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Stability and Change in the Relevance of Citizens’ Foreign Core Postures: Evidence from Germany

Foreign Policy
Political Psychology
Public Opinion
Matthias Mader
Universität Konstanz
Matthias Mader
Universität Konstanz
Harald Schoen
Universität Mannheim

Abstract

A scholarly consensus has emerged that citizens hold relatively stable, general postures toward the conduct of foreign policy, which allow them to form attitudes toward more specific policy issues. Thus, citizens should not be thought of as lacking the capacity to think coherently about this policy domain. What is less clear is whether citizens always use the same postures to evaluate a given issue. With regard to some issues, the same postures may be chronically salient while others are not, resulting in a largely stable pattern of posture-attitude linkages. With regard to other issues, short term contextual variation may be a critical in determining which postures are used to form specific policy attitudes. In these cases, change on the policy-attitude level may go hand in hand with stability on the posture level. In this Paper, we analyse data from a two-wave panel survey of the German population conducted in 2014 and 2015 to study intra-individual stability and change in the implications foreign core postures have for specific policy attitudes. In a first step, we test the stability hypothesis of stable core postures in the German public regarding the central tenets of German foreign policy culture, namely internationalism, multilateralism, and antimilitarism. Then, their implications for the evaluation of specific policy issues at the two points in time are studied. Of special interest are the posture-attitude linkages in cases where real-world events and public discourse changed the informational context in which citizens formed their policy attitudes, such as in the cases of the Euro crisis in Greece and the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. Taking account of temporal variation on the contextual level may be a key to understanding the interplay of stable core postures and shot-term shifts in public opinion on foreign policy.