Public Opinion and the Contradictions of Jimmy Carter's Foreign Policy

Abstract

President Jimmy Carter's failure to achieve popular support for his foreign policy is commonly attributed to his disregard of public opinion. The author evaluates this perception by examining the Carter administration's use of polls in the areas of human rights and U.S.-Soviet relations. Archival material confirms that Carter did not ignore public opinion; rather, his polling operation did not provide the White House with a complete and objective portrait of public attitudes. Carter's team assumed that public opinion on foreign policy was malleable and lacked structure. Thus, no effort was made to determine whether the contradictions pollsters found on the surface were actually held together by an underlying structure. Therefore, the Carter White House had neither an accurate gauge of public attitudes nor an understanding of those attitudes sufficient to build support for its policies. Presidential Studies Quarterly 30, no. 4 (December)

What Makes Autocracies’ Soft Power Strategies Special? Evidence from Russia and China

“…While such explanations are certainly reasonable, they still appear somewhat incomplete, especially given that the idea, that a political regime affects a foreign policy strategy in general, finds rather strong support in the academic literature. For instance, it is contended that, as distinct from autocracies, democracies are unlikely to make war on one another (Maoz and Russett 1993;Owen 1994), democracies' foreign policy is more likely to take account of public opinion (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000;Katz 2000), democracies are more likely to win at wars (Reiter and Stam 2002), their foreign policies are strongly affected by the election cycle (Smith 2004) etc.…”