we assess the public's role in the foreign policymaking process, Americans do have opinions on international affairs. The range of their attitudes, knowledge, and interest is wide. As there are many opinions, so are there many publics.

At the apex of the pyramidal structure often used to depict the American polity is a small group of opinion makers: business leaders, politicians, statesmen, publishers, journalists, intellectuals, and organizational spokespersons. There are four basic types of opinion makers. In descending order of importance, they are national multi-issue opinion makers, such as senators; national single-issue opinion makers, such as presidents of corporations with defense contracts; local multi-issue opinion makers, such as the president of a large bank; and local single-issue opinion makers, such as a professor of Islamic studies at a local university.

This elite, which is involved with international affairs in its daily professional capacities, constitutes the policymakers' primary constituency. Many members of this foreign policy establishment periodically serve in either official or advisory government positions. As opinion makers they transmit their ideas through the media to the rest of the population. In their ancillary role as opinion submitters, they present their policy preferences to those in power. These opinion makers influence, articulate, and represent mass opinion. In such relatively low-profile areas as tariff and trade policies (except for such issues as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization), they may be the only interested public. Consequently, they can exercise a good deal of influence in the policymaking process. Through their lobbies, pressure groups, and informal contacts with decision makers, they are often able to ensure that national policy serves their needs.

Through most of American history a disproportionate number of opinion makers lived along the eastern seaboard. By the mid-twentieth century, however, they were more widely dispersed throughout the country. Although New York City still maintained its hegemony as the national media and financial capital, new opinion makers in regional power centers like Atlanta and Los Angeles began to play leading roles in the foreign policymaking process.

Below this rarefied group of powerful individuals is a segment of the population, perhaps as large as 10 percent, that has been labeled "the attentive public." This well-educated group, whose composition can shift from issue to issue, is informed about foreign affairs and may be mobilized for some form of political activism. These members of the middle and upper-middle class read intellectual magazines and books, belong to organizations and pressure groups with continuing interests in problems in the international sphere, and are likely to be among those who sign petitions and write letters to politicians. The attentive public helps to transmit ideas and information from opinion makers to the rest of the population through interpersonal communications. Much of the foreign policy debate takes place within the ranks of the attentive public, the primary audience for the opinion makers on most issues.

The remainder of the population, a vast and generally silent majority, is basically disinterested in most diplomatic events and uninformed about the nature of the international system. Wars and crises that result in banner headlines or preemption of popular television shows will arouse them, but they ignore the day-to-day operation of the foreign policy machine. Furthermore, they rarely contemplate the broad strategic concerns that define the American national interest.

The mass public is latently powerful. On occasion it can be persuaded to exert pressure upon the directors of the nation's foreign policy, or even to counterbalance more articulate critics among opinion makers and the attentive public. When Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon began to lose the backing of the foreign policy establishment, they appealed to the silent majority for support of their Vietnam policies.

The static pyramidal structure masks some of the behavioral interaction among the three groups. One of the leading students of the issue, James N. Rosenau, proposes the analogy of a gigantic theater featuring daily dramas of international intrigue on its stage. Seated in a disproportionately large and distant balcony, the mass public is unable to see and hear much of the action and, consequently, becomes involved only when the actors reach dramatic peaks. The attentive public, in the much smaller orchestra section, follows the performance closely and even helps those from the balcony whom it meets during intermissions. The players or opinion makers on stage variously direct their attentions to other actors, to specific groups in the orchestra, and, occasionally, to those in the balcony. From time to time, almost everyone within the theater is engaged in activities simultaneously, although the majority in the balcony only rarely applauds or boos.

The American public's ignorance of and disinterest in international affairs is not unique. Surveys tell us that most people in most countries are little concerned with diplomacy. Nevertheless, when compared with their peers in western Europe, Americans tend to score lower on questions demanding knowledge of the outside world.

