Public opinion and foreign policy: A study of the effects of public opinion on foreign policy crafting and implementation from 1970 to 1998

This research project is an endeavor to ascertain the possible effects public opinion has on foreign policy spending. Foreign policy spending was broken down into three separate areas to be tested: (1) foreign economic aid, (2) foreign military aid, and (3) defense spending. The bulk of past literature on this subject has focused on defense spending so this study is an expansion as well as a replication of previous research. The findings were interesting showing public opinion to have a strong correlation with defense spending and a weaker but significant correlation with foreign military aid while having no positive correlation with foreign economic aid. This indicated that defense spending decision and foreign military aid decisions, which are widely considered to fall under the general rubric of “high politics”, are more easily affected by public opinion than the “low politics” of foreign military aid