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

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The Public Salience of Foreignand Security Policy in Britain,Germany and FranceKai Oppermann & Henrike ViehrigPublished online: 12 Aug 2009.

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The Public Salience of Foreign andSecurity Policy in Britain, Germanyand France

KAI OPPERMANN and HENRIKE VIEHRIG

The salience of foreign affairs to general publics is an important but often neglectedparameter for the role of public opinion in foreign and security policy. This articleexplores the determinants of foreign affairs’ public salience and probes into therespective patterns in Germany, Britain and France. Building on the theory of newsvalues, the article proposes to distinguish between issue-specific and country-specificinfluences on the public salience of foreign and security policy. The data suggest thatbroad international crises on the scale of 9/11 or the Iraq war go along with distinctcross-national peaks in the salience of foreign affairs to general publics. At the sametime, the effects of constant issue logics are refracted by country-specific factors: mostnotably, the latter account for the much higher overall salience of foreign affairs to theBritish public than to the German and French publics since late 2002.

The patterns of waxing and waning public interest in foreign affairs arehighly consequential for the role of public opinion in foreign policy decision-making. The more important general publics consider an issue to be, themore governments are likely to feel inclined to account for public opinion intheir policy on that issue. As long as foreign affairs have not attractedsignificant attention on the part of the public, in contrast, governments arerelatively free to conduct their policies regardless of public opinion.

Against this frame of reference, this article seeks to shed light on theconditions that make general publics focus their attention on foreign andsecurity policy and thereby to clarify a crucial precondition for publicopinion to influence foreign policy. For that purpose, the article is organisedas follows: the next section will first elaborate on the concept of publicsalience. The second section will move on to propose an organisingframework for our analysis which distinguishes between issue-specific andcountry-specific determinants of public salience. Section three then discusses

Correspondence Addresses: [email protected]; [email protected]

West European Politics,Vol. 32, No. 5, 925–942, September 2009

ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01402380903064804

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the extent to which our data are comparable before the fourth sectionpresents our empirical findings on the salience of foreign and security policyin Britain, Germany and France.

The Concept of Public Salience

The concept of public salience refers to the significance, importance andurgency that the general public ascribes to a certain issue on the politicalagenda in relation to other issues (Wlezien 2005: 556–61; Soroka 2003: 28–9). It designates a cognitive precondition for public opinion to influence agovernment’s policy-making. The ability of electorates to shape foreign andsecurity policy decisions depends on the credibility of their threat tosanction the government for these decisions. Governments will only have apowerful political incentive to devise foreign and security policies that are inline with the public’s preferences if they would otherwise have to expectnegative consequences for their prospects of remaining in power.

The implicit threat of the public to employ general elections in order tosanction a government for its performance in foreign affairs, however, isonly credible to the extent that foreign and security policy is salient enoughto become a significant source of issue voting. Members of the public can beconceived of as ‘cognitive misers’ (Fiske and Taylor 1984: 11–12) whoeconomise on their scarce capacity to process information. The attentivenessof human actors is highly selective so that they use but a tiny fraction ofavailable information when devising their courses of action (Vertzberger1990: 7–10). Thus, voters will only attend to a closely circumscribed range ofpolitical issues when they decide whom to vote for in democratic elections(Simon 1985: 301–2).

A foremost cognitive short-cut employed by human actors to select whichinformation they process before arriving at a decision has been referred to asthe availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1982: 11–14). Accordingto that heuristic, voters primarily judge a government’s performance in viewof those issues which are ‘at the top of their heads’: the more easily voterscan retrieve information on an issue from memory and the more accessiblethat information is in their minds, the more weight they will assign to theissue in their overall assessment of the competing political parties andcandidates (Iyengar 1990: 2–4; Zaller 1992: 37–9). Since voters do not spendtheir scarce cognitive resources to process information on issues they do notconsider highly salient, public opinion on such issues remains latent andinconsequential (Aldrich et al. 1989: 125–7).

