Thomas Knecht provides a thoughtful and fair assessment of my book, Securing Approval. He raises three reasonable critiques that I respond to here.

First, Knecht raises the question of the relative importance of international organizations (IOs) as a cognitive heuristic when other, more readily accessible informational sources exist. I agree that citizens pay attention to a variety of information sources, and relative attention is probably influenced by factors such as partisanship and attitudes toward multilateral institutions. Indeed, existing research has shown that citizens pay selective attention to news outlets that reinforce their partisan beliefs (e.g., see Eric, Lawrence, Sides, John, and Farell, Henry, “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 8 [March2010]: 141–57; Prior, Markus, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Influences Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections, 2007; and Carpini, Michael Delli and Keeter, Scott, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters, 1996). Although I attempted to control for several of these factors in my tests and provide some prima facie evidence that United Nations Security Council decisions receive coverage in a variety of new outlets, I did not exhaust all possibilities. On the other hand, I find suggestive evidence of a previously unexplored empirical relationship between IO activity and public opinion that, I think, points toward more detailed future analysis.

Second, Knecht argues that my theory demands too much of citizens. In particular, citizens have only rough ideas about the makeup of the UN Security Council. I acknowledge that this is a tension in the theory, but I think there are several answers. To begin with, I pointed out in several passages that while citizens do not literally calculate the biases of individual Security Council members, this does not preclude a correlation between individual attitudes about the Council and member-state preferences revealed through public statements or individual votes. Put differently, citizens can hold a view of the Security Council as generally reluctant to authorize force, and this perception can be shaped by coverage of Council activity (itself driven by member preferences), without citizens actually knowing detailed information about individual member preferences. Next, the conditional-information transmission argument suggests certain observable implications that find some support in the data. It is difficult to explain these patterns if individual attitudes toward the Security Council and other organizations are not at least correlated with the underlying preferences of members.

Third, Knecht also mentions alternative, constructivist-inspired explanations that would point to the UN Security Council as the most legitimate, and therefore most important, security IO in world affairs. While this approach has much to add to our understanding of the interaction between international law and domestic politics, it does not predict a conditional relationship between public response and changes in underlying preferences of the institution, and this conditional relationship finds partial support in the data. Furthermore, an explanation of behavior that appeals to legitimacy must explain where that legitimacy comes from. Voeten, Erik's 2005 article does this with regard to the UN Security Council (“The Political Origins of the UN Security Council's Ability to Legitimize the Use of Force,” International Organization 59 [April2005]: 527–57), and concludes that in light of the leading explanations for what constitutes legitimacy, the Council does not possess characteristics that would make it legitimate in the eyes of mass publics. In short, it is far from clear why the Security Council, an exclusive and antimajoritarian institution, would be seen as the “gold standard” in world affairs.

Knecht makes a useful point that more in-depth case studies would help sort out the causal logics used by leaders when consulting international institutions. While the book does not contain extended case studies, the limited archival evidence cited there, however, shows that the administration of President George H. W. Bush took pains to publicize Security Council support for the 1991 Persian Gulf War and explicitly pointed out the heterogeneous group of countries offering their consent. At the same time, the administration of George W. Bush tried to paint the opposition of France and other permanent members prior to the 2003 Iraq War as due to motives other than the merits of regime change. Both these behaviors are consistent with theory.

I am grateful to Thomas Knecht for his insightful review, and these points are important and worth raising in order to stimulate future research in this subject area.