computer assisted telephone interviews (Sniderman, 2011), then multi-investigator online studies,
and finally diverse online samples at relatively low cost (Berinsky, Huber and Lenz, 2012) thus not
only reduced researchers’ barriers to entry, but also allowed scholars to incorporate longer batteries
of individual differences and dispositional traits into studies that were explicitly intended to test
psychological theories on large and diverse samples.
The literature on public opinion about foreign policy is now so vast that it is impossible to do
it justice in the confines of a short review essay, but the discussion that follows has three parts.
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It begins with the puzzle of how the public expresses such strong views about foreign policy issues
even if they know relatively little about international politics, which political scientists have tried to
answer in two different ways, each of which borrows from a different quadrant of political psychology:
top-down models of public opinion, which understand the public as taking cues from political elites,
and bottom-up models of public opinion, which point to the role of individual differences such
as ideological orientations, core values, and images. Second, it turns to a series of attempts to
provide psychological microfoundations for a number of theoretical models in international security,
including the democratic peace, audience cost theory, rally around the flag effects, against type
models, and nuclear weapons. Third it turns to an area where there has traditionally been less work
in political psychology: public opinion towards foreign economic issues like trade, where researchers
have gradually discovered that material economic interests may play less of a role than classic
theories in political economy once assumed. It concludes by discussing directions for future research,
encouraging scholars to do more work to broaden the geographic scope of the evidence we use to
build and test our theories of public opinion in foreign policy.
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Among the topics I lack the space to cover in any reasonable detail and thus sidestep here include: the evolving
role of the media in foreign policy (Nacos, Shapiro and Isernia, 2000; Robinson, 2001; Berinsky and Kinder, 2006;
Warren, 2014; Baum and Potter, 2019), the relationship between military casualties and public opinion (Mueller, 1971;
Gartner and Segura, 1998; Larson, 2000; Boettcher and Cobb, 2006; Voeten and Brewer, 2006; Gartner, 2008; Gelpi,
Feaver and Reifler, 2009; Kertzer, 2016), the relationship between public opinion and terrorism or political violence
(Kam and Kinder, 2007; Berrebi and Klor, 2008; Merolla and Zechmeister, 2009; Zeitzoff, 2014; Balcells and Torrats-
Espinosa, 2018; Huff and Kertzer, 2018; Littman, 2018; Nair and Vollhardt, 2019; Tellez, 2019; Gilbert, 2020), public
opinion about foreign policy as it relates to international law and cooperation (Brutger and Strezhnev, 2018; Kim,
2019; Lee and Prather, 2020; Dill and Schubiger, 2021; De Vries, Hobolt and Walter, 2021; Morse and Pratt, 2021),
and public opinion about a broader range of issues in foreign economic policy, such as aid, investment, globalization,
or climate cooperation (Milner and Tingley, 2013; Chilton, Milner and Tingley, 2020; Dietrich, Mahmud and Winters,
2018; Carnegie and Dolan, 2020; Naoi, 2020; Tingley and Tomz, 2020; Ferry and O’Brien-Udry, 2021; Mahajan, Kline
and Tingley, 2021).
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