These inferences on the link between issue salience and voting behaviourbuild on a long history of research and are by now well established (seeRePass 1971; Rabinowitz et al. 1982; Niemi and Bartels 1985; Krosnick1988, 1990; Fournier et al. 2003). In addition, there exists a rich literature onthe mediating role of public issue salience in democratic politics, whichexplores other aspects of the relationship between public opinion and

926 K. Oppermann and H. Viehrig

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policy-making. For one thing, numerous studies have shown that policyoutcomes are more consistent with public preferences in cases of high issuesalience than in cases of low issue salience (Page and Shapiro 1983; Monroe1998; Petry and Mendelsohn 2004). Such consistency, moreover, is morelikely to result from a bottom-up rather than a top-down process when thesalience of the issue in question is high (Hill and Hurley 1999). For anotherthing, in a similar vein, a distinguished line of research on the publicresponsiveness to policy outputs suggests that publics will only take note ofpolicy decisions and adjust preferences in a ‘thermostatic’ fashion when therespective policy area is sufficiently salient to them (Wlezien 1995, 2004).The extent to which publics respond to policy outputs in a given domain isthus indicative of that domain’s public salience.

Applying this state of research to the analysis of public opinion’s role inforeign affairs, it follows that the higher the salience of foreign and securitypolicy is, the more responsive voters are to information about that policyand the stronger the policy’s impact as a benchmark for individual votingdecisions is likely to be (Franklin and Wlezien 1997: 348–51). Governmentsare under greater pressure to formulate their policy in view of theelectorate’s preferences when the public salience of the policy is high thanwhen it is low. Their decision-making leeway will correspondingly be moreconstrained by the imperatives of electoral politics in the former than in thelatter case.1

Notwithstanding the major implications of the concept of public saliencefor the domestic setting in which governments devise their foreign andsecurity policy, it has so far gone largely unutilised in the field of foreignpolicy analysis. Existing research on the domestic determinants of foreignpolicy in general and on the role of public opinion in particular has tendedto focus on the preferences of societal actors (Moravcsik 1993), theevaluative content and structure of public opinion (Holsti 1992) and theinstitutional opportunity structures for the public to influence the decision-making process (Risse-Kappen 1991). The cognitive preconditions for theelectorate to make use of existing opportunity structures and thus for theevaluative content of public opinion to become a meaningful constraint on agovernment’s decision-making, in contrast, have only rarely been scrutinised(see Powlick and Katz 1998). Consequentially, there exist virtually noempirical and comparative studies on the conditions which are likely torender foreign affairs more or less salient.2

Against this background, the article contributes to a more systematicunderstanding of the dynamics of the public salience of foreign and securitypolicy. It relates to a substantial body of work which has tracked changes inthe public salience of different domestic and foreign affairs issues in singlecountries – above all in the US (see Asher 1992; Persily et al. 2008) – as wellas similarities and differences in issue salience across countries. Mostnotably, there is evidence for systematic cross-national differences in thepublic salience of defence issues, which appears to be higher in the US and

Public Salience of Foreign and Security Policy 927

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the UK than in Canada and Sweden, for example (Wlezien 1996; Eichenbergand Stoll 2003; Soroka and Wlezien 2004, 2005). Also, there is somepertinent work on the salience of European integration to European publics(Franklin and Wlezien 1997; Oppermann and Viehrig 2008) and as a partypolitical issue (Steenbergen and Scott 2004). It is on these findings that thefollowing analysis seeks to expand when it explores the conditions whichmay account for higher or lower levels in the public salience of foreign andsecurity policy across countries and over time.

To that purpose, the article traces the salience of foreign affairs issues inBritain and Germany since the late 1990s and in France since 2003. This set-up allows for both a longitudinal analysis of trends within each country anda comparison of differences and similarities between the three countries.Since the selected countries are the most significant driving forces behind theEU’s Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), moreover, an account of theextent to which their decision-making in this field is in the limelight of publicopinion can be expected to yield insights into the prospects of one of thehighest-profile current developments in European integration.

Issue-specific and Country-specific Determinants of Public Salience

In order to assess which conditions either spur or mitigate the salience offoreign and security policy to domestic electorates, it is useful for heuristicpurposes to start out from assuming a given international agenda. Althoughthis agenda is in many ways shaped by governments themselves (see Putnam1988), we conceptualise international-level events and developments asindependent inputs into the realm of domestic politics. These inputs are thenprocessed on the domestic level and become more or less salient issues togeneral publics. On an abstract level, therefore, an account of the conditionswhich may exert an impact on the public salience of foreign affairs musthave two points of reference: first, the inherent qualities of the inputs intothe domestic political debate, i.e. of the issues on the international agenda;second, attributes of the domestic political setting in which these issues aredealt with.

