This week we’re looking at how policy-makers think about public attitudes on matters of foreign policy. Do policy-makers understand what the public think? Or are key foreign policy decisions shaped by misperceptions of public preferences?
In democratic countries, foreign policy is often assumed to be shaped, at least in part, by public preferences. But that raises an important question: do policymakers have an accurate understanding of public opinion?
Research on domestic policy suggests that political elites can significantly misjudge what the public thinks, despite the abundance of polling and other sources of information available to them. But until recently, we have known much less about whether the same problem applies to foreign policy.
In this episode, we explore new research examining both American public opinion on foreign policy and policymakers’ perceptions of that opinion. The findings offer new insights into the relationship between citizens and political elites — and into how misunderstandings about public preferences might shape foreign policy decisions.
Joining us is Dr Jonathan Monten, Associate Professor in Political Science at the UCL Department of Political Science and co-author of the study.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:04] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're looking at how policymakers think about public attitudes on matters of foreign policy. Do policymakers understand what the public think, or are key foreign policy decisions perhaps shaped by misperceptions of public preferences?
Hello. My name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to a brand new series of UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. We're back from our summer break and looking forward to sharing lots of cutting edge research with you over the coming year.
And we're starting the new academic year by looking at one of the key drivers of foreign policy. At least in democratic countries, how states act on the international stage is presumably shaped in part by public preferences. For that linkage to work, the people involved in making policy decisions need to be aware of what the public think.
But are they aware, or do they sometimes read the public wrongly? Studies of domestic policy have found that elite perceptions of public attitudes are, in fact, despite all the polling that is done these days, often inaccurate. But we haven't had so much evidence on matters of foreign policy, at least until now.
A new study fills that gap, looking at public attitudes and at elite perceptions of public attitudes on foreign policy questions in the United States. It sheds new light on why leaders in the US might make the decisions they do. One of the authors of that study is my esteemed colleague, Dr. Jonathan Monten, associate professor in political science here in the UCL Department of Political Science, and I'm delighted that Jonathan joins me now.
Jonathan, welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics. I think it's your first time on the show.
[00:01:56] Jonathan Monten: It's my podcast debut.
[00:01:57] Alan Renwick: Well, it's wonderful to have you on. We're really looking forward to hearing about your research. And let's go straight into the heart of the article that we're discussing today. I've said a little bit there about the research question and so on, but do you want to put it in your own words?
What's the question that you ask in this article, and why did you see that as a question that deserves to be addressed?
[00:02:20] Jonathan Monten: Well, thank you very much. Actually, when we started on this project, we were interested in a slightly different question. We were looking at how, political leaders, political elites and the public in the United States viewed international organisations, and the actions and opinions of international organisations.
And as we looked at the survey evidence and data, we started to notice that elites were very bad at guessing what the public thought. They consistently underestimated or "misunderestimated", you may remember as President George W. Bush said. Misunderestimated, what the public thought. And that struck us as very interesting.
It raised very fundamental questions about how democratic responsiveness works in the context of foreign affairs, if political leader are unaware, in a systematic way about what the public thinks. It also raised a lot of questions about a number of core theories in the study of international relations-
[00:03:31] Alan Renwick: Hmm
[00:03:31] Jonathan Monten: which very often assume that democracies behave differently on the international stage because democratic leaders are constrained by what the public thinks. But does that linkage break down if elites are, as we say, misreading the room in the article?
[00:03:49] Alan Renwick: Hmm. Really interesting. So this matters for foreign policy outcomes. It's not just a matter of interest in looking at the attitudes of themselves. We think-
[00:03:57] Jonathan Monten: Absolutely.
[00:03:58] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Fantastic. So what do we already know about elite perceptions of public attitudes?
[00:04:07] Jonathan Monten: Well, as you mentioned in your introduction, rightly, much of the action in this literature, before this article had been in the context of domestic politics.
And there had been a number of, I think, influential and very well done studies that found that elites in the US Congress, as well as legislative aides - you know, the people that made up the political establishment - systematically misperceived what the public thought on key domestic issues in the United States, for example, around gun control or reproductive rights or environmental action on issues like climate change.
