Book Review: Review Essay: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad, by Martha Bayles and Public Opinion & International Intervention: Lessons from the Iraq War, edited by Richard Sobel, Peter Furia, and Bethany Barratt

Abstract

Review Essay: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America's Image Abroad. Martha Bayles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 336 pp. $30 hbk. Public Opinion & International Intervention: Lessons from the Iraq War. Richard Sobel, Peter Furia, and Bethany Barratt, eds. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012. 322 pp. $23.96 pbk.These two books take diametrically opposed approaches to a common and critical subject: The role of public opinion in helping, or hindering, the making of foreign policies. While Martha Bayles' book focuses on the impact of American popular culture- from Friends to American Idol-on the ability of the United States to project an appealing image of its ethos abroad, the many authors in Public Opinion & International Intervention zero in on one issue-debates in twelve countries, from the United States to India, over the 2003 war in Iraq.While not specifically targeting media studies, the books pose important questions and intriguing arguments about an implicit issue at the core of communication: How much does the public (often represented or informed by mass media) matter in governance? Both, however, also illustrate the difficulties of providing empirical answers to that question, even though they try to tackle it from entirely different perspectives- social scientific opinion surveys and cultural criticism-that share only the extensive use of interviews.The edited collection by Richard Sobel, Peter Furia, and Bethany Barratt-students of political science, politics, and public opinion-uses twelve case studies of decision making over the Iraq War as a of the theory that public opinion constrains foreign policymaking. The result of that test is a depressing probably-not (but we cannot be sure). The case studies are well chosen, focusing on democracies-where the popular will should matter-and evenly split between the countries that did intervene in Iraq on some level (from the leading United States to Japan, which contributed to the humanitarian and reconstruction missions nearly a year after the invasion) and those that did not (from Germany, which came to symbolize the transatlantic drift, to Canada).Each case provides a brief, useful explanation of the general context in a particular country (such as the process of foreign policy making and relations with the United States and Iraq). Then it asks whether the domestic public's position on the war, amply documented in polls, affected political decisions and, where the latter went against the former, if a price was paid during elections. With an early exception of the United States, virtually all publics were against the war as it happened, or at least against their country's participation in it, so the most interesting cases are those where leaders such as the United Kingdom's Tony Blair went ahead in the coalition of the willing despite adamant opposition. In the other cases, where public opinion and the government's decision to stay out of the conflict coincided over time, as the chapter on Canada points out, it is very much a chicken-and-egg proposition that can only rely on hypothetical counterfactuals.While each context is a bit different, the cases appear to confirm that geopolitical, partisan, cultural and personal factors played a stronger role than public opposition in the decisions to participate in the war. The public in those countries almost always rallied around the flag once the decision was made, and did not punish decision makers in subsequent elections, often because the Iraq issue had ceased to be prominent. A few authors suggest that the public might have constrained the justification and sometimes the kind of commitment governments made, for example, in Australia-but as the authors of that chapter argue, simple poll following is impossible in foreign policy making, and they lack empirical evidence to show the directionality of causality even in these modest effects. …