On the one hand, the level of an issue’s public salience could follow fromthe logic and mechanisms which are innate to that issue and thereforeconstant across countries. Similar types of issues would then tend towardssimilar levels of public salience regardless of specific domestic politicalconstellations. On the other hand, the salience of foreign and security policycould equally depend on the domestic-level context in which the policy isconducted. Country-specific attributes of the domestic political settingwould then act as antecedent conditions which may induce similar kinds ofissues to display different levels of public salience (see Esser 2002: 130–33).3

In either case, the essential causal mechanism which translates differentissue-specific logics and country-specific contexts into higher or lower levelsof a policy’s public salience is the amount of media reporting on the policy


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in question. There exists a strong correlation between the extent of an issue’scoverage in the media and the salience of that issue to the general public(Kepplinger 2008: 195). Voters tend to attach the highest importance tothose issues which figure most prominently in the media (McCombs andShaw 1972; Miller and Krosnick 2000). The media are by far the most cost-effective means for the public to learn about foreign affairs, and most votersmost of the time exclusively rely on the reporting of the media for theirinformation on foreign and security policy (Page et al. 1987: 23–5; Powlickand Katz 1998: 38–9). The media, in turn, fulfil their role as an indispensabletransmission belt between foreign policy and the public’s attention to thatpolicy according to an inbuilt logic of news values (Graber 1997). The higherthe news value of foreign and security policy is, the more coverage the mediawill devote to this field and the more salient the policy will become to thegeneral public.

Taking the theory of news values as our frame of reference, the followingsections explore the most pertinent theoretical expectations on thedeterminants of the public salience of foreign affairs with respect to bothissue-specific logics and country-specific attributes of the domestic politicalcontext. As to the former, we highlight the role of an issue’s intrinsicnewsworthiness; in regard to the latter, our focus is on the patterns of elitedissent on foreign affairs and on the extent to which a country isimmediately affected by (or directly involved in) a certain issue on theinternational agenda. Finally, we attend to the important interaction effectsbetween issue-specific and country-specific determinants.

Issue-specific Determinants: The News Factors of Foreign and SecurityPolicy

Foreign policy events possess immanent characteristics that condition theirvisibility in the news media and the intensity of their perception in thepublic. These characteristics can be defined as news factors which determinewhether a piece of information has a high or a low news value (Schulz 1976:29–34). The more news factors an event displays, the higher its news value tojournalists, editors and publishers will be. In consequence, the media islikely to publish only such information in which several news factors such asviolence, unexpectedness, elite-centrism or negativism are combined. On anabstract level, the common denominator of the diverse sets of news factorsconsists of a sense of urgency, threat to basic values and novelty conveyedby them (see Galtung and Ruge 1965: 66–8; Kepplinger 1998). It is preciselythese three attributes, moreover, which in conjunction make for the definingcharacteristics of crises (Knecht and Weatherford 2006: 709).

It can thus be hypothesised that upswings in the public salience of foreignaffairs should partly follow from the intrinsic quality of international-levelevents as crises. Insofar as issues in the realm of foreign and security policydisplay the features of a crisis, they are likely to become highly salient to


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general publics. Since the features that qualify an international event as acrisis are independent from the domestic context in which the event isprocessed, the effects of crisis events on the public salience of foreign affairscan be expected to be similar across countries. Explanations that ascribeincreases in the salience of foreign and security policy to the high news valueof international crises thus refer to constant issue-specific logics.

Country-specific Determinants: Elite Dissent and Direct Involvement

As regards the country-specific context of foreign and security policy, incontrast, theoretical expectations point to two potential sources ofsystematic variation in the policy’s public salience. First, it is well-established to conceive intra-elite dissent on political issues as a catalystfor the media coverage of these issues and thus for their salience to thegeneral public. Domestic political competition is often more about shiftingthe public’s attentiveness to certain policy areas than about changing thevoters’ respective preferences. Elite actors may accentuate intra-elitecleavages on foreign affairs precisely in order to expand the arena ofpolitical conflict (Jones 1994: 181–3). In this process, they send outcontradictory cues on foreign and security policy, which in turn enhancemedia interest in the policy and widen and polarise the domestic debateabout it (Zaller 1992: 6–22). Contentious elite debates thus add to the newsvalue of a policy and provide the media with auspicious pegs for theircoverage (Luhmann 2004: 59; Knecht and Weatherford 2006: 709). Byarticulating dissent from government policy, therefore, political and societalelites act as fire-alarms which direct the public’s attention to the disputedissues (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984: 165–71).

