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Preface and Acknowledgments In a democracy, it is generally assumed that citizen preferences inform public policy. But do American presidents really consider public opinion when making foreign policy decisions? For a variety of reasons, foreign policy has always posed a difficult challenge for democratic governance. Citizen oversight of public officials requires an active and informed electorate, yet the American public is only sporadically attentive to and knowledgeable about foreign affairs. Additionally , citizens’ foreign policy preferences sometimes conflict with the policies that presidents believe to be in the national interest, forcing the White House into a difficult choice between political expediency and strategic effectiveness. Further complicating matters are national security concerns that prevent a full disclosure of information to the public. These and other challenges have been especially apparent in recent history. The U.S. intervention in Kosovo, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Iraq War have led some observers to question what role, if any, the public plays in the construction of American foreign policy. This book examines whether presidents lead, follow, or simply ignore the American public when making foreign policy decisions. Our exploration into the public’s role in U.S. foreign policy departs from a rather unusual place: a personal story that has nothing to do with international affairs. About a year ago, I was at home playing with my kids when the phone rang—it was a local survey organization wanting to hear my opinion of the new hospital being built in my community. Fortunately, ours is a relatively healthy family, and I only think of hospitals when one of our kids breaks a leg (or when a pollster asks me questions about hospitals). But being a college professor in the field of American public opinion, I believe it is important to respond to surveys, even those concerning topics I have little interest in or knowledge of. I agreed to be interviewed, so the pollster asked what kind of services I thought the local hospital should provide: Should it have an eye institute? Should the emergency room staff include a pediatric specialist? Should the hospital perform hip and knee replacements? Should it have a cosmetic surgery wing? I replied to all of these queries with an emphatic “yes!” After all, I wanted the best hospital money could buy just in case, God forbid, a member of my family should ever need it. I hung up the phone and did not think about hospitals again until my daughter had a high-grade fever seven months later. This anecdote may seem a bit off topic, but it does offer several insights about the nature of public opinion in general that we will relate to the specific issue of public opinion and foreign policy. First, it is easy to offer an opinion to pollsters. I had given no thought to our new hospital before the survey call, so when answering the questions, I paid little mind to the problems that hospital administrators surely deal with, such as budgets, staff, and space. My responses, although genuine, were probably a bit poorly considered, but I offered them anyway. Second, just because a clear and definitive opinion is expressed in a survey does not mean that the issue is important to the respondent . Again, I rarely had thought of hospitals, so I was not going to base my vote in the upcoming election on a candidate’s hospital platform, and I was not planning on marching in the streets to demand a cosmetic surgery wing. The issue was simply not that important to me at the time, but again, that lack of salience didn’t stop me from staking a clear and definitive position when asked for my opinion. Third, the importance of an issue can change over time. While hospital services were not that salient to me at the time of the survey, they suddenly became very important when my daughter became ill. (Her illness turned out to be minor, but we did have to drive twenty miles to the next hospital because ours did not staff the appropriate pediatric specialist.) The final and most important lesson is that the interaction of preferences and issue salience prompts both citizen action and government response. Even though my preferences for hospital services had not shifted one little bit in the seven months after the survey call, the salience of those very same opinions increased dramatically when my daughter became ill. The confluence of strong preferences...

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