Too Pacifist in Peace, Too Bellicose in War: Political Information and Foreign Policy Opinion

• Author: Katja B. Kleinberg,Benjamin O. Fordham
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002720912818
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Too Pacifist in Peace,

Too Bellicose in War:

Political Information and

Foreign Policy Opinion

Benjamin O. Fordham

1

and Katja B. Kleinberg

1

Abstract

Scholars of public opinion and foreign policy recognize that the general public is

poorly informed about international affairs, but they disagree about whether and

how this fact affects the policies that it will support. Some argue that the lack of

information has little effect, at least in the aggregate, while others hold that political

information mediates attention to elite cues. We investigate a third line of argument

in which political information has a direct effect on the policy options individuals

support. Low levels of political information give rise to a pattern of complacency

toward likely international threats in times of relative peace and a contrasting ten-

dency to support violent and aggressive policy options during war or acute crises.

We test this argument using survey data from two relevant historical settings: the

American entry into World War II and the response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Keywords

foreign policy, public opinion, conflict, threat perception

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans who felt threat-

ened were markedly less likely to support civil liberties (Davis and Silver 2004) and

more likely to express support for the torture of detainees (Conrad et al. 2018).

1

1

Department of Political Science, Binghamton University (SUNY), NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Benjamin O. Fordham, Department of Political Science, Binghamton University (SUNY), PO Box 6000,

Binghamton, NY 13902, USA.

Email: bfordham@binghamton.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(10) 1828-1856

ªThe Author(s) 2020

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002720912818

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Concern about the public’s response to dramatic events and its implicat ions for

democratic governance have a long pedigree (e.g., Stouffer 1955). Well explored

in the context of domestic politics, the issue has received somewhat less attention in

the context of foreign policy-making. In this article, we take on this task. We argue

that the public exhibits a pattern of overreaction and underreaction in response to

international events and that ignorance and apathy are key drivers of individual-level

variation in these responses.

Scholars generally acknowledge that the American public knows little about

politics in general and foreign policy in particular (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter

1996; Kinder and Sears 1985; Bennett 2003). Delli Carpini and Keeter’s (1996, 70-

71) examination of factual questions used to assess political knowledge on the

American National Election Study indicated that only 40 percent of Americans knew

the purpose of North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1988, 58 percent could define

the Cold War in 1950, and only 39 percent could define free trade in 1953. Other

examples of this information deficit are abundant and not difficult to find. As Holsti

(1996, 51) noted in his otherwise optimistic assessment of the role of public opinion

in foreign policy, there is “overwhelming evidence that the American public is on

balance poorly informed about inte rnational affairs.” What scholar s continue to

debate is whether this lack of information makes a difference. Does the low level

of public information about foreign policy evident in examples like these really

matter? How, if at all, does it affect the policies that the public will support?

Two relatively optimistic answers to these questions prevail in current research

on foreign policy. Some scholars suggest that public opinion would not look sub-

stantially different if people were better informed. At the individual level, basic

belief structures or cognitive shortc uts may compensate for the lack of spec ific

knowledge about policy (e.g., Holsti 1996, 47-51). At the aggregate level, individual

errors arising from the lack of information may cancel each other out, yielding a

reasonable and prudent central tendency (e.g., Page and Shapiro 1992, 41; Jentleson

1992). Other scholars argue that the lack of information plays a mediating role in

shaping public opinion. Better informed individuals pay more attention to the elite

cues that usually shape public opinion (e.g., Zaller 1992, 1994; Berinsky 2009).

We will test a third, darker possibility that lack of information has a direct effect

on individual opinion. In peacetime, support for policies dealing with potential

threats will be lower among less informed individuals. By contrast, in periods of

acute crisis or war, less informed individuals will support aggressive and violent

policy options at higher rates than better informed people do. We test these tenden-

cies using survey data from two relevant historical settings: the American entry into

World War II and the response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Data from these two

periods generally support our argument.

The pattern we find among the less informed has potentially important implica-

tions. It suggests that information plays a different role than it is assigned in most

recent research on public opinion and foreign policy, though one that was quite

prominent in earlier work. Writers such as Walter Lippmann, Gabriel Almond, and

Fordham and Kleinberg 1829