The Public Salience of Foreign and Security Policy in Britain, Germany and France

Abstract

The salience of foreign affairs to general publics is an important but often neglected parameter for the role of public opinion in foreign and security policy. This article explores the determinants of foreign affairs' public salience and probes into the respective patterns in Germany, Britain and France. Building on the theory of news values, the article proposes to distinguish between issue-specific and country-specific influences on the public salience of foreign and security policy. The data suggest that broad international crises on the scale of 9/11 or the Iraq war go along with distinct cross-national peaks in the salience of foreign affairs to general publics. At the same time, the effects of constant issue logics are refracted by country-specific factors: most notably, the latter account for the much higher overall salience of foreign affairs to the British public than to the German and French publics since late 2002.

Acknowledgements

The article builds on a paper presented at the 2nd Global International Studies Conference in Ljubljana, 23–26 July 2008. We would like to thank the participants of our panel and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. The effects of an issue's high public salience on the ability of governments to push through their favoured policies are not necessarily negative. The constraining effects of high public salience only pertain to the leeway of governments to pursue policies that run counter to the public's preferences. When governments seek to implement policies which are in line with the wishes of the public, in contrast, they will be strengthened vis-à-vis their opponents if the public salience of the respective policies is high.

2. For a partial exception regarding public opinion in the US see Knecht and Weatherford (2006); for an analysis of the salience of political issues in British party manifestos see Pogorelis et al. (2005).

3. The distinction between issue-specific and country-specific determinants of public salience is derived from the concept of situational logic, which has been proposed as a framework for middle-range theorising (Esser 2002: 130–33). One, the concept refers to ‘situational’ elements of explanation which account for differences in outcomes across specific contexts and have been conceptualised in this article as country-specific determinants of public salience. Two, the concept points to elements of explanation which identify a constant ‘logic’ of causation that is independent from specific contexts. Here, these constant parameters are referred to as issue-specific determinants of public salience that have an equal effect on the salience of foreign affairs irrespective of country-specific differences.

4. Given the relative nature of public salience, the difference between majoritarian and consensus-oriented systems only relates to the volatility of foreign affairs' salience, not to its overall level.

5. The criterion of direct involvement has a subjective dimension to it and is not to be measured solely against some objective standard. The general publics' sense of being immediately affected by international events may be strongly influenced, for example, by historical, cultural and linguistic ties between societies or by a country's strategic culture.

6. This conjecture can be illustrated by the different levels in the average public salience of defence issues in the US and Canada. Whereas the US is the prototype of a country which is strongly engaged in world politics and in international conflicts, Canada is arguably less entwined with international affairs. Correspondingly, defence issues tend to be relatively salient to the American but less so to the Canadian public: with regard to the US, defence has figured as a significant electoral issue in various presidential elections (Asher 1992), and public opinion has been proven strongly responsive to policy changes regarding defence spending (Wlezien 1996) – both of which being indicative of the field's high public salience. In the case of Canada, on the contrary, the weak responsiveness of public preferences to changes in defence spending speaks to a rather modest public salience of defence issues (Soroka and Wlezien 2004).

7. We owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.

8. UK data from Ipsos Mori Political Monitor (2008): unprompted, combined answers to the questions: ‘What would you say is the most important issue facing Britain today?’ and ‘What do you see as other important issues facing Britain today?’; German data from Forsa Bus (1997–2006): ‘Was sind Ihrer Meinung nach in Deutschland zur Zeit die drei größten Probleme?’

9. We are aware that the composite issue of ‘Foreign Affairs, Defence or Terrorism’ represents a rather extensive range of concerns. Nonetheless, this category has the virtue of being not only broad enough to encompass all spontaneous enumerations that relate to foreign and security policy but also sufficiently distinct to cover only foreign affairs issues and to exclude, for example, personal security concerns that relate to domestic issues such as crime. Moreover, we contend that meaningful comparisons of issue salience over time and across countries require a high level of aggregation of individual polling data.

10. Strictly speaking, our selection of cases does not allow us to discard the possibility that cross-national similarities in the public salience of foreign affairs may be due to similarities in country-specific contexts which have been omitted in our analysis. This possibility could only be ruled out by analyses that resort to a most dissimilar cases design, in which the countries under study differ in all relevant dimensions except in the patterns of public attention to foreign affairs (King et al. 1994: 168–82).