So if you live long enough you're probably bound to have various viewpoints, but the main point is this is a person who is not a political scientist and yet had a lot of impact.

But to give some other examples, almost everybody knows of Gabriel Almond's work in the early 1950s, but actually historian Thomas Bailey of Stanford University beat Almond to the punch with a book that came out two years earlier, a book called The Man in the Street. Hadley Cantril, who was a psychologist and President Roosevelt's secret and private pollster during World War II, would be another example, and then finally, George Gallup, who was not trained as a political scientist, whose call of the 1936 election really made public opinion and polling appear to be a scientific kind of undertaking.

Today, as I'm going to argue and as I argue in the book, there's really been a renaissance of interest in public opinion and foreign policy and that renaissance is certainly built on more than the work of political scientists; it's the work of people in many disciplines, and also by those outside academia.

What I want to do is to pick up on several themes from the book briefly and then move on to questions and discussion.   

The first theme is that the whole issue of the role of public opinion and foreign policy is at the core of the long-standing debate between realists' perspectives on foreign affairs and liberal perspectives.   

The second thing I want to talk about briefly is what I would call the Almond-Lippmann consensus which emerged in the two decades after World War II.   

Third, the kind of challenges that have been made to the Almond-Lippmann consensus through research in the last couple of decades.   

And then finally to discuss some thoughts about an agenda for future research.

 
First, let me turn to the realist-liberal debate. While the realists' perspective is a fairly large tent, there are a variety of self-proclaimed realists. I think that one of the things that brings them together is the notion that public opinion can play a very small constructive role in the conduct of foreign affairs — that is, at best, from the realists' perspective, one might view the public as passive, uninterested, and essentially willing to leave it to the professionals, who are better informed about national interests and how to pursue them. The worst realist nightmare is that of a relatively uninformed public emotionally aroused about some issue — it might be the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor or it might be the pictures of great human rights violations in Somalia — and that these emotions will drive governments into ill-fated crusades to try to make the world over in the American image, attempt to reform the world, and prevent governments from undertaking things that they know better about.

This was the view of many of the Founding Fathers. It's not an accident that in much of foreign affairs the Senate, which was the appointed body at that time, was given a much greater role than the House, which was intended to represent the people more directly. Scholars representative of this realist view include Hans Morgenthau, E.H. Carr, Gabriel Almond, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan, who continues at the age ninety-four, to write — often with a very critical view — of the role of the public and its representatives in Congress in foreign affairs.

In contrast, we have the liberal perspective, which is that the average citizen, whether terribly well-informed or not, can make sensible judgments on issues of war and peace and can act as an important brake on the ambitions of overly ambitious leaders. We see this in the thesis of "no annihilation without representation," a slogan during the 50s and 60s. This is also an old tradition, including figures such as Immanuel Kant, Woodrow Wilson, and many others.

One of the most articulate statements of the liberal perspective comes from one of the most conservative of American political leaders. A man of great distinction, Elihu Root, won a Nobel Peace Prize, served in the Senate, as Secretary of War, and as Secretary of State. In the first article in the first issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, he wrote a piece on popular diplomacy in the period after World War I. I'll briefly read from this because I haven't been able to find quite as concise a statement, even the works of Woodrow Wilson, of this liberal perspective. When foreign affairs are ruled by democracies the danger of war will be in mistaken beliefs. The world will be the gainer by the change, for, while there is no human way to prevent a king from having a bad heart, there is a human way to prevent the people from having erroneous opinion. That way is to furnish the whole people, as part of their ordinary education with correct information about their relations to other people, about the limitations upon their own rights, about their duties to respect the rights of others, and about what has happened and is happening in international affairs and about the effects on national life are the things that are done or refused as between nations; so the people themselves will have the means to test misinformation and appeals to prejudice, and passion based upon error. That pretty much summarizes the liberal perspective — that through better international education and similar measures, the public can, in fact, play a constructive role.

 
On the Almond-Lippmann consensus, one of the arguments I make in the book is that World War I and the necessity of mobilizing publics for that dreadful four-year long war really put the issue of public opinion in foreign policy on the agenda. It was no longer, as in the writings of Immanuel Kant, just purely a theoretical issue. This led Root to write the article from which I just quoted, and so it became part of the agenda; it was about this issue that Lippmann was writing in his two books of the 1920s.

World War II coincided with the beginnings of both scientific polling and the work of George Gallup and others. The work on public opinion and foreign policy, particularly in this country, was largely driven by the questions about what the United States was going to do after World War II. Would the country follow the path that it pursued after World War I, essentially of turning its back on international organizations? Thus much of this research was essentially driven by the question whether the U.S. public would turn isolationist after the euphoria of winning the war, as in the past.

This flurry of research after World War II came to three fundamental conclusions:

  First, public opinion is highly volatile and emotion driven, and therefore provides very weak foundations for effective foreign affairs. This point emerged from Gabriel Almond's book on the American people in foreign policy, the writings of Walter Lippmann, and many others.

  Second, public opinion lacks structure. That is, people may have isolated bits of information in their heads, but it doesn't come together in any kind of coherent view of the world.

  Third, Lippmann's fears to the contrary, public opinion basically has little, if any, impact on foreign affairs. Bernard Cohen's book published in the early 1970s, based on the work he had done in the 1960s, essentially argued that point. He used a wonderful quotation from a Foreign Service officer: "The hell with public opinion. We should lead and not follow." One of the limitations of the book is that at the time he was unable to interview people other than the bureaucrats; that is, the elected officials were not a part of his sample, and so it probably presented a little bit of a skewed view of the public's impact.

 
Let me turn now to the challenges to the Almond- Lippmann consensus. I've argued that World War I put the issue on the agenda and World War II brought forth a great flurry of research interested largely in what the U.S. was going to do after the war. The Vietnam War brought about a kind of reexamination of this Almond-Lippmann consensus. You had lots of research now that went beyond the Gallup, Harris, and other polls. A study that was initiated by Sidney Verba of Stanford tried to do a more focused kind of research on the war in Vietnam. This led to a lot of other projects that were concerned more specifically with foreign affairs than the usual Gallup poll. One of the questions that drove this research was that, if the public is essentially uninterested, uninformed, and irrelevant, and the leaders are so wise, how is it that we got ourselves into the Vietnam quagmire?

Essentially what has come out of this research are a lot of questions raised about the three major components of the Almond-Lippmann consensus.