Does Public Opinion on Foreign Policy Affect Elite Preferences? Evidence from the 2022 US Sanctions against Russia

Abstract

Does US public opinion on international affairs affect political elites’ policy preferences? Most research assumes that political elites do indeed consider public opinion in their decision-making process. However, this key assumption is difficult to test empirically given limited research access to political elites. We examine elite responsiveness to public opinion on sanctioning Russia during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We fielded a pre-registered experiment within the 2022/23 TRIP survey of US foreign policy practitioners, offering a rare opportunity for a fairly large elite survey experiment (n = 253) with important policy actors who have not been studied in this context. We used current public polling highly supportive of increasing sanctions as an information treatment. Our research design, involving a highly salient real-world issue and treatment, substantially expands on previous work. Exposure to the treatment raises elite support for increasing sanctions from 68.0% to 76.3% (+8.3 percentage points). While sizable, this effect is smaller than those identified elsewhere. We argue that this difference is driven by pre-treatment dynamics, ceiling effects, and issue salience, and is therefore all the more notable. While our results support previous research, they also highlight issues of external validity and the context dependence of elite responsiveness.