This situation appalls many observers. Americans are better-educated and more literate today than they have ever been. Print and electronic mass media provide their audiences with more essential information than was available to the decision makers themselves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, the public is still woefully uninformed about foreign affairs. As late as 1964, more than one-quarter of those polled in a national survey did not know that a communist regime, which had been in power since 1949, ruled on the mainland of China. During the same period, only a handful of Americans could distinguish among Prince Souvanna Phouma, General Phoumi Nosavan, and Prince Souphanouvong, the three rival leaders contending for power in Laos, a country to which millions of dollars and some U.S. military personnel had been committed. In 1997, only 5 percent of the population could name one European nation that was a candidate for membership in NATO. Paradoxically, in earlier days, despite primitive means of communication, the average American probably was better-informed about foreign affairs than he or she is now. Then, boundary disputes and tariff imbroglios not only were diplomatic problems but also dominated the domestic political debate and determined the health of the economy. Of course, the U.S. role in the international system was not very complicated during the first century and a half of American history.

According to several influential scholars, the widespread disinterest in many political issues is not necessarily an undesirable feature of contemporary American democracy. As long as the majority of the uninformed and noncosmopolitan mass public is disinterested, leaders do not have to worry about irrational inputs into the foreign policy process. Indeed, some theorists contend that democracy in a large polity depends upon mass apathy in order to function effectively. If all Americans were to become interested, informed, and active in the political process, decision makers would be subject to constant crosscutting pressures that would render them incapable of performing their duties. Such a model of the civic culture in the United States disturbs some commentators. They call attention, among other things, to a period in the early 1960s when, insulated from public opinion, the government made decisions about political and military commitments to South Vietnam that had tragic consequences for Americans and Vietnamese alike. Had more Americans been aware of the covert and, at the time, relatively obscure programs, the ensuing ventilation of the issues might have led to the development of alternate policies for South Vietnam. The mass public is not always correct in its assessment of prudent foreign policies, but it can monitor and challenge decision makers who may be moving along dangerous pathways.

The Media and the Public

The American public's lack of interest in and information about foreign affairs is intimately related to the relative lack of interest displayed in such topics by their news and informational organs. Except for a handful of cosmopolitan dailies, few newspapers maintain a staff of foreign correspondents or offer many column inches of international news. Most rely upon one of the major wire services for whatever foreign news they see fit to print. By 2000, the Associated Press, which had come to dominate the wire services in the United States, was used by 1,700 U.S. newspapers and 5,000 U.S. radio and television outlets. The most influential shapers of media presentations of international problems may be the handful of journalists who produce the daily news budgets for the wire services. The New York Times plays a comparable role, particularly for the editors of the television networks' nightly newscasts, who, like most journalists and politicians, consider its judgment about what is important foreign news preeminent among all newspapers.

Electronic media bring foreign news to Americans over regularly scheduled news broadcasts and special programs. For the most part, however, their treatments lack the continuity and background material that would enable their audience to make sense out of a one-minute report on a riot in Nigeria or a thirty-second reference to the fall of the Euro. Television time is so expensive, and the time allocated to news so limited, that viewers are afforded only fleeting, disjointed glimpses of complex international events. News of body counts, bombings, and inflammatory rhetoric are treated without concern for the historical processes in which they are embedded. Only when there is a major crisis do some networks, particularly the cable news networks, offer sustained treatment of an international problem that goes beyond the brief snapshot of the sensational happening. And even then, most viewers, except "news junkies," quickly begin to surf other channels to find lighter programming.

Publishers and editors are convinced that, except in times of crisis, foreign news does not attract large enough audiences to satisfy the demands of their cost accountants. Although they probably are correct in their judgment, a feedback process is at work here. The directors of the mass media perceive their audience as uninterested in most stories with international datelines. Consequently, they offer a skimpy diet of such materials. Presented with such fare, the audience will never become either informed about or interested in international affairs. Whatever the explanation for public and media disinterest in such news, the situation is unlikely to change radically in the foreseeable future. The increasingly complicated diplomatic arena, with its numerous international organizations and nations no longer operating in a simpler bipolar world, makes the task of understanding foreign policy more difficult than it has ever been and, perhaps, not worth the effort for most Americans. After all, to become competent in international affairs in the 1990s, one had to know something about the history of the Balkans, the nature of Islamic fundamentalism, and the social structure of the Peruvian peasantry. In the 2000 election campaign, many Americans sympathized with the Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, who not only had a difficult time pronouncing "foreign" names but often could not remember them at all. This lack of interest in learning about the world intensified after the Cold War ended and the international system became a less dangerous but also far more complicated place for most citizens.