And it wasn't just that they estimated poorly, they misassessed what the public thought. They consistently did so in one direction, which was that they thought the public was more like them than the public really was. There are a variety of arguments for why that might be in the domestic poli- in the domestic politics environment, but that was sort of the core finding.
And what we were finding, which I think added to the puzzle, was essentially the opposite, that in the foreign affairs context, elites consistently misperceived the public as farther from their policy preferences than they really were.
[00:05:22] Alan Renwick: So let's just explore the, the domestic stuff a little bit more first.
So you say that policymakers or members of the elite ... So we're, I guess we should say a little bit here first about just who we're talking about. Who is it who holds these attitudes?
[00:05:34] Jonathan Monten: Well, by elites - we use that term very broadly in the article, and then we try to look at different segments of what that means - but broadly speaking, we mean people who hold elected office, for example, in the US Congress, or people who hold, positions, you know, office holders in the executive branch or federal agencies. That's the sort of core group of political elites as this literature typically uses it.
But then people often look at what, you might variously call, sort of non-elected elites or non-political elites, but people in leadership roles that still play a role in the public debate, people who might help set the public agenda of what issues get on the public agenda or how different policy options are framed or what information reaches decision-makers, and that group is wider than just people who serve in government itself.
It could include research centers, institutes, think tanks. It could include businesses that have interests with the government. It could include interest groups such as labour unions or religious organisations or nonprofits, people who are involved secondarily in the decision, in, in the decision-making process.
So broadly speaking, we refer to that group as political elites, but within that group, there's some diversity.
[00:06:46] Alan Renwick: And presumably there's a lot of diversity within that group in what they think about domestic policy questions. So I mean, when you say that people tend to think that the public agree with them more than the public actually do... is that that people with different views have different views of what the public are thinking or, are we looking kind of across the group as a whole?
[00:07:06] Jonathan Monten: it's a very good question. It's across the group as a whole. I think the starting point for much of this, for the study of this question in the domestic politics context is, it is a puzzle because you would assume that, you know, legislators, people in the US Congress, those responsible for policymaking in their offices have an enormous incentive to get public opinion right.
[00:07:26] Alan Renwick: Mm.
[00:07:26] Jonathan Monten: You know, their ability to stay in office depends on their ability to accurately assess what the public thinks, and yet they consistently misestimate what the public thinks. Why might that be?
[00:07:38] Alan Renwick: Mm.
[00:07:39] Jonathan Monten: Well, there are a number of theories on the table. I don't think there's any one consensus yet.
So one hypothesis is that these political elites tend to think of what their base wants and in particular what the most extreme voice is in what their base wants. Okay, that's, that's one possibility. Another possibility is that they're more exposed to the most mobilised segments of civil society, so it could be those interest groups we mentioned, sort of business groups, for example, or corporate interests that are most effective at getting their views before people in a position of power, not necessarily the typical voter.
So there are a number of opinions. I'd say there's also another sort of overlapping finding, which is it, it does also seem that Elites tend to view the public as more conservative in their views as they typically are. And again, there are a number of potential explanations for, for why that might be.
It could be that, again, conservative voices or extreme conservative voices, for a variety of reasons, have become most pervasive, you know, in the US media ecosystem. It could be, it could be any, any number of things.
[00:08:48] Alan Renwick: Hmm. So you're doing your research on your original research question, you're looking at public attitudes and elite attitudes and elite perceptions of public attitudes.
And you're starting to notice that there seem to be these gaps here, and you're also noticing that the gaps that you're observing are different, or at least seem to be different, from the gaps that we're used to seeing in the domestic policy space. Do you want to just take us a little bit further into that?
[00:09:15] Jonathan Monten: Absolutely. So we were aware of this domestic politics literature, and it struck us that not only were political elites, people in political positions of political power, not only were they very bad at guessing what the public thinks, but they were doing so in a very particular direction, and that direction, in the context of foreign policy, was assuming that the public was more different than they really were.
And in the foreign policy context-
[00:09:49] Alan Renwick: So more different from themselves?
