Does Information Increase Opinion Quality on Defence Issues?

• In Event: Public Opinion and Conflict Propensity

Abstract

The capacity of citizens to voice an opinion on foreign policy and military issues is a much-debated topic. In the public policy and international relations literature, defence is often presented as an unobtrusive issue, i.e., an issue that most citizens do not experience directly and which is remote of their daily preoccupations. The minimalist view – otherwise known as the “Almond-Lippmann consensus” – states citizens lack both interest in it and knowledge about it; consequently, their opinions are unstructured, incoherent and unstable; and for this reason, public opinion should not be relevant for policy-making (Almond 1950; Holsti 1992).

Whereas research in the US has shown that public opinion on defence is more rational, stable and consistent than what the “Almond-Lippman consensus” suggested (e.g., Shapiro and Page 1988; Holsti 2004), in Europe, little attention has been paid to the way citizens form their opinions on those issues, monopolized by experts and the top of the executive, and for which a certain left-right consensus exists. As it has been demonstrated that the quality of opinions – that is, their stability and consistency (Price & Neijens 1997) – depends on how well informed the people are (Althaus 1998), this paper contributes to bridging this gap by focusing on the effects of providing information on opinions towards defence issues.

Moreover, defence is a multidimensional policy that cannot be restricted to its most sensational component, that is wars, or more broadly, military operations. It is very diverse: beyond troops deployment, it deals with the recruitment, training and retention of civilian and military personnel; the production and maintenance of military material, equipment and facilities; arms procurement and exportation; international cooperation and alliances. Some of these issues are more salient, concrete and/or obtrusive than others. As those issue attributes are relevant to predict agenda-setting effects (Soroka 2002; Richter 2021), they should also matter when it comes to public opinion, in the sense that people might know more about some of them than others. Furthermore, the relevance of those issues for the public differs from one cultural and societal context to another.

To better understand the effect of (the lack of) information on people’s opinion on these matters, we conduct a series of four experiments in France, the UK and Germany. These three countries offer different combinations of military power, the professionalisation of their armed forces, the visibility of the military, their participation to multilateral operations, and the approval of missions by their national democratic institutions.

Each experiment tests the effect of providing information in the target question on respondents’ answers, for a given topic. We compare the answers of respondents randomly assigned to the group who receives information to those of respondents randomly assigned to the group who doesn’t. We also compare the results between the experiments, that is between the different issues. Each issue has been selected depending on its attributes, and more specifically how much debated it is in at least one of the three countries (based on debates in the Parliament) and how salient it is (measured in terms of visibility in the media over the last year): arms exportation, participation in NATO, the fight against terrorism abroad, and nuclear deterrence. Finally, respondents in each experiment are asked the same question again three weeks later, allowing for a comparison in time. However, the second time, no information is provided to participants.

We hypothesize that the more respondents know about a specific defence issue, the less the information we provide should influence their opinions, and the more stable their opinions should be over time. Reversely, respondents who know less should be more sensitive to information effects and express fewer stable opinions. However, for them, we expect that providing information increases the stability of their opinions on a given topic. Therefore, the effect of providing information should matter at three levels. Individually, the most educated and the most interested in defence issues should be less sensitive to information effects. At the issue level, information about the most salient ones should have less effect on respondents’ answers than information on the least salient issues. Finally, at the country level, issue salience varies, and therefore, information effects should also be less important among respondents of the country in which a given issue is the most debated and salient.

As military issues have been gaining visibility in the recent years, public attitudes matter increasingly. In this respect, improving our understanding of how citizens form their attitudes on issues that are often said to be remote from their everyday lives is crucial in terms of democratic control over decisions taken in a field that is at the core of governments’ jurisdiction.

Authors

• Cyrille Thiébaut, AGORA - Cergy Paris University & LIEPP / Cevipof - Sciences Po

• Friederike Richter, Universität der Bundeswehr München

• Lou Safra, CEVIPOF