Sources of the Public's Opinions

Although the vast majority of Americans do not closely follow foreign affairs, they do express opinions about foreign countries and problems of peace and war. These opinions, as well as their underlying attitudinal and value structures, are developed in various ways from a variety of sources. Quite often people form attitudes about public affairs because of factors that may have nothing to do with the merits of a case.

An individual's attitude toward foreign policy is determined in part by his or her educational experiences, religious affiliation, age, place of residence, and even sex. Citizens belonging to the same cohorts tend to share similar foreign policy attitudes. College graduates are more likely to be internationalists than people with a high-school education; Catholics are more likely to be hostile to socialist nations than non-Catholics; young people in the 1990s were more friendly to the Japanese than those who remembered Pearl Harbor; midwesterners are usually more isolationist than easterners and westerners; and women tend to be less militaristic than men. All of these rather simplistic dichotomous generalizations are more complicated than they appear at first glance. For example, midwesterners may be isolationist because they live hundreds of miles from the coasts, or because farmers are more isolationist than city dwellers, or for several other reasons. Young people may be relatively friendly to Japanese because they are more tolerant of Asians in general, or because they have learned to understand the Japanese point of view in 1941, or because they harbor guilt feelings about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The groups to which an individual belongs are not the only predictors of foreign policy attitudes. Psychological and personality factors also influence, and may even determine, political attitudes. In one of the most famous explorations in this area, researchers discovered that those who score high on the "F" or authoritarian scale are often xenophobic and militaristic, while those with low scores are more tolerant of foreigners and more pacific. The authoritarian and other specific personality types are affected by the pattern of the individuals' relationship to their parents, their sexual experiences, and their career development. In one study of the impact of personality on foreign policy attitudes, psychologists theorized that a subject was pro-Russian during the 1950s because his mother had been an oppressively dominant factor during his childhood. At the other end of the political spectrum, a subject's violent Russo phobia was attributed to his need to display the courage and toughness that he lacked as a youth. Interestingly, it is likely that the more important a public issue is for an individual, the more his or her attitudes will be determined by such psychological factors.

Regardless of the social or personality group to which one belongs, people the world over are generally suspicious of outsiders, whether those outsiders represent a different church, community, or country. Such suspicions increase in inverse proportion to knowledge. Since many Americans lack knowledge of other nations, they often view foreigners both in negative and in stereotypical terms. Stereotypes that simplify a complicated world are most comforting when the individual who relies upon them is not exposed to dissonant information.

For many Americans, and a good many Europeans, Latins are lazy, Jews are shrewd, and Arabs are terrorists. Not all stereotypes are negative. The smaller and less threatening the country, the more likely Americans are to admire its people. Charming and peaceful countries like the Denmark of Hans Christian Andersen and the Switzerland of hardy democrats have long had pleasant images in the United States. Stereotypes for larger and more powerful states are usually more ambiguous. Depending upon the specific historical situation, the positive or negative components of those stereotypes may be dominant. Although at times Americans have been attracted to the polite and clever Chinese seen in the Charlie Chan character, they have at other times been fearful of the fiendish Mandarin Fu Manchu. Germans have been esteemed for their efficiency and cleanliness but also despised for their arrogance and brutality. During the 1940s, Russians went from godless communist conspirators to partisan freedom fighters and then back to godless communist conspirators in a matter of eight years.

In some cases, Americans have confused a country's foreign policy with its nationals. However, when asked about this distinction, they respond that they have nothing against ordinary folk in a rival state, only the ruling class. Indeed, they express sympathy for those who live under dictatorial regimes. All too often Americans have assumed that such benighted people must be hostile to their overlords. This sort of analysis led some to conclude, during the early years of the war in Vietnam, that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong performed so well in the field because they were either drugged or chained to their weapons. Similarly, in the 1990s many Americans believed that the people of Iraq could not wait to overthrow their evil dictator, Saddam Hussein.

