War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy - Softcover

Baum, Matthew A.; Potter, Philip B. K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691165238 ISBN 13: 9780691165233

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to join or avoid a war? War and Democratic Constraint shows that the key to how a government determines foreign policy rests on the transmission and availability of information. Citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable and a distinctive foreign policy emerges when two vital institutions—a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media—are present to make timely information accessible.

Matthew Baum and Philip Potter demonstrate that there must first be a politically potent opposition that can blow the whistle when a leader missteps. This counteracts leaders' incentives to obscure and misrepresent. Second, healthy media institutions must be in place and widely accessible in order to relay information from whistle-blowers to the public. Baum and Potter explore this communication mechanism during three different phases of international conflicts: when states initiate wars, when they respond to challenges from other states, or when they join preexisting groups of actors engaged in conflicts.

Examining recent wars, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq, War and Democratic Constraint links domestic politics and mass media to international relations in a brand-new way.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matthew A. Baum is the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications and professor of public policy at Harvard University. He is the author of Soft News Goes to War and the coauthor of War Stories (both Princeton). Philip B. K. Potter is assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Taking us past democratic peace and other generalizations, Baum and Potter present a comparative and differentiated analysis that insightfully explains variations in the politics of the use of force among democracies, and integrates systemic factors including national political institutions and the interactions of the media, elites, and general public."--Bruce W. Jentleson, Duke University

"War and Democratic Constraint is a major achievement on several fronts. It offers evidence that public opinion can and does constrain government actions--in the foreign policy area no less. More importantly, it shows how this power to constrain is not the same for all democracies. The book demonstrates more than any work to date the value of studying the interplay of public opinion, the media, elite leadership, and policymaking."--Robert Y. Shapiro, Columbia University

"Answering important questions about foreign policy and leadership, this book is the first to comprehensively explore why some leaders are more constrained by public opinion than others. Baum and Potter look at aspects of democratic systems--political opposition, press freedom, and media access--in relation to their constraints on leadership. While there are works on democracy and democratization, none make the connections to media like this one does."--Patrick James, University of Southern California

"With War and Democratic Constraint, Baum and Potter have made a major advance in our understanding of how the news media does and does not enable the public to control its government. A seminal book on political communication and democratic responsiveness, this work will be read by scholars and students for years to come."--Jonathan M. Ladd, Georgetown University

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

War and Democratic Constraint

How the Public Influences Foreign Policy

By Matthew A. Baum, Philip B. K. Potter

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16523-3

Contents

List of Figures and Tables, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
Chapter 1 • Introduction: Looking for Democratic Constraint, 1, 
Chapter 2 • Democracies Are Not Created Equal: A Theory of Democratic Constraint, 14, 
Chapter 3 • Democratic Constraint, the Democratic Peace, and Conflict Initiation, 53, 
Chapter 4 • Looking for Audience Costs in All the Wrong Places: Constraint and Reciprocation, 86, 
Chapter 5 • Willing and Politically Able: Democratic Constraint and Coalition Joining, 103, 
Chapter 6 • Downs Meets the Press: How Party Systems Shape the News, 151, 
Chapter 7 • Coalition Stories: Cases from the Iraq Coalition, 193, 
Chapter 8 • Conclusion: Information, Constraint, and Democratic Foreign Policy, 222, 
References, 237, 
Index, 251, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Looking for Democratic Constraint

In February 2003, British citizens opposed to the war in Iraq held the largest public demonstration ever seen in the United Kingdom. The protest brought London to a standstill—no mean feat in a country with a long and storied tradition of public protest. In the three months preceding the war, only a third of the British public on average supported a military attack on Iraq, compared to nearly half (47 percent) opposing it. Public support bottomed out in the month prior to the war (February 2003), falling to 29 percent, with opposition rising to 52 percent. Indeed, as late as March 16, four days before the US-led invasion, 54 percent of the British public considered war against Iraq unjustified, while only 30 percent considered it justified.

