American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy: Release of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations 2004 Global Views Survey

Transcript

MARSHALL BOUTON: Many of you are aware that the Chicago Council has been carrying out studies of American public attitudes on international issues and U.S. foreign policy for now almost exactly 30 years. Those studies have until this year, however, been quadrennial, have taken place every four years. For the first time ever in the history of the Chicago Council study, we elected this year to carry out a study after only two years for perhaps the obvious reason that in this U.S. presidential election year, for the first time certainly since the late 1960s, since 1968, this is an election in which foreign policy issues are right at the top of the agenda. One could reasonably argue whether they're just above or just below economic issues, but they are certainly a much higher place in the debate than they are in most U.S. presidential elections.

Additionally, we had an opportunity at the Council this year, as I've described, to work on parallel studies in Korea and Mexico that we thought would be valuable, especially coming on the heals of the comparative study we did with the German Marshall Fund in 2002 of European public opinion. We thought that looking at our neighbor to the South and one of our longest established allies in East Asia as opposed to Europe would provide some interesting points of comparison.

One further distinguishing factor about the 2004 study is that we decided to focus much of our effort, most of the questions, or at least certainly half of the questions, on what we call rules of the game or the cognitive framework which Americans bring to their attitudes on international issues and U.S. foreign policy. The hypothesis was that 9/11 and the war in Iraq and, with those events, the arguments that have been made, the propositions that have been put out by the administration and by others in response to the administration's arguments about rules of the game may well have caused some shift in American thinking about what those rules of the game ought to be, particularly as they relate to state behavior and the use of force, although we also go into rules of the game with respect to economic matters.

Now, I wanted to also underscore something that has come up just in the last few days in response to some questions we have gotten from the media. Again, those of you who are familiar with the Chicago Council study know that our objective never has been--and it certainly was not this year--to attempt to do a snapshot of changing public attitudes on the performance of the administration in any particular respect, on the performance or views or propositions of Candidate Kerry, or in general on the shifting winds of the campaign. Our focus has always been to try to reach beneath the surface of those waves, even in a presidential year like this, and try to understand the deeper structure of American thinking about the world and our role in it. And that's an important distinction, I think, to bear in mind.

You will see in looking at the data that the words "Bush" and "Kerry" and "Republican" and "Democrat" do not appear anywhere in the questions and really even in the report--I don't think we actually used those terms in the report--because that's not what this is about.

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