Description
How do populations of small powers think about their country‘s relationship to China and the US? How are preferences for future bilateral ties distributed within populations, particularly in countries that are not committed to either camp? And what are possible implications of this for foreign policy-makers in Beijing and Washington? In a recent survey we asked 15,105 respondents in 32 countries in Africa (9), Latin America (11), Eastern Europe (8), Asia and the Middle East (4) how they judge their country’s current relationship to the US and China, and to tell us how they think it ought to be. In the paper we discuss not only the status quo of public attitudes toward these rivaling great powers, we also discuss how the potential for small power foreign policy change can be conceptualized. To that end, we develop a typology based on two dimensions: discrepancy (difference between current and desired relationship) and polarization (standard deviation of desired relationship). Subsequently, we discuss the four resulting types of small power public preferences, and present paradigmatic cases representative of each type, to corroborate our theorizations and to illustrate the suggested consequences for great power foreign policy.