The structure of foreign policy attitudes in transatlantic perspective: Comparing the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany

Abstract

Abstract. While public opinion about foreign policy has been studied extensively in the United States, there is less systematic research of foreign policy opinions in other countries. Given that public opinion about international affairs affects who gets elected in democracies and then constrains the foreign policies available to leaders once elected, both comparative politics and international relations scholarship benefit from more systematic investigation of foreign policy attitudes outside the United States. Using new data, this article presents a common set of core constructs structuring both American and European attitudes about foreign policy. Surveys conducted in four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) provide an expanded set of foreign policy-related survey items that are analysed using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). Measurement equivalence is specifically tested and a common fourfactor structure that fits the data in all four countries is found. Consequently, valid, direct comparisons of the foreign policy preferences of four world powers are made. In the process, the four-factor model confirms and expands previous work on the structure of foreign policy attitudes. The article also demonstrates the capability of ESEM in testing the dimensionality and cross-national equivalence of social science concepts.

German views on US nuclear weapons in Europe: public and elite perspectives

“…To field our surveys, we worked with YouGov, a leading pollster (for recent uses, see Gravelle et al, 2017, Sagan and Valentino 2017, Carpenter and Montgomery 2020. We conducted two surveys with identical questionsone on a sample of German political elites and the other one on the representative sample of the German public.…”

Examining the foreign policy attitudes in Moldova

“…Extending the analysis of foreign policy attitudes across other contexts and countries, but on the same axe of cooperative internationalism- militant internationalism- isolationism, facilitates the international comparability of results, interpretation and policies. In this regard, our study follows the line of research developed by [ 18 , 19 ], and it adds empirical evidence over issues previously formulated by [ 4 ]. Secondly, our paper introduces for the first time poverty in the study of public opinions on foreign policy, which allows considering the impact of a prevailing social issue in Moldova.…”

“…The paper adds new empirical evidence to the literature which relies almost exclusively on studies of American foreign policy opinions [ 4 ], but it also contributes to the literature in other ways. First, it provides a regional perspective to the analysis of foreign policy attitudes, which perfectly fits the challenging Moldova’s ethno-geopolitical context.…”

Oil wealth and US public support for war

“…In order to prevent implausible combinations of target characteristics from biasing our results (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2015), we constrained the randomization of some combinations. Additional survey items were included to measure a set of relevant covariates, such as beliefs about militarism and internationalism (Gravelle et al, 2017), political partisanship, ideology, level of interest in politics and socio-demographics (see Online Appendix B for full questionnaire).…”