KNOWLEDGE AND THE POSITION OF ATTITUDES TO A EUROPEAN FOREIGN POLICY ON THE REAL-TO-RANDOM CONTINUUM

Abstract

The paper begins with the debate about the stability, the structure and the relevance of attitudes to foreign policy and argues that the cognitive aspect of the issue has a crucial bearing on whether one comes down on the side of the ‘conventional wisdom’ (the so-called Almond–Lippmann consensus) or the side of the ‘revisionists’ in this debate. It goes on to suggest, however, that the underlying issue is not one of ‘true attitudes’ versus ‘non-attitudes’ but rather a matter of where any particular set of attitudinal responses is located on a real-to-random continuum. Having considered some evidence concerning the public’s knowledge of the European Union, the paper puts forward four hypotheses concerning the negative impact of lower levels of knowledge on the structure of attitudes. With some minor qualifications, the four hypotheses are supported by the Eurobarometer data analysed. Attitudes to a European common foreign and security policy are particularly susceptible to variations in knowledge, and the conclusion is drawn that, at lower levels of knowledge, such attitudes come suspiciously close to the wrong end of the real-to-random continuum. THE DEBATE ABOUT ATTITUDES TO FOREIGN POLICY The quality of public opinion on foreign policy is a much-debated matter. What is now dubbed ‘the conventional wisdom’ took a dim view of public opinion in this area. It argued four propositions: public attitudes to foreign policy lack an adequate knowledge base, they are unstructured, they are unstable, and they have no relevance for policy-making. The argument was encapsulated as early as  in Almond’s view that ‘foreign policy attitudes among most Americans lack intellectual structure and factual content. Such superficial psychic states ∗ An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Boston, September, . The paper was submitted to IJPOR  January, . The final version was received  February, .  World Association for Public Opinion Research                 are bound to be unstable since they are not anchored in a set of explicit values and means ends calculations or traditional compulsions’ (Almond, , p.). The ‘conventional wisdom’ regarding the nature of foreign policy attitudes has come in for sustained criticism in recent years, to the extent that it might be said that the revisionist view is now in the ascendant. However, the revisionist critique is not as comprehensive or as telling as might appear at first sight. This can be seen by considering the four propositions (in reverse order to that in which they have just been listed). The last proposition—regarding the relevance of public opinion to the making of foreign policy—can be set aside as an issue that follows from rather than being directly part of the problem of the quality of attitudes to foreign policy. In one sense, it is a normative issue: weakly formed attitudes (if such they be) ought not to have any effect on foreign policy. To the extent that it is not a normative issue, it is open to empirical investigation, but that investigation is distinct from the question of what is the nature of public opinion on foreign policy. In regard to the allegation that attitudes to foreign policy are unstructured or unconstrained, the revisionist response makes a distinction between general foreign policy orientations and abstract beliefs, on the one hand, and specific foreign policy attitudes and opinion on immediate issues, on the other. It then argues that, while constraint might be lacking in relation to views on particular matters, it does obtain at the level of general orientations and beliefs. Two quotations illustrate the point: We take strong exception to the conventional wisdom that in the face of this uncertainty, the public is unable to connect its foreign policy attitudes together or connect them to its political behaviour. . . . The common theme in this research is that while citizens’ specific foreign policy attitudes may not be consistently related to one another or to political evaluations, more general foreign policy orientations play a stronger role in foreign policy decision-making (Hurwitz and Peffley, ,