The Public Salience of Foreign and Security Policy in Britain, Germany and France

Abstract

The salience of foreign affairs to general publics is an important but often neglected parameter for the role of public opinion in foreign and security policy. This article explores the determinants of foreign affairs' public salience and probes into the respective patterns in Germany, Britain and France. Building on the theory of news values, the article proposes to distinguish between issue-specific and country-specific influences on the public salience of foreign and security policy. The data suggest that broad international crises on the scale of 9/11 or the Iraq war go along with distinct cross-national peaks in the salience of foreign affairs to general publics. At the same time, the effects of constant issue logics are refracted by country-specific factors: most notably, the latter account for the much higher overall salience of foreign affairs to the British public than to the German and French publics since late 2002.