[00:09:51] Jonathan Monten: More different from the elite.
[00:09:51] Alan Renwick: So in the domestic policy space, we find that the elite members think the public are more similar to them than they really are.
[00:09:57] Jonathan Monten: Yes.
[00:09:58] Alan Renwick: That is because they're projecting their own attitudes onto the public. But in the foreign policy space, the elites think the public are more different from them than they really are.
[00:10:06] Jonathan Monten: Exactly. Exactly right. And in the foreign policy space, that means something a little bit different. The sort of policy dimensions are a little bit different, and they're not quite as coherent as people's views on the domestic politics.
What should the size of government be? What should the role of government be? And the most common dimension that people look at in the context of foreign affairs is, you might call it a sort of internationalist, isolationist dimension. are you in favour of being policies that are more internationalist, more ambitious in their international scope, or do you favour policies that are more isolationist, withdrawing, not separating or not becoming involved in military conflicts around the world or global governance institutions around the world? Think things of that nature.
And, separate from domestic politics, it appeared that political elites tended to assume - political elites themselves in the US are highly internationalist, as a class. They are typically in favour of active military engagements around the world, being active in international organisations for, for, for good or ill, being active in shaping the global political economy.
Now, what's gone on under the Trump administration under the last few years, we can discuss that as a sort of additional, more recent turn of events. But typically, that's how the sort of political class in the United States has viewed foreign affairs. And there it appears, from the evidence that we found, that their assumption was that the public was highly isolationist in contrast, that the public was opposed to military interventions around the world, opposed to becoming actively involved in international organisations or treaty making, or things of that nature.
[00:11:58] Alan Renwick: And why might they think this?
[00:12:02] Jonathan Monten: Well, this is the sort of central theoretical puzzle of the piece, is how to explain why the direction of misperception is so different in domestic and foreign affairs. And we put one argument on the table, which we invite readers and listeners to consider, but is likely not the end of the debate.
We draw an argument from the literature on psychology and social psychology. And in that literature, there's, a set of arguments about how individuals estimate the views of others. Not necessarily even political, views, but if I was trying to estimate, for example, what television shows you like, or what podcasts you listen to, how would I make that inference?
and the argument that a number of social psychologists have put on the table is that people tend to make these inferences based on how similar they view the other person as. So if you view the other person as highly similar to yourself, we're both, we both teach at UCL, we both are in the political science department, we both live in London, - The assumption is that our s- our sim-- our preferences will be highly similar.
Whereas if you were-- if I viewed you as very different from me along a set of social dimensions the argument is I would view... I would guess that your views were, were different than mine, even if in fact we liked the same TV shows and we listened to the same, podcast. And the sort of term of art in the social psychology literature is does someone engage in projection?
Do I project my views onto you as being similar to mine? Or do I engage in what they call pluralistic ignorance, which is the assumption that your views are different than mine because I perceive you as dissimilar to me on some dimension.
[00:13:55] Alan Renwick: So basically, the idea is that we have a kind of DC-based policy elite that thinks people in the flyover states are all hopelessly isolationist and don't care about the rest of the world.
[00:14:06] Jonathan Monten: In a nutshell, that is exactly right.
[00:14:08] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Okay. And the purpose of your analysis then is to see, well, we've got some hunches as to what might be going on, but we need to properly measure the effects and then see if we can understand what are the underlying causal mechanisms.
[00:14:22] Jonathan Monten: Exactly.
[00:14:23] Alan Renwick: So how do you do that?
[00:14:26] Jonathan Monten: Well, we go about it in two ways. The first is that we rely on a set of observational studies of surveys that were conducted by a group in the United States called the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. And they did something that was very useful from a political science and methodological perspective, and I should say here that I am a part of the research team that in recent years has helped design these surveys.
And that is to ask similar survey questions, at the same time, of both a representative sample, national sample, of the US public and of political elites- people who have or recently served in government, people who serve in think tanks and research centers, in internationally oriented interest groups, things of that nature.
