Description
This paper argues that studies on the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy require a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the salience of foreign policy issues to the electorate. The two dominant approaches in this field – liberal and constructivist – both implicitly rely on the ideas that a) foreign policy matters to the electorate and b) the electorate’s view on foreign policy impacts policy. For example, in the influential work of Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, the authors use experimental survey data on hypothetical interventions to show that the U.S. public are not as casualty averse as policymakers have assumed. What is left unexplored in this work, and also in constructivist studies that focus on elite rhetoric as a means of legitimating foreign policy decisions, is the salience of foreign policy matters to the electorate. Without resorting to the debunked theories of the Almond-Lippman consensus on public opinion, this paper explores historical datasets on important issues to the American public to examine the varying salience of foreign policy and explores the consequences of these results on the study of foreign policy and public opinion.
