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Mind the Gap: Three Papers on the Dynamics of Elite and Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy
Mind the Gap: Three Papers on the Dynamics of Elite and Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy
상세정보
- 자료유형
- 학위논문 서양
- 최종처리일시
- 20260202103554
- ISBN
- 9798288864780
- DDC
- 320
- 서명/저자
- Mind the Gap: Three Papers on the Dynamics of Elite and Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy
- 발행사항
- [Sl] : University of California, Berkeley, 2025
- 발행사항
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025
- 형태사항
- 143 p
- 주기사항
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-01, Section: A.
- 주기사항
- Advisor: Hyde, Susan;Brutger, Ryan.
- 학위논문주기
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2025.
- 초록/해제
- 요약The United States public doesn't know very much about foreign policy. Though the interests and actions of the U.S. span the globe and have profound impacts on the lives of its citizens, the issues at stake can seem obscure and far-removed from the everyday experience of the average voter. This lack of knowledge, and the corresponding lack of emphasis the public tends to place on foreign policy when compared to domestic concerns when polled, can lead scholars to be dismissive of the importance of public opinion when it comes to foreign policy. Yet politicians do not act as if the public doesn't matter--they talk about foreign policy often, and do so in ways meant to persuade the public to their side. Indeed, despite the low priority the U.S. public generally gives foreign policy in polls, when a foreign policy issue breaks through, it can break through in a big way. From the political convulsions set off by the Vietnam War to the unlikely elevation of Barack Obama to the Presidency on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq War, one need not squint to see evidence of major electoral impacts brought on by public dissatisfaction with the way U.S. foreign policy is conducted. Even outside of major international events and crises, the effort that politicians make to move public opinion on foreign policy issues indicates its importance.How well do these persuasive efforts work? A large literature in political science on "elite cues'' has shown that the public looks to like-minded political leaders for signals in order to form opinions on issues, especially when they have little knowledge of those issues. In this literature, partisanship has traditionally been the master variable when it comes to which elites are considered "like-minded'' by a given voter. With partisan polarization increasing among both elites and the public in recent decades, this connection between partisans in the public and their co-partisan leaders seems like it should be stronger than ever. However, foreign policy has long been a domain where partisan divisions are less stark and less stable. Which of the two major parties in the U.S. of the 2020s is "anti-war?'' Which favors free trade? Is partisanship the key to understanding how and when elites are able to move the public on foreign policy?In this dissertation, I present three papers that all deal with the connection between elites and the U.S. public and that all investigate the ways partisan identity interacts with this relationship. The overall picture that emerges is one of a public estranged from its own partisan elites on international matters. The public is not an empty box, ready to be filled by elites. Rather, members of the public hold attitudes that are often in opposition to those held by their leaders, and display resistance to persuasion in various ways. Furthermore, when voters use partisanship as a heuristic to form opinions about foreign policy issues, they do so in sophisticated ways. Instead of merely adopting the attitudes of co-partisan elites, the public uses partisanship as a piece of information to make decisions about what policies to support.In the first paper, I ask how divisions between elite and public opinion on foreign policy have changed over time. Drawing on the most comprehensive source of data on U.S. public and elite foreign policy opinion, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs surveys, I show that the public and elites disagree on foreign policy issues more now than they ever have. I leverage unique aspects of this rich source of opinion data, namely the repetition of the same questions over many years, to show that these elite/public gaps also do not tend to shrink over time. This descriptive study replicates and extends prior work on Chicago Council opinion surveys by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, adding twenty years of more recent data, analyzing trends more rigorously, and bringing data on partisanship into the analysis of elite/public gaps. Partisanship emerges as an increasingly important factor structuring public opinion on foreign policy, but even in our contemporary era of extreme polarization, divisions between elites and the public outstrip divisions between the parties.In the second paper, I ask how partisan cues affect public opinion when multiple partisan elites are communicating to the public simultaneously. In an environment with multiple elites attempting persuasion, how does the public react to the partisan identity of the elites? Can the persuasive power of a president be constrained by dissent from within their own party? Two heuristic models of public opinion formation put emphasis on either partisan loyalty or surprising opinions, and produce distinct expectations for opinion formation in a complex multiple-cue environment. I run a survey experiment on a representative sample of U.S. adults in order to test these models, using a hypothetical security scenario as a test case. While I find no support for the expected effect of intraparty dissent weakening a President's persuasive power, the results do provide support for the surprising opinions heuristic over the "partisan loyalty" heuristic. At least in some contexts of elites persuading the public, the public is more likely to use partisanship as a source of potential information about policy than as a signal to cheerlead "their side."In the third paper, I dive below the level of partisan affiliation into foreign policy ideologies. Isolationists and internationalists exist in both the Democratic and Republican parties, as do hawks and doves. Partisan elites use rhetoric that appeals to these two dimensions of foreign policy ideology in their public statements. How effective are these different types of ideological rhetoric when persuading the public on the issue of defending an ally? Using a second survey experiment, I show that there is little difference between how Republican and Democratic voters respond to these rhetorical appeals. However, voters' ideological predispositions do influence what sorts of appeals they respond to.Together, these three papers show that the dynamics of elites and the public on foreign policy go beyond partisanship, even in an age of hyper-polarization.
- 일반주제명
- Political science
- 키워드
- Elite cues
- 키워드
- Foreign policy
- 키워드
- Public opinion
- 기타저자
- University of California, Berkeley Political Science
- 기본자료저록
- Dissertations Abstracts International. 87-01A.
- 전자적 위치 및 접속
- 로그인 후 원문을 볼 수 있습니다.
MARC
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■1001 ▼aBlinkinsop, Andrew.