And that paired survey methodology is incredibly powerful in helping us compare not just what elites think compared to what the public thinks, but whether elites are able to accurately guess what the public thinks as well. So in each survey year, we know what the public thinks, we know what elites think, and we know what elites think the public thinks on a number of key foreign policy issues. So that's the first set of evidence we present about how elites perceive public opinion.
[00:15:49] Alan Renwick: I thought this was just a wonderful aspect of this article, that you've got this ... I mean, this dataset goes all the way back to the 1970s, I think, and the specific questions that you're able to use for this analysis don't go back that far, but they do go back to 2004
[00:16:03] Jonathan Monten: Yeah. It's a useful set of data if you're interested in understanding foreign policy attitudes in the United States. It does go back to the '70s, but the particular questions that drive the analysis, what we call not just beliefs about foreign affairs, but second order beliefs, trying to guess what someone else, another group thinks about these same foreign policy questions, those questions we started including regularly around 2014.
So now we have about 10 years and, and counting of data on these perceptional, perceptual questions.
[00:16:36] Alan Renwick: So these are questions about kind of concrete policy issues that are on the public agenda at, at the moment.
[00:16:43] Jonathan Monten: Well, we strike a balance. Some questions are questions that have been asked essentially every year from the '70s, and those are very useful at helping us see over time how public opinion in the US towards foreign affairs has changed.
For example, one of the questions they've asked from the beginning is a very simple question: Do you think the United States should play an active part in global affairs or should stay out of global affairs? And although it's framed very generally, it is very useful to see how the public answers that question, you know, every few years, beginning in roughly 1974.
Other questions are questions that are related to events that are on the global agenda in that year or roughly around the time that the survey is fielded. So for example, does someone favour sending military aid to Ukraine following the Russian invasion? Do you think that President Trump, made the right decision or the wrong decision in launching a military attack on Iran, this year?
But also questions about possible future scenarios. For example, if North Korea were to invade South Korea, would you support the US intervening? Or if China were to invade Taiwan, would you support the US coming to the aid of Taiwan? So questions that are sort of scenarios that might unfold in the future.
[00:18:04] Alan Renwick: Mm. So this is the kind of first prong of your research strategy. And there's a second prong that we'll get onto in a moment. But what do you find from this first prong of the overall research approach?
[00:18:18] Jonathan Monten: Almost for almost every question in almost every year that we've fielded this survey, the gap between what elites think and what the public thinks is relatively small.
Typically, large majorities of elites, for example, say that they think the US should play an active part in world affairs, and large majorities of the public agree, although not quite as large. Among the elite sample, some years the answer to that question is 98%, 99% of the political elites that we sample say, "Yes, the US should play an active part in world affairs." And among the public, the figure can sometimes go between 60 and 70%. Sometimes it can go into the upper 50s. So they're both going in the same direction, you know, but there is a sort of gap in the intensity of the belief. But then if you ask elites to guess what percentage of the American public they think answers yes to that question, that the US should play an active part in world affairs, they will underestimate by 20 percentage points or more.
They assume that a majority of the public opposes playing an active part in world affairs. And then that pattern extends to question after question. For example, should the US send additional military aid to Ukraine? Majority of the public says yes. A larger majority of elites say yes. But when you ask elites to guess what the public thinks, they assume the public is opposed. Some of the most interesting survey items are those related to questions that I think most listeners would associate with President Trump's agenda, and assume that they are popular with the public.
For example, is globalisation on balance good or bad for the US economy? Or should the US restrict to a greater degree legal immigration? Majorities of the US public still support those positions, but for people in the political class, for the foreign policy establishment, the assumption is that the public is opposed to greater global economic integration, or that the public is in favour of greater restrictions on legal immigration, in the face of the survey data that we have.
One of the most interesting survey items to me has to do with the question of should the US continue to support NATO. That's the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The US participation in NATO and support for NATO, and support for the NATO alliance, was one of the fundamental elements of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War and into the post-Cold War period.
And not just majorities, but bipartisan majorities of the public, and of political elites, supported active US involvement in NATO. Now, Trump has struck a somewhat idiosyncratic position, even within his own party, on that question. But it has led, I think, to a majority of elites to assume that the public as a whole is not in favour of necessarily withdrawing from NATO, but from reducing the US commitment, from pulling back. And that is contrary to the survey evidence that we've collected.
