Abstract
Previous research shows that, when it comes to foreign policy, individuals have general orientations that inform their beliefs toward more specific issues in international relations. But such studies evade an even more important question: what gives rise to such foreign-policy orientations in the first place? Combining an original survey on a nationally representative sample of Americans with Schwartz's theory of values from political psychology, we show that people take foreign policy personally: the same basic values that people use to guide choices in their daily lives also travel to the domain of foreign affairs. Conservation values are most strongly linked to “militant internationalism,” a general hawkishness in international relations. The value of universalism is the most important value for predicting “cooperative internationalism,” the foreign-policy orientation marked by a preference for multilateralism and cosmopolitanism in international affairs. This relatively parsimonious and elegant system of values and foreign-policy beliefs is consistent across both high- and low-knowledge respondents, offering one potential explanation for why those people who are otherwise uninformed about world politics nonetheless express coherent foreign-policy beliefs.
Highlights
Previous research shows that, when it comes to foreign policy, individuals have general orientations that inform their beliefs toward more specific issues in international relations
Such studies evade an even more important question: what gives rise to such foreign-policy orientations in the first place? Combining an original survey on a nationally representative sample of Americans with Schwartz’s theory of values from political psychology, we show that people take foreign policy personally: the same basic values that people use to guide choices in their daily lives travel to the domain of foreign affairs
We have shown that personal values — especially those serving interpersonal goals — shape foreign policy orientations: Americans who place a great deal of emphasis on promoting the welfare of others are more likely to be cooperative internationalists favoring working through the United Nations to resolve global problems, while respondents who are heavily concerned with the stability and security of the in-group are more likely to be militant internationalists favoring the use of force abroad
Summary
Previous research shows that, when it comes to foreign policy, individuals have general orientations that inform their beliefs toward more specific issues in international relations. Previous research shows how foreign-policy predispositions allow individuals to derive attitudes on specific foreign-policy events or questions on which they lack good information (Rathbun 2007; Reifler et al 2011; Kertzer and McGraw 2012). We demonstrate that those dispositions are themselves grounded in even more fundamental values. We discuss the implications of those results for prominent traditions in foreign-policy opinion studies
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