Do presidents incorporate the preferences of the public into their foreign policy decisions? Previous scholarship has begun to sketch out the sources of variation in the policy-public opinion linkage, but we still lack a clear understanding of the factors that increase or decrease presidential responsiveness. To better explore the relationship, we conceptualize presidential foreign policy making as a five-stage processFproblem representation, option generation, policy selection, implementation, and policy reviewFarguing that the degree to which presidents are responsive to public opinion varies with fluctuations in public attentiveness. At stages in which public interest is high, presidents are more likely to incorporate mass preferences into their decision making than during stages of public quiescence. The key finding in our analysis of 34 foreign policy cases is that the public's ''issue-attention cycle'' varies systematically across foreign policy crises and noncrises. Examining these cycles of attention allows us to make predictions about the conditions under which public opinion is most likely to influence decision making.It has been frequently noted that the American public's attention to foreign affairs is sporadic. The foreign policy literature depicts a public highly attentive to crisis situations that involve military force, but paying little mind to noncrisis issues like foreign trade or foreign aid. Moreover, because the public is unusually dependent on elites and the mass media for the information and interpretations on which to base opinions, the influence process is often portrayed as running from the top down, from the government to the public. Presidents and their policy teams are not viewed as having carte blanche, but unless popular attention to an issue is high, national leaders are predicted to be only weakly constrained by public opinion in their foreign policy choices. The salience of foreign policy issues to the public is central to this picture: electorally accountable leaders will give closer consideration to the potential electoral impact of their decisions the more attentive the public is. What are the conditions under which the public is more or less attuned to foreign policy?This research seeks to map the pattern of the American public's attentiveness to foreign policy questions. Our approach draws on three complementary kinds of Authors' note: We wish to extend a special note of gratitude to Jim Carr for his invaluable technical assistance. In addition, we are extremely grateful of the assistance of

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This article examines the extent to which service-learning courses affect students' attitudes and opinions. Elsewhere, we used a pre/postsurvey field experiment to demonstrate that volunteering with a homeless person tends to erode the stereotypes held by the domiciled-a confirmation of the venerable contact hypothesis. Here we use the same research design to assess whether students in service-learning courses exhibit a similar type of opinion change after spending a day with a homeless person. We find that even with limited contact a significant number of service-learning students came away from their time with homeless individuals holding fewer stereotypes and with a more nuanced perspective on the causes and consequences of homelessness. Nevertheless, working with a homeless person did have a negative effect on some students and contact generally failed to change students' views on public policy.

This paper elaborates a model of problem representation first presented by Billings and Hermann (1998). The foreign policy process begins when decision-makers specify policy goals and identify relevant constraints in response to a perceived problem. Although this initial problem representation often sets the course for subsequent policy, unanticipated constraints can arise that catch decision makers off-guard. Finding themselves in a context they did not anticipate to be in, decision makers may choose to alter their representation of the problem and ⁄ or change the course of policy. Billings and Hermann offer one piece of this puzzle by examining how decision makers re-represent problems; this paper provides the second piece by assessing how policies, not representations, change in response to new constraints. A case study of the U.S. response to the Ethiopian famine in the mid 1980s demonstrates that policy does not always follow problem representation.

I want to thank Terrence Chapman for his insightful comments. The core of our respective arguments is similar: We both find that public opinion can shape international affairs in important, and perhaps unexpected, ways. Nevertheless, he offers some constructive criticism that has prompted me to think more deeply about my work.