The Foreign Policy Attitudes of Indian Elites: Variance, Structure, and Common Denominators

Abstract

Foreign policy belief systems have received much attention. Yet nearly all work examines attitudes in western democracies, chiefly the United States. The current security environment requires that we ask whether the foreign policy views of individuals in other nations—particularly regional powers—are similar in structure to those found in the US case. This article does so for the Indian case. Drawing on studies of US opinion, we develop a set of claims and test them on an original data set on Indian elites. We make four contributions. First, we show that Wittkopf’s framework applies to the Indian case. Second, we demonstrate how this framework can be made more generally applicable by revising its emphases on different types of internationalism and on rethinking the meaning of isolationist preferences. Third, we place the Indian case in comparative perspective. And last, we model the dimensions of Indian attitudes as a function of domestic ideology. Results of our analyses provide insights into the structure of foreign policy belief systems outside the Global North.