[00:21:43] Alan Renwick: Hmm. So, so far so good in terms of the evidence fitting the expectations that you had. So the evidence clearly indicates that elites systematically think that the public are going to be more isolationist and less internationalist than they actually are.
[00:22:02] Jonathan Monten: Exactly.
[00:22:03] Alan Renwick: Great. As I said, there are two prongs to your research. So you refer to them in the article as the observational part, which is what we've just discussed, and then also an experimental part.
[00:22:15] Jonathan Monten: Yes.
[00:22:15] Alan Renwick: So what more do you still want to find out that you haven't found out from that first part, and how do you seek to do that?
[00:22:23] Jonathan Monten: Well, this is an excellent question about how these two types of evidence interact. And I should say, you know, to continue with where we originally started, the experiment was actually our original idea for the paper. It was to try to experimentally understand - to understand in an experimental context - attitudes towards an international organisation.
In the case of the experiment, we refer to NATO. So from a research perspective, this was our starting point. And we ended up moving the building blocks around in a way that I think resulted in a more interesting study than what we had originally had originally intended.
[00:23:02] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:03] Jonathan Monten: The purpose of the experiment was to try to understand, in a more precise way, whether the causal mechanism that we were positing - that elites psychologically perceive the US public as dissimilar to them - is that driving their misperception in some way? And in addition to that, it also allows us to answer or at least put some evidence on the question of maybe the issue here isn't just that elites are bad at guessing what the public thinks. Maybe it's just really hard to guess what someone else thinks? It's not necessarily a phenomenon unique to political elites, even those that have, as we discussed, electoral incentives to understand what the public thinks and to be on the right side of public opinion. Maybe it's just a very difficult in general.
[00:23:56] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:56] Jonathan Monten: so the experiment allows us to isolate to an extent that the survey evidence doesn't answers to those questions, whether the causal mechanism we've identified is actually playing a role in these results and whether elites are not just bad at guessing what the public thinks, but uniquely bad.
and we find positive answers to both those questions.
[00:24:18] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So we're talking about an experiment here, and th- by this we mean a survey experiment. Yes. And regular listeners to the podcast will be familiar with the concept of a survey experiment, but some of our listeners, may not be. So do you want to just explain what, what is a survey experiment here and what are you doing in this survey experiment?
[00:24:35] Jonathan Monten: Well, in this case we included within our, bi- biannual survey of public opinion, in addition to our usual questions, for example, the active part question, and in addition to questions about issues that were in the news for that, that year, for example, Ukraine or Iran, we included a small, - Fictional, scenario where we described a, a particular scenario to survey takers and essentially asked them what we thought, what they thought the US should do in that scenario.
And the scenario we chose was the idea of, a conflict in Africa where a country, a non-democratic country, has invaded its neighbor, for, essentially security reasons. And that has triggered a humanitarian crisis as well as a greater risk of larger refugee flows and pote- potentially a greater risk in terrorism.
And we essentially asked both samples of elites and of the public what they thought the US should do in that scenario. But the trick is we randomly changed the scenario in a very subtle way for certain survey respondents. And our sort of experimental, treatment, so to speak, what we changed in the experiment to try to get at our, to test our causal theory, was whether or not US intervention was supported by an international organisation, and in particular, whether it w- it was authorized by NATO, by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
So for some survey respondents, they read about a scenario in which NATO opposed US intervention. Other survey respondents read about a scenario in which NATO endorsed US intervention. And our question was, what effect would that have on not just whether elites supported intervening in this fictional scenario, and not just whether the public thought that elites would, the public supported intervening in this scenario, but whether elites thought the endorsement of an international organisation would change what the public thought.
[00:26:42] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So the idea here is that the endorsement of the international or- organisation is a way of kind of measuring the degree of internationalism-
[00:26:48] Jonathan Monten: Yes ...
[00:26:49] Alan Renwick: in the, the attitudes.
[00:26:50] Jonathan Monten: Exactly. Yes.
