Swords into ploughshares: The effect of pacifist public opinion on foreign policy in Western democracies

Abstract

This analysis focuses on the effects of domestic public pacifist opinion and international security threats on foreign policy outputs. Much work has suggested that governments’ foreign policy outputs are responsive to public opinion in advanced democratic countries. Using the cases of several Western democracies, this article offers a theory of the effect of public pacifism on foreign policy. It employs a cross-sectional time-series analysis over a period of a quarter century to test the theory and the generalizability of the hypothesis of an opinion–foreign policy nexus using new measures and broader data. Results here contradict literature on expected public opinion and policy outputs in the Cold War period, yet are supported after. The findings indicate that the predicted effect of public opinion on foreign policy outputs to be conditional on the presence of security threats. Convergence between leaders and public opinion in post-Cold War Western democracies is likely to make hawkish foreign policy less tenable in the West.