More generally, majoritarian political systems which favour confronta-tional and adversarial patterns of political debate should be more prone toopen elite dissent on foreign and security policy than consensus-orientedpolitical systems and should thus tend to display more marked upswings inthe public salience of foreign affairs (see Lijphart 1999: 9–47). When an issuerises to the top of a government’s agenda in majoritarian systems, it is morelikely to crowd out the public’s attention to other political issues than inconsensus-oriented systems in which such crowding-out effects should bemore muted.4

Second, general publics can be expected to attach higher importance toforeign and security policy the more they consider foreign affairs to havetangible repercussions on their daily lives. The extent to which foreign policyissues are seen to implicate the personal security and wealth of members ofthe public is one of the foremost determinants of these issues’ news value(Schulz 1976: 33). Moreover, publics have an incentive to pay particularattention to those international developments on which their views have achance to become consequential, i.e. in which their respective governmentsplay a role and have a say. Irrespective of its intrinsic qualities, therefore,


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one and the same issue on the international agenda is likely to attain thehighest public salience in countries which are most closely involved in ormost immediately affected by that issue.5 Any international conflict, forexample, will tend to be most salient to publics whose countries are party tothat conflict. By implication, foreign and security policy should on averagebe more salient in countries which generally tend to be strongly engaged ininternational affairs by virtue of their geopolitical position or aninternationalist foreign policy outlook than in countries which are lessexposed to international events.6 Also, the extent of a country’s interna-tional engagement can be expected to feed back into the patterns of elitedissent on foreign affairs: an international event will more likely spurcontentious elite debates in countries which are immediately affected by thatevent than in countries which are not.

The Interaction between Issue-specific and Country-specific Determinants

In general terms, then, the public salience of foreign and security policy in aspecific country at a given point in time is a function (1) of issue-specific newsfactors inherent to foreign affairs issues and (2) of country-specific catalysts ofthese issues’ newsworthiness, i.e. the degree of domestic elite dissent on foreignaffairs and the extent of the country’s involvement in the respective issues.Moreover, it is important to note the pervasive interactions between these twodeterminants which are inexorably linked:7 on the one hand, the extent towhich a given foreign affairs issue becomes salient to national publics iscountry-dependent. The public salience of international events is thusrefracted by the country-specific context in which the respective publics areembedded. On the other hand, the extent to which a given domestic politicalcontext will spur the public salience of foreign affairs is issue-dependent. Theeffects of a country’s involvement in an international event and of a domesticelite dissent in this regard on the public salience of foreign affairs are thuscontingent on the event’s immanent newsworthiness.

Data Sources and Methods

By way of empirical analysis, the concept of public salience can beoperationalised through the data provided by public opinion polls and bymedia content analyses (Sinnott 1997: 6–7). The following account rests onpublic opinion data. Here, the most valid indicator of salience is provided byopen-ended and unprompted questions on the public’s denomination of the‘most important issue’ on the current political agenda. Specifically, weresorted to three data sources: the semi-annual Standard Eurobarometersfor all three countries under study, the Ipsos Mori institute for Britain, andthe Forsa institute for Germany. Regrettably, there are no systematiccountry-specific polling data on the salience of foreign affairs in Francewhich would have been adequate for our purposes.


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The Eurobarometer polls make for a valuable starting point for ourcomparative endeavour, since they employ identical question wordings,sampling methods and coding schemes in every EU member state (Lagos2008: 584–5). The data obtained from these surveys are thus highlycomparable across Britain, Germany and France (see Figure 1). However,the Eurobarometers probe into the European publics’ denomination of themost important issues only from 2003 onwards. They therefore do notallow for inferences on longer-term historical trends. Moreover, the semi-annual interval of the Eurobarometers precludes more detailed insightsinto short-term developments and the construction of continuous timeseries.

In order to make up for these shortcomings, we complemented our datawith country-specific surveys from two national polling institutes: IpsosMori for Britain and Forsa for Germany.8 Although the question wordingsemployed by these institutes are not entirely similar, the two data sets comeas close as possible to providing comparable data on the salience of politicalissues in the two countries: Ipsos Mori asks for ‘the most important issuefacing Britain today’ and thus adopts the most valid indicator for an issue’spublic salience. The Forsa institute, however, asks respondents what theycurrently consider to be ‘the three major problems in Germany’. Since thisquestion wording mingles an issue’s perceived importance with its perceivedproblem status, it is only the second-best measure of the concept of salience,which is agnostic as to whether or not an issue is negatively evaluated as aproblem (Wlezien 2005: 556–61).