The Soviet-American relationship during the Cold War produced the intriguing hypothesis that the antagonists tended to view each other in terms of a mirror image. That is, each side saw its rival as its polar opposite. Russians viewed themselves as defensive and conciliatory and Americans as offensive and refractory, while Americans reversed these images. Such an interpretation is supported by the general psychological principle of projection, in which individuals project their own character flaws onto those whom they dislike. As they emerged from the crushing Vietnam experience in the 1970s, Americans became more self-critical and began to see themselves as others saw them. The mirror-image phenomenon of the 1950s was replaced by a more realistic view of America's role and actions in the international system, at least for a while. Such realistic introspection did not sit well with many citizens who rallied to their old vision of national superiority under the administration of Ronald Reagan.

Although American images of foreign countries may shift from generation to generation, groups organized around their ethnic origins often constitute permanent lobbies for their homelands. Such Americans have been active throughout American diplomatic history. The mythical melting pot has failed to create a new American; even to the fourth and fifth generations, many citizens cling to their original nationality. In diplomatic and military disputes that do not directly involve the United States, German Americans, Polish Americans, and Arab Americans, among others, tend to support their homelands. Often this support is given without regard to the national interest of their adopted country. Fenians of Irish origin tried to bring England and the United States to war in the 1860s. During World War I, German Americans vigorously contested Woodrow Wilson's drift toward the British and ultimately his decision for war. Throughout much of the post–World War II era, Jewish Americans exercised a powerful influence, if not a veto, over U.S. Middle East policy. Cuban Americans played a similar role in affecting the nature of U.S. policy toward Cuba under Fidel Castro.

The ethnically based lobby is only one type of mass pressure group. Other segments of the public can be mobilized because of shared economic interests. In the months before the outbreak of the War of 1812, midwestern farmers agitated for war against England because they blamed their depressed condition on the British Navigation Acts. In the late twentieth century, New England fishermen pressured the State Department to support measures that would keep Russian and other competitors away from their traditional fishing grounds, while most corporate leaders pressured Washington to break down tariff barriers through free-trade and other international organizations.

Ideology can also arouse citizens to action. During the 1930s, many American Catholics worked to prevent the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt from permitting arms sales to the Republican government of Spain. Conversely, many college students who saw the Spanish Republicans as heroic antifascists attempted to force Roosevelt to relax the arms embargo. During the 1950s, the conservative Committee of One Million was a powerful voice in the debate over America's China policy. Two decades later, a comparable anticommunist group, the Committee on the Present Danger, exercised great influence within the Republican Party in destroying support for Nixon and Ford's policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

Although, from time to time, special interest groups have been able to play powerful roles in American diplomatic history, they have not been as influential in the shaping of foreign policy as they have been in domestic policy. For the most part, American diplomats have been able either to ignore them or to play them off against one another.

Conclusion

Wherever we probe in our study of public opinion and foreign policy, we encounter frustrating complexities and ambiguities. Political theorists and historians disagree about the ways the public ought to influence foreign policy and the dimensions of the actual nature of the relationship in American history. Most contend that presidents are somehow constrained by a public that defines broad national goals and sets parameters for action. Yet the presidents' preeminence in the opinion-making process guarantees them almost as much freedom in the international arena as leaders from less democratic systems. The public itself is not monolithic. Several publics possess varying degrees of knowledge of, interest in, and influence on foreign policy. Individuals develop foreign policy attitudes because of exposure to events and as a result of socioeconomic status and personality development.

The wealth of sophisticated research produced by social scientists since World War II underscores the gaps in knowledge about the opinion-policy relationship. Although we know much more about the origins of foreign policy attitudes, as well as the world of the decision maker, the precise nature of the opinion-policy nexus still eludes us. Because of the questions raised about the meaning of the Vietnam experience for the American democratic system, scholars and statesmen began reexamining the public's impact on foreign policy. As might have been expected, considering the earlier debates over this complicated and contentious issue during the life of the republic, they have failed to reach a clear consensus on this most important and often troubling aspect of their unique political system.

Bibliography

Almond, Gabriel A. The American People and Foreign Policy. New York, 1950. A path breaking effort by a social scientist, now rather dated.

