Paying Attention to Foreign Affairs: How Public Opinion Affects Presidential Decision Making. By Thomas Knecht. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. 280p. $64.95.

Despite increased attention to the linkages between domestic politics and international relations in political science literature over the last 20 years, considerable debate remains about how well equipped citizens are to act as informed constraints on governments or how attentive and responsive government actors are to public opinion. Debates about citizens' ability to act as a check on government behavior are not new, of course, and have a long tradition in political philosophy and in public discourse. Yet the proliferation of theories of domestic–international linkages in contemporary IR scholarship has unfortunately been accompanied by incomplete dialogue between public opinion and IR scholars and often by claims of unidirectional or unconditional causality regarding domestic constraints, elite framing and opinion leadership, citizens' informational capacities, and the role of the media. The relationship among these factors in shaping foreign policy is quite complex, however, and fortunately Thomas Knecht acknowledges this complexity and advances a conditional argument about the relationship between public attitudes and presidential decision making.

Knecht begins by arguing that presidents should be most responsive to public opinion when issues are “salient,” meaning that they are highly visible and important to citizens, and when public opinion is more or less unified, meaning that there is wide support for a particular policy option. In order to develop a predictive theory concerning when these two conditions are likely to be met, he divides the policymaking process into five stages: problem definition, option generation, policy decision, implementation, and policy review. According to the argument, public attention is not constant across these stages, meaning that presidents' “room to maneuver” should vary across these stages as well. Nor is public attention likely to be constant across different types of foreign policy events. Crises, characterized by time pressures and a high likelihood of military force, tend to generate much more media and public attention than do noncrisis foreign policy decisions.

Knecht's argument generates the specific hypotheses that public attention to crises should peak during the implementation stage of the policy, while public attention to noncrises should peak during the earlier policy decision stage. Crises, especially those that end with military force, attract the most public attention, while noncrises tend to attract much less attention. When the public does focus on noncrises, that focus tends to be short-lived and devoted to one aspect of the decision stage, such as how to administer food aid to famine-ravaged Ethiopia.

To examine these claims, Knecht collects data on the average minutes of daily television coverage for 17 crises and 17 noncrises, dividing each event into the stages of foreign policymaking, and examines when coverage peaked. This data is presented in a very readable and intuitive manner in Chapter 3, which discusses the majority of the cases that conform to the theory, followed by those that do not. Coverage of 14 of the 17 noncrises peaked at the policy decision stage, consistent with the theory. The record for crises is more mixed: Coverage of nine of the 17 crises peaked at the implementation stage, five at the policy decision stage, two at the option generation stage, and one at the implementation stage. One strength of this type of evidence is that it allows the author to look at specific details of each event in order to devise explanations for patterns of coverage. The graphical presentation of the data is also quite effective. However, a drawback is that without something like simple comparison of means tests, we are left without a metric to determine how confident we should be in the theory in light of these comparison. One would like to know, for instance, if the pattern in media coverage across crises shows statistically significant differences, given that the hypothesized pattern holds in a narrow majority of crisis cases. Knecht could also do more to describe the procedures for categorizing events temporally into the five stages of foreign policymaking, an admittedly difficult and subjective task. Nonetheless, the effort to compare public exposure to news across a large number of events deserves praise.

Chapters 4–7 turn to more extensive cases studies of the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict and the 1982–86 Ethiopian famine. One of the virtues of the book is the combination of broader, aggregate comparisons in Chapter 3 with the more detailed, process-tracing approach in Chapters 4–7. In Chapters 4 and 5, Knecht examines the first Bush administration's approach to dealing with public opinion, first in the early policymaking stages and then once the implementation of military action began. He shows that in the early stages of the Gulf conflict, the administration had considerable leeway to lead public opinion, although as media coverage made the public more knowledgeable about the situation and as public opinion began to coalesce, the administration became more constrained by public opinion.

Two theoretically relevant themes stand out in the discussion of the Gulf conflict. First is the relationship between public opinion and foreign policymaking changes across the life of a foreign policy event, evolving from elite leadership to much more public constraint. The recognition of this type of conditional causal relationship contributes to broader debates about the role of domestic politics in foreign policy. Second, the author presents direct evidence that a number of the Bush administration's policy decisions were firmly aimed at domestic and international political audiences. For instance, concern over public opinion played a direct role in the decisions to garner Unites Nations Security Council approval, to hold a final meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in January 1991, and then to end military operations short of Baghdad. Each of these decisions involved trade-offs that resulted in delay or compromise in policy objectives. This evidence shows in detail how policy can be shaped by public opinion, even when the result is policy that might be strategically suboptimal.

The case study of the Ethiopian famine is also quite interesting as a comparison, as much of the literature pays little attention to this type of noncrisis decision making. The Ethiopian case nicely demonstrates how media attention to noncrises can wax and wane, generating greater or lesser constraints for presidential decision making. The Reagan administration's aid policy followed patterns in issue salience during this period; when media attention peaked, the administration donated record aid, but later returned to aid giving more consonant with the broader U.S. strategic posture. Consistent with the theory, public attention focused most on what needed to be done, and once a decision was made, the public seemed to quickly lose interest.

While the evidentiary portion of the book is well done and offers detailed insight into how policymakers have dealt with public opinion, one of the limitations of the book is that the theoretical explanation for why media attention peaks at different stages of policymaking is somewhat underdeveloped. Knecht equates issue salience with media attention, making the very reasonable claim that media time devoted to an event is a reasonable proxy for the public's perception of the importance of the event. However, we are left with some ambiguity about whose preferences and behavior drives patterns of attention across the stages of foreign policymaking. The theoretical section conjectures that these patterns flow from public interest, suggesting a demand-side explanation for the phenomena. For example, crises tend to be shorter and involve more “severe” policy responses like military action; thus, the public will pay more attention to the implementation stage (p. 25). Yet in other parts of the book, the author alludes to supply-side factors, like the role of famous individuals in activating public awareness of the Ethiopian famine or the Bush administration's early framing of the Gulf conflict in shaping public opinion about Saddam Hussein. The argument throughout the book tends to portray presidents as beholden to these patterns in public attention, suggesting that when issue salience peaks, presidents are normally required to take public opinion into account. But if the stages and timing of crises are themselves shaped by presidential decision making, there is a potentially underexplored strategic dynamic shaping patterns in salience.

Although these questions are left partially unanswered, on the whole Paying Attention to Foreign Affairs is an important contribution to the literature on public opinion and foreign policy. Knecht recognizes the complexity of these linkages and provides ample evidence and analysis of the interplay between presidential decisions and public attitudes. The combination of aggregate comparison of media attention across crises with several detailed case studies is especially effective at portraying the ways in which public attitudes and foreign policy interact.