Moreover, our British and German data sets also differ in regard to theirrepresentation of responses: whereas Ipsos Mori groups all answers into 40issue categories, the German data consist of up to 416 more precise

FIGURE 1

EUROBAROMETER POLLS, 2003–07

Source: Standard Eurobarometer No. 59–68, Q: What do you think are the two most important issues facing

[OUR COUNTRY] at the moment? Authors’ figure.


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categories. Since our research interest is to compare the public salience offoreign and security policy in general, we decided to make use of theaccumulated Ipsos Mori category ‘foreign affairs, defence and internationalterrorism’, and from the Forsa data we put together all categories that referto foreign and security policy and international terrorism.9 Given theavailable data sets, we contend that our approach offers the bestapproximation to coding equality and that the results of the two polls arebroadly comparable (see Figure 2). While certainly imperfect, our data thusallow for comparable findings across all three countries under study for theyears 2003–07 and, in addition, for Britain and Germany over the longer-term period between 1997 and 2006.

With these caveats in mind, the analysis of our findings is organised asfollows: first, we attend to the overall level of the public salience offoreign and security policy; second, we focus on the volatility of thatpolicy’s salience, i.e. on the most notable peaks in public attention toforeign affairs. On both dimensions we seek to trace broad trends withinthe countries over time and point out similarities and differences acrosscountries.

Findings

The Level of Public Salience

As to the overall level of the salience of foreign and security policy in thecountries under study, the Eurobarometer polls yield two basic insights. First,the public salience of foreign affairs between 2003 and 2007 was far higher inBritain than inGermany andFrance: in every Eurobarometer poll during that

FIGURE 2

IPSOS MORI, FORSA SALIENCE DATA, 1997–2006

Source: Ipsos Mori Political Monitor (2008), Q: What would you say is the most important issue facing

Britain today? and What do you see as other important issues facing Britain today? Forsa Bus (1997–2006),

Q: Was sind Ihrer Meinung nach in Deutschland zur Zeit die drei grobten Probleme? Authors’ figure.


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period, the percentage of respondents which ranked foreign affairs, defence orinternational terrorism among the two most important issues of the day wasabout two to four times higher in Britain than in the two other countries (seeFigure 1). Second, the data point to broadly similar levels of salience inGermany and France: on average, the difference between the Eurobarometerresults for the two countries was only about four percentage points.

With respect to Germany and Britain, the Eurobarometer findings areaccentuated by the country-specific IpsosMori and Forsa polls (see Figure 2).Due to the lack of country-specific polling data on France, we have to restrictthe following account to these two countries. Nonetheless, we wouldhypothesise that the general patterns of public attention to foreign andsecurity policy in France shouldmore or less mirror our findings onGermany:first, the Eurobarometer data suggest close similarities between the twocountries as to the public salience of foreign affairs; second, the country-specific contexts of the debates inGermany andFrance on the Iraqwar and oninternational terrorism resembled each other (Gordon and Shapiro 2004: 75–92).

The Ipsos Mori and Forsa polls show that the British and German publicsparted ways in regard of their attention to foreign affairs after the 11September 2001 terrorist attacks and even more so after the preparations forthe 2003 Iraq war grewmore acute in late 2002. Since then, the average level offoreign affairs’ salience in Britain is constantly of an altogether higher order ofmagnitude than in Germany. Prior to 9/11 and the Iraq war, in contrast, thepercentages of respondents who considered foreign and security policy animportant issue tended to be similar and were at a very low level.

This divergent development speaks to a pronounced difference in thepersistence of event effects on the public salience of foreign affairs in BritainandGermany: the same international events had amuch longer-term impact inthe former than in the latter case. InBritain, 9/11 and the Iraqwar proved to becataclysmic turning points for public opinion and induced a far higher averagelevel of public attention to foreign affairs than hitherto. These turning pointsnot only caused temporary disruptions of the established equilibrium level ofthe British public’s attention to foreign affairs but effectively shifted thisequilibrium to a much higher level. In Germany, on the contrary, the sameinternational events had much less persistent effects on public opinion andonly sparked rather short-term upswings in public attention. The Germandata thus appear to be in line with what has been named the ‘opinion-decaymodel’ (Dalton and Duval 2004: 127): the sharp initial upswings in the publicsalience of foreign affairs around 9/11 and the onset of the Iraqwar soon fadedaway, and the German public’s attention to foreign and security policy withina few months settled down close to its pre-9/11 level.

Given our twofold classification of possible determinants of foreignaffairs’ public salience, these findings highlight the effects of country-specificdeterminants: the cross-national differences in the level of foreign affairs’public salience and in the persistence of event effects cannot be accounted


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for by intrinsic issue-specific logics of international events but have to be dueto different domestic political settings in which these events were debated.

The most notable difference in country-specific contexts between Britainand Germany relates to the extent to which these countries were directlyinvolved in or felt vulnerable to the formative issues on the internationalagenda after 2001/02, i.e. international terrorism and the Iraq war. Mostobvious in this regard is the war against Iraq, in which only Britain but notGermany took part. Along with direct involvement in that war wentimmediate and tangible repercussions of it for the British public, mostdisturbingly in the form of killed military personnel (Cox and Oliver 2006:183–4). The British political debate on Iraq was steadily supplied withmultiple focal points which sustained an unusually high and startlinglypersistent level of public interest in the war. Without such immediate focalpoints, in contrast, the attention of the German public to foreign affairsrapidly waned after the US-led invasion of Iraq in spring 2003.

With respect to international terrorism, the picture is more ambiguous. Inone way or the other, all three countries under study were involved in the‘war against terror’. However, the London bombings of 7 July 2005 madeBritain the only one of these countries to have suffered a major terroristattack on its soil. Moreover, even before the London bombings, a case canbe made that the British public felt more concerned with the issue than itsGerman or French counterparts due to the close cultural and politicalaffinity between Britain and the US and due to Britain’s role as the leadingally of the US both in Iraq and in the global fight against terrorism(Williams 2005: 37–55).

The second characteristic of the country-specific context which shouldhave contributed to the much higher level of foreign affairs’ public saliencein Britain than in Germany and France after 2003 relates to the patterns ofdomestic political conflict. In particular with respect to the Iraq war, theBritish political debate was exceptionally charged and highly polarised.Most notably, the British government’s support for the war sparked a highlydivisive dissent within the political elite. Although this dissent was rathermuted between the major British parties, it was all the more entrenchedwithin the Labour government and its parliamentary support coalition.These intra-governmental conflicts served as powerful fire-alarms whichadded to the public’s mobilisation against the increasingly unpopular war.True to the pattern of majoritarian systems, the public debate on Iraq inBritain was thus much more polarised than the debates in Germany andFrance, where the anti-war policies of the respective governments proved farless contentious both within the political elites and the general publics.

The Volatility of Public Salience

Moving on to the volatility of foreign affairs’ public salience in Germanyand Britain, our data display similarities as well as differences. As regards


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the former, Figure 2 features three particularly pronounced peaks in publicattention to foreign affairs which have occurred in both countries at similarpoints in time. The first can be observed in April/May 1999 at the height ofthe Kosovo war in which German and British forces were engaged. Thesecond and even sharper upswing was induced by 9/11: in Germany andBritain the percentages of respondents who ranked foreign affairs among themost important political issues increased many times over within one monthfrom August to September 2001. The third conjoint upswing of foreignaffairs’ public salience, finally, took shape in March 2003 in the wake of theincipient Iraq war.

In order to account for these cross-national similarities, the analysis hasto focus on constant issue-specific logics.10 Each of the three major parallelupswings in the public salience of foreign affairs during our period of studywas precipitated by events which qualify as international crises. The lesssuch crises are confined to specific countries and the more pronounced theyare, the more powerful issue-specific determinants of foreign affairs’ salienceshould be relative to country-specific determinants. The Kosovo war, 9/11and the Iraq war possess extremely high news values which similarly attractthe attention of both the media and general publics across differentcountries.

The conjoint upswings in the public salience of foreign affairs in Britainand Germany, however, also display marked differences regarding theirmagnitudes. Most notably, the peaks after 9/11 and around the beginning ofthe 2003 Iraq war were far more pronounced in Britain than in Germany:after 9/11 the share of respondents in Britain who ranked foreign affairs,defence or terrorism among the most important issues increased by 60percentage points, in Germany by 30 points. A similar pattern took shape inthe case of Iraq when the British data again report a rise in the salience offoreign affairs by 60 points between July 2002 and February 2003, whereasthe German data during the same period only feature an increase by 15points. This finding again speaks to the different domestic political settingsof the British and German debates on 9/11 and Iraq, i.e. to the moreimmediate relation of the British public to these issues and to the highlypolarised controversies in Britain over the government’s Iraq policy.

As to the Kosovo war, it is the German data which stand out for therelative magnitude of the increase in the public’s attention to foreign andsecurity policy compared to 9/11 and Iraq. Although Kosovo inducedroughly similar upswings in Britain and Germany, this was most exceptionalin Germany, where the salience of foreign affairs during the Kosovo war washigher than during the Iraq war and only slightly lower than after 9/11. Theextraordinary attention of the German public to Kosovo reflects theextremely intense domestic debate about the war, which was fuelled by deepconflicts within the newly elected left-of-centre Schroder government.

Since the conjoint upswings in the salience of foreign affairs in Britain andGermany at the time of Kosovo, 9/11 and Iraq differed in magnitude


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between both countries, our data indicate that the precise effect of theintrinsic news value of international crises on foreign affairs’ public salienceis refracted by country-specific determinants. What is more, in a number ofcases the impact of issue-specific logics was entirely overshadowed bycountry-specific contexts. In particular, our findings point to several peaksin the public salience of foreign affairs which occurred only in one of the twocountries.

The first of these exclusive peaks took shape in Britain in February 1998.The context of that upswing was set by a Foreign Office dossier about thenuclear ambitions of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and by Tony Blair’scontroversial visit to Washington during which he appeared to endorsePresident Clinton’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric on Iraq (Riddell 2003:94–6). It is this specific setting of the British debate which accounts for theFebruary 1998 peak in the public salience of foreign affairs in Britain as wellas for the notable absence of such a peak in Germany.

A similar logic holds for two conspicuous upswings in the salience offoreign and security policy to the British public in 2004. In April/May 2004,the attention of the British public was spurred by revelations about abusesof prisoners in Abu Ghraib and by reports that April 2004 was the bloodiestmonth in Iraq since official hostilities had ended. In October/November2004, the British debate on the war was aroused by a fierce offensive ofBritish and American troops on the Iraqi town of Fallujah. Again, theseevents failed to spur a particular public interest in Germany which was lessimmediately affected by them.

Anothermajor event to leave itsmark on our data is the 7 July 2005 terroristbombings in London, which led to a more than threefold increase in thesalience of foreign affairs to the British public. In Germany, by contrast, thesame event only induced a minor increase of less than two percentage points.These divergent patterns, more than anything, underline that the immanentnews value of international crises on its own does not necessarily suffice tosparkmajor upswings in the public salience of foreign affairs.Rather, the effectof issue logics on the salience of foreign affairs is conditioned by the interactionof issue-specific factors with country-specific determinants.

Conclusion

General publics can only be expected to signal their foreign policypreferences to decision-makers if foreign affairs issues are sufficiently salientto them. Otherwise, the thermostat of public opinion ‘is not switched on’(Franklin and Wlezien 1997: 349) and governments are exempt from publicscrutiny when they devise their foreign and security policy. On the mostgeneral level, therefore, the article’s analysis of the conditions which makegeneral publics focus their attention on foreign affairs explores a necessaryprecondition for democratic accountability in the field of foreign andsecurity policy.


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More specifically, the article contributes to existing scholarship on theconcept of public issue salience in that it proposes to distinguish betweenissue-specific and country-specific influences on the salience of foreign affairsto domestic publics. This organising framework expands our knowledgeabout the dynamics of foreign and security policy’s public salience mainly intwo respects: first, it highlights country-dependent differences in the publicsalience of foreign affairs and thus corrects for a certain bias in the literaturetowards issue-specific differences. Second, it points to the interplay betweenissue-specific and country-specific factors as determinants of public issuesalience.

The article thus cautions against generalisations about the public salienceof different foreign policy issues which are exclusively based on these issues’intrinsic qualities. Rather, the salience of similar issues to different nationalpublics will be refracted by country-specific determinants, in particular thepatterns of domestic elite dissent and the country’s degree of directinvolvement in the respective issues. These country-dependent determinantsappear to be particularly consequential for the extent to which initial effectsof international events on the public salience of foreign affairs persist overtime.

In view of these findings, we can thus expect to see rather uneven patternsin the public salience of foreign affairs in different countries at similar pointsin time. This expectation should not the least hold for Britain, Germany andFrance as the three leading architects of ESDP. Future efforts to put ESDPinto practice – especially in the form of military overseas missions – arelikely to become more salient to publics in some EU members than in othersand might thus be hampered by uneven pressures of national publicopinions on member state governments.

Acknowledgements

The article builds on a paper presented at the 2nd Global InternationalStudies Conference in Ljubljana, 23–26 July 2008. We would like to thankthe participants of our panel and two anonymous reviewers for theircomments and suggestions.

Notes

1. The effects of an issue’s high public salience on the ability of governments to push through

their favoured policies are not necessarily negative. The constraining effects of high public

salience only pertain to the leeway of governments to pursue policies that run counter to the

public’s preferences. When governments seek to implement policies which are in line with

the wishes of the public, in contrast, they will be strengthened vis-a-vis their opponents if

the public salience of the respective policies is high.

2. For a partial exception regarding public opinion in the US see Knecht and Weatherford

(2006); for an analysis of the salience of political issues in British party manifestos see

Pogorelis et al. (2005).


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3. The distinction between issue-specific and country-specific determinants of public salience is

derived from the concept of situational logic, which has been proposed as a framework for

middle-range theorising (Esser 2002: 130–33). One, the concept refers to ‘situational’ elements

of explanation which account for differences in outcomes across specific contexts and have

been conceptualised in this article as country-specificdeterminants of public salience. Two, the

concept points to elements of explanation which identify a constant ‘logic’ of causation that is

independent from specific contexts. Here, these constant parameters are referred to as issue-

specific determinants of public salience that have an equal effect on the salience of foreign

affairs irrespective of country-specific differences.

4. Given the relative nature of public salience, the difference between majoritarian and

consensus-oriented systems only relates to the volatility of foreign affairs’ salience, not to its

overall level.

5. The criterion of direct involvement has a subjective dimension to it and is not to be

measured solely against some objective standard. The general publics’ sense of being

immediately affected by international events may be strongly influenced, for example, by

historical, cultural and linguistic ties between societies or by a country’s strategic culture.

6. This conjecture can be illustrated by the different levels in the average public salience of

defence issues in the US and Canada. Whereas the US is the prototype of a country which is

strongly engaged in world politics and in international conflicts, Canada is arguably less

entwined with international affairs. Correspondingly, defence issues tend to be relatively

salient to the American but less so to the Canadian public: with regard to the US, defence

has figured as a significant electoral issue in various presidential elections (Asher 1992), and

public opinion has been proven strongly responsive to policy changes regarding defence

spending (Wlezien 1996) – both of which being indicative of the field’s high public salience.

In the case of Canada, on the contrary, the weak responsiveness of public preferences to

changes in defence spending speaks to a rather modest public salience of defence issues

(Soroka and Wlezien 2004).

7. We owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.

8. UK data from Ipsos Mori Political Monitor (2008): unprompted, combined answers to the

questions: ‘What would you say is the most important issue facing Britain today?’ and ‘What

do you see as other important issues facing Britain today?’; German data from Forsa Bus

(1997–2006): ‘Was sind IhrerMeinung nach in Deutschland zurZeit die drei großten Probleme?’

9. We are aware that the composite issue of ‘Foreign Affairs, Defence or Terrorism’ represents

a rather extensive range of concerns. Nonetheless, this category has the virtue of being not

only broad enough to encompass all spontaneous enumerations that relate to foreign and

security policy but also sufficiently distinct to cover only foreign affairs issues and to

exclude, for example, personal security concerns that relate to domestic issues such as

crime. Moreover, we contend that meaningful comparisons of issue salience over time and

across countries require a high level of aggregation of individual polling data.

10. Strictly speaking, our selection of cases does not allow us to discard the possibility that

cross-national similarities in the public salience of foreign affairs may be due to similarities

in country-specific contexts which have been omitted in our analysis. This possibility could

only be ruled out by analyses that resort to a most dissimilar cases design, in which the

countries under study differ in all relevant dimensions except in the patterns of public

attention to foreign affairs (King et al. 1994: 168–82).

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

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