Bailey, Thomas A. The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy. New York, 1948. The classic impressionistic and wonderfully anecdotal treatment by a dean of diplomatic historians.

Barnet, Richard J. The Rocket's Red Glare: When America Goes to War—The Presidents and the People. New York, 1990.

Benson, Lee. "An Approach to the Scientific Study of Past Public Opinion." Public Opinion Quarterly 30, no 4. (1967–1968): 522–567.

Cohen, Bernard C. The Public's Impact on Foreign Policy. Boston, 1973. One of the soundest treatments of the subject, especially the introductory chapter on the state of the art.

Foster, H. Schuyler. Activism Replaces Isolationism: U.S. Public Attitudes, 1940–1975. Washington, D.C., 1983.

Foyle, Douglas C. Counting the Public In: Presidents, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy. New York, 1999. An interesting attempt by a political scientist to categorize the approaches of recent presidents.

Graber, Doris A. Public Opinion, the President, and Foreign Policy: Four Case Studies from the Formative Years. New York, 1968.

Hilderbrand, Robert C. Power and the People: Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897–1921. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981.

Holsti, Ole R. Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996.

Kegley, Charles W., Jr., and Eugene R. Wittkopf, eds. The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Policy: Insights and Evidence. New York, 1988. Several useful contemporary studies in this political science volume.

Levering, Ralph B. The Public and American Foreign Policy, 1918–1978. New York, 1978. A valuable brief survey by a leading specialist in the field.

Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York, 1922. Still a thought-provoking treatise.

——. Essays in the Public Philosophy. Boston, 1955. A critique of democratic leaders' pandering to the emotional masses.

May, Ernest R. "An American Tradition in Foreign Policy: The Role of Public Opinion." In William H. Nelson, ed. Theory and Practice in American Politics. Chicago, 1964, pp. 101–222.

Mueller, John E. War, Presidents, and Public Opinion. New York, 1973. An influential work by a political scientist concentrating on the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Newsom, David D. The Public Dimension of Foreign Policy. Bloomington, Ind., 1996. A practitioner takes a look at the problem.

Rosenau, James N. Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: An Operational Formulation. New York, 1961. A still-important study of the various publics and their relationships to the policymakers.

Shapiro, Robert Y., and Benjamin I. Page. "Foreign Policy and Public Opinion." In David A. Deese, ed. The New Politics of American Foreign Policy. New York, 1994.

Small, Melvin. "Historians Look at Public Opinion." In Melvin Small, ed. Public Opinion and Historians: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Detroit, Mich., 1970. An analysis of the shortcomings of traditional historical approaches to the subject.

——. Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves. New Brunswick, N.J., 1988. An attempt by a historian to evaluate the influence of the antiwar movement on presidential decision making.

——. Democracy and Diplomacy: The Impact of Domestic Politics on U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1994. Baltimore, 1996.

— Melvin Small

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For other uses, see Public opinion (disambiguation).

Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population. Public opinion can also be defined as the complex collection of opinions of many different people and the sum of all their views. The principle approaches to the study of public opinion may be divided into 4 categories:

1. quantitative measurement of opinion distributions;
2. investigation of the internal relationships among the individual opinions that make up public opinion on an issue;
3. description or analysis of the public role of public opinion;
4. study both of the communication media that disseminate the ideas on which opinions are based and of the uses that propagandists and other manipulators make of these media.

Contents 1 Concepts of “public opinion” 2 Private opinion and public policy 3 The use of public opinion studies 4 See also 5 Notes 6 Bibliography

Concepts of “public opinion”

Public opinion as a concept gained credence with the rise of 'public' in the eighteenth century. The English term ‘public opinion’ dates back to the eighteenth century and has derived from the French ‘l’opinion publique’, which was first used in 1588 by Montaigne. This concept came about through the process of urbanization and other political and social forces. For the first time, it became important what people thought, as forms of political contention changed.

Adam Smith, one of the earliest classical economists, refers to public opinion in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, but it was Jeremy Bentham, the famous utilitarian Philosopher, who fully developed theories of public opinion. He opined that public opinion had the power to ensure that rulers would rule for the greatest happiness of the greater number. He brought in Utilitarian philosophy in order to define theories of public opinion.

