Political Systems, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy: The United States and the Netherlands

Abstract

of a President who seemed to be saying in his election campaign that he had learned those 'lessons' compels us to recognize that this kind of event is part and parcel of a political process. That is to say, it has developed not as a function of how much or how little we know or have learned about public opinion and its workways, but rather as an aspect of a struggle to determine whose preferences in the policy matter under discussion (in this case, sovereignty over the Panama Canal) ought to be the controlling ones. Secondly, this issue reminds us that our focus on the subject of public opinion and foreign policy is ordinarily national in scope. That is to say, the substantive problems of foreign policy arise in a national context, and the political problems of organizing or undermining support for those issues among the population have to be seen in the same context. Thirdly, the case of the Panama Canal treaties underscores the significance of the political system in the United States for the entire process of the mobilization (and eventual deployment) of public opinion in the matter. The constitutional requirement of the consent of the Senate to treaty ratification clearly structures a political strategy that would