■24510▼aMind the Gap: Three Papers on the Dynamics of Elite and Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy
■260 ▼a[Sl]▼bUniversity of California, Berkeley▼c2025
■260 1▼aAnn Arbor▼bProQuest Dissertations & Theses▼c2025
■300 ▼a143 p
■500 ▼aSource: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-01, Section: A.
■500 ▼aAdvisor: Hyde, Susan;Brutger, Ryan.
■5021 ▼aThesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2025.
■520 ▼aThe United States public doesn't know very much about foreign policy. Though the interests and actions of the U.S. span the globe and have profound impacts on the lives of its citizens, the issues at stake can seem obscure and far-removed from the everyday experience of the average voter. This lack of knowledge, and the corresponding lack of emphasis the public tends to place on foreign policy when compared to domestic concerns when polled, can lead scholars to be dismissive of the importance of public opinion when it comes to foreign policy. Yet politicians do not act as if the public doesn't matter--they talk about foreign policy often, and do so in ways meant to persuade the public to their side. Indeed, despite the low priority the U.S. public generally gives foreign policy in polls, when a foreign policy issue breaks through, it can break through in a big way. From the political convulsions set off by the Vietnam War to the unlikely elevation of Barack Obama to the Presidency on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq War, one need not squint to see evidence of major electoral impacts brought on by public dissatisfaction with the way U.S. foreign policy is conducted. Even outside of major international events and crises, the effort that politicians make to move public opinion on foreign policy issues indicates its importance.How well do these persuasive efforts work? A large literature in political science on "elite cues'' has shown that the public looks to like-minded political leaders for signals in order to form opinions on issues, especially when they have little knowledge of those issues. In this literature, partisanship has traditionally been the master variable when it comes to which elites are considered "like-minded'' by a given voter. With partisan polarization increasing among both elites and the public in recent decades, this connection between partisans in the public and their co-partisan leaders seems like it should be stronger than ever. However, foreign policy has long been a domain where partisan divisions are less stark and less stable. Which of the two major parties in the U.S. of the 2020s is "anti-war?'' Which favors free trade? Is partisanship the key to understanding how and when elites are able to move the public on foreign policy?In this dissertation, I present three papers that all deal with the connection between elites and the U.S. public and that all investigate the ways partisan identity interacts with this relationship. The overall picture that emerges is one of a public estranged from its own partisan elites on international matters. The public is not an empty box, ready to be filled by elites. Rather, members of the public hold attitudes that are often in opposition to those held by their leaders, and display resistance to persuasion in various ways. Furthermore, when voters use partisanship as a heuristic to form opinions about foreign policy issues, they do so in sophisticated ways. Instead of merely adopting the attitudes of co-partisan elites, the public uses partisanship as a piece of information to make decisions about what policies to support.In the first paper, I ask how divisions between elite and public opinion on foreign policy have changed over time. Drawing on the most comprehensive source of data on U.S. public and elite foreign policy opinion, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs surveys, I show that the public and elites disagree on foreign policy issues more now than they ever have. I leverage unique aspects of this rich source of opinion data, namely the repetition of the same questions over many years, to show that these elite/public gaps also do not tend to shrink over time. This descriptive study replicates and extends prior work on Chicago Council opinion surveys by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, adding twenty years of more recent data, analyzing trends more rigorously, and bringing data on partisanship into the analysis of elite/public gaps. Partisanship emerges as an increasingly important factor structuring public opinion on foreign policy, but even in our contemporary era of extreme polarization, divisions between elites and the public outstrip divisions between the parties.In the second paper, I ask how partisan cues affect public opinion when multiple partisan elites are communicating to the public simultaneously. In an environment with multiple elites attempting persuasion, how does the public react to the partisan identity of the elites? Can the persuasive power of a president be constrained by dissent from within their own party? Two heuristic models of public opinion formation put emphasis on either partisan loyalty or surprising opinions, and produce distinct expectations for opinion formation in a complex multiple-cue environment. I run a survey experiment on a representative sample of U.S. adults in order to test these models, using a hypothetical security scenario as a test case. While I find no support for the expected effect of intraparty dissent weakening a President's persuasive power, the results do provide support for the surprising opinions heuristic over the "partisan loyalty" heuristic. At least in some contexts of elites persuading the public, the public is more likely to use partisanship as a source of potential information about policy than as a signal to cheerlead "their side."In the third paper, I dive below the level of partisan affiliation into foreign policy ideologies. Isolationists and internationalists exist in both the Democratic and Republican parties, as do hawks and doves. Partisan elites use rhetoric that appeals to these two dimensions of foreign policy ideology in their public statements. How effective are these different types of ideological rhetoric when persuading the public on the issue of defending an ally? Using a second survey experiment, I show that there is little difference between how Republican and Democratic voters respond to these rhetorical appeals. However, voters' ideological predispositions do influence what sorts of appeals they respond to.Together, these three papers show that the dynamics of elites and the public on foreign policy go beyond partisanship, even in an age of hyper-polarization.
■590 ▼aSchool code: 0028.
■650 4▼aPolitical science
■653 ▼aAmerican politics
■653 ▼aElite cues
■653 ▼aForeign policy
■653 ▼aPublic opinion
■653 ▼aSurvey experiment
■690 ▼a0615
■690 ▼a0601
■71020▼aUniversity of California, Berkeley▼bPolitical Science.
■7730 ▼tDissertations Abstracts International▼g87-01A.
■790 ▼a0028
■791 ▼aPh.D.
■792 ▼a2025
■793 ▼aEnglish
■85640▼uhttp://www.riss.kr/pdu/ddodLink.do?id=T17357743▼nKERIS▼z이 자료의 원문은 한국교육학술정보원에서 제공합니다.