Despite strong public opposition, Tony Blair—a Labour prime minister whose left-of-center politics made him no obvious ideological ally to Republican US President George W. Bush—proceeded to commit forty-five thousand troops to the conflict. Blair maintained that presence—a force second in number only to that of the United States—in the face of opposition that intensified in the years that followed. In short, despite substantial opposition from his own electorate, Blair prioritized the strategic relationship with the United States, which was pushing very hard for contributions to its "coalition of the willing."

The British public was not alone in disapproving of the Iraq War. Prior to the war's outbreak, an overall average of two-thirds of respondents across sixty-two countries surveyed—in some cases over 90 percent—opposed a military attack on Iraq. Protests of comparable magnitude to those in London sprang up in many Western countries in the first half of 2003, but the domestic responses to them varied widely. Canada—a country with equally deep cultural, military, and financial ties to the United States—withheld support for the conflict, as did France, a long-standing ally. Both cited domestic opposition as a primary reason. Italy and Spain initially committed forces, but withdrew them in the face of the same sort of mounting opposition that Blair withstood.

How should we understand this variability? When it comes to foreign policy, why are some leaders seemingly constrained by public opinion, even in the earliest stages of policy formulation, while others are more insulated from it? These are the questions that motivate this book.

The problem is substantial. Republican forms of government, by design, put distance between leaders and voters. Citizens voluntarily delegate some of their sovereign power, for limited periods of time and in limited domains, to elected representatives. In theory, this allows leaders to make considered decisions by insulating them from popular passions. In the longer term, however, representatives must either faithfully represent the deeper preferences of the citizenry or be replaced through elections. In an era of mass democracies in which millions hold the franchise, we are inevitably speaking of such republican arrangements in which the few represent the many. Yet the variability that we have just described in the way American allies responded to calls for contributions to the coalition of the willing suggests that not all democracies are alike when it comes to insulation and responsiveness.

We argue that this distinction arises from the way diverse institutions modulate the flow of information from leaders to citizens. There are important differences among democracies on this dimension. Some foster the flow of information much more effectively than others, and these distinctions are important. With information comes democratic constraint. Without it, democracies are in some important regards functionally equivalent to autocracies.

Most existing work on democratic conflict behavior assumes that information flows easily and responsiveness is automatic. These assumptions might approximate the realities of direct democracy in ancient city-states such as Athens, but they bear little resemblance to democratic processes in modern mass democracies. As is so often the case, the result is a mismatch between theory and practice that undercuts the validity and usefulness of academic research on this subject. In practice, citizens cannot perfectly constrain their leaders. The best evidence suggests that, more often than not, they fail to even come close. This is because, once in power, leaders have powerful incentives to prevent citizens from holding them to account. In some cases they also possess institutional tools enabling them to do so.

Nowhere is the gap between elected representatives and the public larger than in the "high politics" of international affairs, particularly in matters of war and peace. Most citizens have little or no firsthand knowledge of events taking place abroad. In this sense, the Iraq example is more the exception than the rule in that citizens worldwide were at least aware and mobilized enough to have preferences and make them known. More commonly, leaders make foreign policy decisions without any meaningful public scrutiny. Citizens generally lack the time and incentive to inform themselves about distant events with uncertain implications for their daily lives. This leaves them dependent upon political and media elites to tell them what they need to know about foreign policy. Consequently, political and media institutions that systematically foster both robust opposition elites and the flow of information from them to citizens enhance democratic responsiveness, whereas their absence tends to insulate leaders from their citizens.

WHY DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS MATTER

While an extensive body of empirical research explores how and why states become embroiled in international conflict, very little of it differentiates among democracies. For example, the voluminous literatures on the democratic peace and domestic audience costs—which we grapple with in this book—generally identify states as either democracies or autocracies, thereby smoothing over any institutional differences within democracies as a group. This can be a useful simplification for answering some questions, but it also means that puzzles like the aforementioned variability in nations' responses to the Iraq conflict generally escape scrutiny. Within democracies, this body of work tends to implicitly assume that the foreign policy process is perfectly...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691165238
• ISBN 13: 9780691165233
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 258
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar