Counting the Public In: Presidents, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy.

Sparrow, Bartholomew H.

Counting the Public In: Presidents, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy. By Douglas C. Foyle. Columbia University Press. 1999. xiii + 379.

How does public opinion affect foreign policy? Counting the Public In argues that presidents' consultation of public opinion when making foreign policy may best be explained by the beliefs that they (and their advisers) have on the role that public opinion should play in foreign policy--that is, whether public opinion input is desirable and whether it is necessary. Yet how presidents apply public opinion to the making and implementation of foreign policy depends on whether the decision period is short or extended, and if the president is aware of the need for a decision.

Douglas Foyle tests his theory of belief politics in four cases from the Eisenhower years where each case represents different high-stress decisions: Quemoy and Matsu ("crisis"), Dien Bien Phu ("reflexive"), Sputnik ("innovative"), and New Look ("deliberative"). Foyle further tests his theory by applying it to one crisis and one deliberative case from each of the Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton presidencies, where the presidents had different belief orientations with respect to public influence: Carter was an "executor"; Reagan, a "guardian"; Bush, a "pragmatist"; and Clinton, a "delegate." (Eisenhower was a pragmatist.)

The historical record overwhelmingly confirms Foyle's model. Neither realist theory (according to which political leaders ignore public opinion when making decisions and then lead public opinion when implementing foreign policy) nor Wilsonian liberalism (where public opinion influences foreign policy decisions and restrains the scope of presidential action) holds up.

Counting the Public In has many attractions and one fundamental problem. The book is a model of research design and organizational clarity. The author proceeds carefully and clearly: he gathered evidence on presidents' beliefs on public influence before he collected evidence on the decisions themselves, for instance. Foyle's categorizations of presidential dispositions toward public opinion and the context of decisionmaking are at once innovative and useful, evocative of James David Barber's typology of presidential character and Skowronek's research on political time and presidential leadership. Foyle's taxonomies will be widely adopted by others in the field, I suspect.

The author's decision-making model is both parsimonious and cognizant of the complexity of presidential politics, and the book nicely combines positivist political science with close historical research. Foyle further recognizes that to relax some of his model's constraints (e.g., to include economic cases, to reduce the proximity of foreign policy decisions to elections) would likely moderate its predictive power.

Undermining the book's central argument, though, is the fact that the author does not define public opinion. The author assumes a "public opinion" instead of offering the reader a sense of the difficulty of divining public opinion (polls, congressional behavior, and the press are all at various times used as indicators), whether it be the interpretation of poll results, reading congressional actions (do members act on behalf of their party? organized interests? their constituents?), or evaluating media content.

Lost is the fact that polls, the Congress, and the press may all be influenced by public diplomacy. The dissemination of news from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Defense to the media may be instrumental to the formation of public opinion on foreign policy and allow for information to be used for political ends, as Leon Sigal, Daniel Hallin, Tom Wicker, Stephen Hess, and others point out.

In addition, by excluding corporate leaders, lobbyists, academic experts, and top journalists from his definition of "elites," the author ignores the disparity in public opinion that may exist between Washington opinion, as reflected in the pages of the prestige press and on television, and that of the mass public (as the research of Benjamin Page, Thomas Patterson, Steven Kull, I. M. Destler, and others shows). But both sets of opinions are included in the text's presentation of "public opinion."

The author's neglect of communications strategy and the news media in the formation of public opinion has two implications. One is that it casts doubt on Foyle's history and hypothesis testing, given that the author's model has no role for nonofficial elites in the determination of foreign policy. The later case studies, written without the benefit of archival data, are particularly suspect: in the Gulf War, for instance, Foyle omits mention of the Bush administration's role in promoting the false stories of the one-quarter-million Iraqi troops massing at the Saudi border, the hospital incubator deaths, and the identification of Saddam Hussein with Hitler. We may wonder about the other case studies and other neglected secondary materials.

A second implication is that if public communications are an important part of presidential success, as the earlier Reagan and later Clinton eras suggest, then we may need another variable: presidents' belief in their ability to manipulate public opinion. Clinton may see himself as a "delegate" of public opinion--although this reader views presidential statements and memoirs with more skepticism than does the author--but the president also believes in the malleability of public opinion. Clinton's ability to manipulate political information may make him, a "delegate," less tied to public opinion, in fact, than a supposedly freer "executor" Carter.

Last, the book disserves the reader. The end notes pages contain no reference to either the pages or chapters to which the notes refer, and the index is unhelpful: many entries listed more than ten and sometimes more than twenty pages or page sequences. "Polls" listed twenty-five page locations with no further breakdown in subject matter, for instance; "realists" listed twenty-three locations; "public opinion, led," twenty-one; "Wilsonian liberalism," twenty; and "Soviet Union," seventeen. These are nontrivial concerns to an academic readership.

Counting the Public In is an impressively researched, sophisticated work that should prompt further research on the domestic determinants of U.S. foreign policy. It is possible to learn from conceptually flawed work no less than from definitive scholarship.

--Bartholomew H. Sparrow University of Texas at Austin