[00:26:51] Alan Renwick: Yes. Okay. That's really clear. Thank you. and so what did you find? what, what, what is the effect that you observed there?
[00:26:58] Jonathan Monten: Well, I'm happy to report that the, the result of the experiment were, were broadly consistent with what we had found in the historical survey evidence. And that is that, NATO, NATO's endorsing US military intervention in this fictional conflict had the effect of increasing both elite support and public support for US intervention.
And as you just noted, we use that as a proxy for internationalism. And whether or not it is is a, is a interesting question in its own right, but in the survey, that's our, our proxy. So it increases support. - We, when we then asked elites to estimate the proportion of the public that supported US intervention in each of those different fictional worlds, one world in which NATO supported it and one world in which NATO didn't support it, elites effectively guessed that NATO endorsement would not increase public support, that the message or cue, the approval from this international organisation would not have an effect on the public.
And what we know from our survey evidence is that in fact it did have an effect on the public. The public did approve to a greater degree US military intervention when it had the support of an international organisation. But consistent with our theory that elites would guess the public was more isolationist than they really were, the, the elites missed it.
[00:28:26] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And can you just help me get my head around why are we more interested in the difference that is made by whether or not NATO supports or opposes intervention than in simply whether people support or oppose intervention?
[00:28:40] Jonathan Monten: In general.
[00:28:40] Alan Renwick: It w- yeah, and in, so yeah, I mean, you, you might think that if you're a very, take a very isolationist view then you're going to oppose intervention in an, in an African humanitarian cause.
Mm-hmm. Whereas if you have a more internationalist approach you would support that kind of intervention. So why, why is it the, the NATO endorsement- Yeah ... that is the, the important thing for getting at things here?
[00:29:00] Jonathan Monten: It's a very good question. I, I, I think the, the underlying idea behind using NATO endorsement as a proxy for being pro-internationalist is that engaging in a large scale Foreign intervention in the face of foreign opposition is, represents a kind of, not necessarily isolationism but, but unilateralism
[00:29:27] Alan Renwick: Mm.
[00:29:27] Jonathan Monten: a disregard for global public opinion
[00:29:30] Alan Renwick: Mm.
[00:29:31] Jonathan Monten: A disregard for the institutions of global governance, and in the case of NATO, a disregard from, for the view of our closest allies
[00:29:38] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:38] Jonathan Monten: Whereas supporting military intervention because it has the endorsement of, and, the approval of an international organisation effectively represents, the opposite of those things.
And I should also say here that there is a, a larger side literature in international relations and the study of international relations sort of on this question, investigating this question in, in detail. And the basic idea behind that literature is that the public, when forming views about foreign, foreign policy questions such as intervention, relies on a series of, informational cues around them, and those informational cues could come from, example, from their friends, they could come from their family, it could come from the leaders of their party, it could come from the president.
And the question that literature asks is, "What about informational cues from international level actors? Do, do they have a similar kind of effect on, on the public?" And the assumption is yes, that it represents a kind of proxy for being in favor of multilateral action, as opposed to unilateral action.
[00:30:45] Alan Renwick: And I g- I guess that relates to a question that I had when I read through the paper, that you, you, you test the effect of one particular informational cue- Yes ... the effect of NATO supporting or opposing this intervention. Yeah. what if you u- used a different informational cue, so it was, the, the president, s- i- is favorable or, or, j- you know, you said, "Generally people think that this is a good idea or a bad idea."
Mm. Or you said that, a group of s- senior policy experts say that this is a good idea or a bad idea. I mean, I, I guess it could be that you would find just the same sorts of effects there and, and that actually you're just picking up the effects of a positive cue rather than specifically the effects of an internationalist positive cue.
[00:31:32] Jonathan Monten: That's an, that's an excellent question, Alan. We should do that study. Let's, let's do that study. yeah, you're, you're, you're identifying exactly, the, the sort of issue at, at the core of these studies and also a limitation of them, which is that- You know, in, in real world scenarios, how do people sort out the variety of informational signals and cues they're getting?
