Militant internationalism and dogmatism among foreign policy elites: evidence from Russia, 1995–2016

ABSTRACT

Are foreign policy attitudes among Russian elites structured around broader beliefs about the nature of world politics? Are these attitudes consistently related to individual cognitive styles? I address these questions using survey data on the Russian foreign policy elite spanning most of the post-Soviet period. In my analysis, I focus on militant internationalism – a hawkish foreign policy orientation – and its relationship to the dogmatic cognitive style. The internal structure of militant internationalism among Russian elites reveals two constituent dimensions: perception of threat from the United States (anti-Americanism) and acceptance of using armed force abroad (militarism). I also demonstrate that militarism is positively related to dogmatism, whereas anti-Americanism appears to be more volatile. This analysis represents the first attempt to study elites’ views on foreign policy within the motivated cognition framework using survey data from outside of the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Militant internationalism
• dogmatism
• foreign policy
• attitudes
• elites
• Russia

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Vladimir Gel’man, Kimberly Marten, David Rivera, and Sharon Rivera for their comments on the previous version of this article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.