The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, by using the conceptional tools of his theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, argued (1922, "Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung"), that 'public opinion' has the equivalent social functions in societies (Gesellschaften) which religion has in communities (Gemeinschaften).^[1]

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas contributed the idea of "Public Sphere" to the discussion of public opinion. Public Sphere, according to Habermas, is where “something approaching public opinion can be formed” (2004, p.351). Habermas claimed that it is featured as universal access, rational debate, and disregard for rank. However, he believed that these three features for how public opinion should be formed are not in place in western democracy. Public opinion, in western democracy, is highly susceptible to elite manipulation.

The American sociologist Herbert Blumer has proposed an altogether different conception of the "public." According to Blumer, public opinion is discussed as a form of collective behavior (another specialized term) which is made up of those who are discussing a given public issue at any one time. Given this definition, there are many publics; each of them comes into being when an issue arises and ceases to exist when the issue is resolved. Blumer claims that people participate in public in different capacities and to different degrees. So, public opinion polling cannot measure the public. An educated individual's participation is more important than that of a drunk. The "mass," in which people independently make decisions about, for example, which brand of toothpaste to buy, is a form of collective behavior different from the public.

Public opinion plays an important role in the political sphere. Cutting across all aspects of relationship between government and public opinion are studies of voting behavior. These have registered the distribution of opinions on a wide variety of issues, have explored the impact of special interest groups on election outcomes and have contributed to our knowledge about the effects of government propaganda and policy. Three communities of people who form Public Opinion 1: Public Leaders and Thinker 2: Common Educated Class 3: Common People

Private opinion and public policy

The most pervasive issue dividing theories of the opinion-policy relation bears a striking resemblance to the problem of monism-pluralism in the history of philosophy. The controversy deals with the question of whether the structure of socio-political action should be viewed as a more or less centralized process of acts and decisions by a class of key leaders, representing integrated hierarchies of influence in society or whether it is more accurately envisaged as several sets of relatively autonomous opinion and influence groups, interacting with representative decisionmakers in an official structure of differentiated governmental authority. The former assumption interprets individual, group and official action as part of a single system and reduces politics and governmental policies to a derivative of three basic analytical terms: society, culture and personality.

The use of public opinion studies

The rapid spread of public opinion measurement around the world is reflection of the number of uses to which it can be put. Governments have increasingly found surveys to be useful tools for guiding their public information and propaganda programs and occasionally for helping in the formulation of other kinds of policies. The US Department of Agriculture was one of the first government agencies to sponsor systematic and large scale surveys. It was followed by many other federal bodies, including the US information agency which has conducted opinion research in all parts of the world.

Public opinion can be influenced by public relations and the political media. Additionally, mass media utilizes a wide variety of advertising techniques to get their message out and change the minds of people. A continuously used technique is propaganda.

The tide of public opinion becomes more and more crucial during political elections, most importantly elections determining the national executive. Some think the Overton window is a method for shifting or describing shifts in public opinion.

It is frequently measured using the method of survey sampling.

See also

• Truth
• Collective behaviour
• Opinion polls
• Public Opinion Quarterly
• Public sphere
• Political socialization
• Urtak

Organisations

• American Association for Public Opinion Research
• European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research
• World Association for Public Opinion Research

• Gabriel Tarde
• Ferdinand Tönnies
• Walter Lippmann

Notes

1. ^ cf. Rolf Fechner/Lars Clausen/Arno Bammé (eds.): Öffentliche Meinung zwischen neuer Religion und neuer Wissenschaft. Ferdinand Tönnies' „Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung“ in der internationalen Diskussion, in: Tönnies im Gespräch, tom. 3, Munich/Vienna: Profil 2005, ISBN 3-89019-590-3.

Bibliography

• Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923
• Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1989 (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Neuwied 1962)
• Jacob Shamir/Michal Shamir, The Anatomy of Public Opinion, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. [1]
• Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922.
• Norman John Powell, Anatomy of Public Opinion, New York, Prentice-Hall, 1951.
• Ferdinand Tönnies, On Public Opinion, 1970 (Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung, 1922, critical edition by Alexander Deichsel, Rolf Fechner, and Rainer Waßner, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter 2003)

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