And I think one assumption that drives this research in the international relations literature is that it is distinct from domestic politics in the sense that people typically or arguably have more stable and well-formed views about domestic political issues that affect their everyday life. For example, the level of taxation or public funding for education or for healthcare, issues they, they have a-- they tend to have a stable view about things that affect their everyday life compared to foreign affairs issues, which can be more distant, less consequential for their, their what, their everyday, their everyday environment.
Mm-hmm. And the argument is that in a context where they have in, sometimes rationally less information about what is going on, they're more prone to rely on what we call cue givers, informational cues or signals from sources that they find, credible or trustworthy. And now to the question that you've asked, that, that it sort of raises the question of, well, who is a credible signal sender?
Who is a trustworthy cue, cue giver? And I think there's good evidence that people trust, party leaders, for example, because they think that they're similar on other issues that they, they tend to agree with. Or if you're a Trump voter, you're going to follow Trump's policy line even if you don't necessarily have a well-formed view yourself.
The question the-- this international organisations literature raises is, does the public see international level actors as credible- Mm. -cue givers? That's the question it's trying to get at, and you're identifying a very real limitation, which is it's very hard to distinguish between a, a, a somewhat artificial ex- fictional scenario where you've given everyone
You've, you've sort of defined the parameters of the information that someone has been given. Mm. Compared to a real world global event where people are getting a variety and diversity of, of cue givers and information, people they trust in the media, politicians that they voted for tend to follow, or even friends or family, or now what they read on social media or what they hear in podcasts.
it's, it is very hard to disentangle the effects of all of these different sources of information in an experimental, setting.
[00:34:31] Alan Renwick: Mm.
[00:34:31] Jonathan Monten: you know, you can only give people so much information and you can only vary that information so much, in, in an experiment. So I think I would say the experiments, the experimental evidence that we present in the paper, I think it, it, it moves our understanding forward, a little bit, but I wouldn't treat it as conclusive.
I think it adds weight to the view, in part because it confirms or is consistent with what we had found from other sources of evidence that elites tend to misperceive the public. But I don't think it's the con- a, a conclusive answer or the final say.
[00:35:05] Alan Renwick: As ever, we need more research. But before we get there, there are a couple of other aspects of the findings that, give, give us f- further insight here that, that we should get into.
So one of them, you were alluding to earlier, is this question of, is it that, it's just generally very difficult to estimate how many people, - Yes ... take a particular view, or is it that elites are particularly bad at doing this and are kind of systematically doing it in a, in, in a particular way?
[00:35:33] Jonathan Monten: Yes.
[00:35:34] Alan Renwick: And you're able to, shed light on that.
[00:35:37] Jonathan Monten: Well, we, we present evidence that The public is better at guessing what the public thinks than elites are at guessing what the public thinks. And we interpret that as evidence that something is going on with elites that make, that, that interferes with their ability to accurately assess, what the public as a whole thinks.
But there might be other explanations for why the public is better at guessing at what the public thinks than elites are at guessing at what the public thinks. So again, I would say it's one piece of evidence. I found it, you know, interesting, and I think again, it starts to fill this gap of, yeah, is it a question of just it's difficult to guess what other people think, or is it something, unique to elites as a group?
[00:36:24] Alan Renwick: Yeah. I found that pretty, pretty persuasive. So, you're, you're being very modest there- ... but it sounded good to me. And then the further step that you also take is that you look at the mechanism that might be leading to these elite misperceptions. And y- this question of, is it that the elites have a kind of stereotypical view of what members of the public think?
[00:36:45] Jonathan Monten: Yes, exactly. And this is something that we are able to leverage in an experiment, that we can't in the, the surveys themselves. and what we tend to find is that- Elites that hold a more isolationist perception of the public, elites that subscribe to this isolationist stereotype to a greater degree, misestimate public opinion to a greater extent.
Holding a view of the public as isolationist is correlated with a greater degree of misperception of, of what the public in fact actually thinks. So again, we, we interpret that, that association as evidence that to some extent elite misperception is being driven by an isolationist stereotype. I will say one interesting thing about it is it's not necessarily driven by what elite group you're in.
For example, are you an elected official? have you served in a federal agency in a foreign policy capacity? Do you work in a research, institute or think tank that studies foreign affairs? The effect is pretty consistent across the board. It seems to be more correlated with this isolationist stereotype than the particular elite group that you fall into.
[00:38:03] Alan Renwick: Hmm. So those are the findings that you get from, these various different bits of research. What should we make of it all? What does this tell us about the nature of the foreign policymaking process?
[00:38:17] Jonathan Monten: Well, this is, this is an excellent question, and it's, something that I'm still, trying to, trying to grasp, you know, to, to sort of get my head around.
And, because I think it does raise some fairly fundamental questions about, how the democratic process works in foreign affairs but also how some of our international relations theories that assume that the publ- that elites and democratic officials sort of kn- know what their public thinks what their constituencies think.
it raises some fairly fundamental questions. And I think one conclusion I take from it, and this, this goes beyond a little bit what we argue in the article itself, is I think that when we look at what is going on in democratic societies around the world, in Western Europe, in the United States, I think there is an argument that we are seeing the rise of a kind of populist, backlash to I don't know what the quite word is, the foreign policy establishment, you know, and the belief that that establishment, the, the deep state as, as President Trump likes to say, is disconnected from the public, and these populist movements are needed to bring the government back into alignment with what the public thinks, and that public dissatisfaction is, is driving the rise of these movements.
In, in the US it could be about immigration or about trade agreements. In the UK it could be about Brexit, you know, or about immigration. And I think one of my takeaways from this study is that that narrative misses something fundamental about public opinion, which is that the-- when you actually ask voters what they think, they are more pro-internationalist than that narrative assumes.
And so many of, for example, President Trump's positions on immigration, on tariffs, on supporting US allies are not just in the minority, are not just minority positions amongst the US public, they're minority positions within his own party.
[00:40:32] Alan Renwick: Mm.
[00:40:33] Jonathan Monten: And I think to me that raises, not, not necessarily a kind of optimism, but I, I think that there is a latent coalition out there of pro-internationalist constituencies that appear to be overlooked.
[00:40:51] Alan Renwick: Hmm.
[00:40:51] Jonathan Monten: and I don't know what that means for, say, future elections or future policy changes, but I think that observation adds something to our understanding of what is driving the rise of these movements that I think we're, we're missing.
[00:41:04] Alan Renwick: Hmm. And I guess your research shows that where the public actually are is somewhere between where the populists are and where what Trump calls the deep state- Yes
is.
[00:41:15] Jonathan Monten: Exactly.
[00:41:16] Alan Renwick: I mean, can, can we say kind of where they are in between? Or is, or is that the next piece of research in
[00:41:21] Jonathan Monten: order to understand? Maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe that's the next piece of research. And, as I said, those sort of u- understanding what those policy positions are in, in the foreign policy context is a little different, you know, than the, the domestic policy conse- context.
And people can hold, of course, a diversity of views in, in, in any number of, any number of conversations combinations. I think what I will say, though, is, what I can say is from our evidence at least, is that i- it's, it's not just that they're somewhere in between, it's that there are fairly sizable constituencies within both parties.
so it's not a Republican Democratic thing or something to do with independence. There are constituencies within both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party for, a, an internationalist, p- pro-multilateral engagement foreign policy in the United States. And I think the question-- It raises questions of why those constituencies have been sidelined, you know, how they can become mobilized again, or how to rebuild the kind of bipartisan coalition that, you know, drove US foreign policy for so long and that we now seem to be departing from.
[00:42:37] Alan Renwick: Well, thank you so much, John. This has been really, really interesting. There are many more questions that I could ask. Absolutely. But, sadly we are out of time. So thank you for this, really fascinating discussion.
[00:42:46] Jonathan Monten: Thank you, Alan.
[00:42:48] Alan Renwick: We've been discussing the article Elite Misperceptions in Foreign Policy by Joshua D. Kertzer, Joshua Busby, Jonathan Monten, Jordan Tama, and Craig Cafura, which was recently published in the British Journal of Political Science. And as ever, we will put the details in the show notes for this episode.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Matthieu Dinh and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.