PUBLIC INFLUENCE ON FOREIGN POLICY

The dominant  Japanese pacifist political culture was being chalanged by a nationalist subculture. This potentionally impact on public opinion in China in 2005. Many issues drove the problematique relations between the Chinese and Japanese in this period. These include Japanese claims to some islands and oil reserve in South China Sea, untill Japan’s bid for a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council. At the same time, China’s economy had “helped pull the sluggish Japanese economy out of recession” as Japan’s primary export market in 2004. We might think that the anti-Japanese protest as a negotiating tool of the Chinese government in its dealings with Japanese. But the Chinese protests as public opinion and later street protest were not organized by the Chinese government. These seemed to have been genuine reflections of public opinion on Japan.

The chinese case suggest that the relationship between the public and foreign policy decision making is complicated. The chinese case also demonstrates that public opinion matters to governments, even in nondemocratic system.

There are two basic views on the relationship between public opinion and policy making. The first suggests a strong impact, this approach assumes that the general public has a measurable and distinct impact on the foreign policy making process (leaders follow masses). The second is denying any real impact, this view representing the conventional wisdom in the literature suggests a ‘top-down’ process, according to which popular consensus is a function of the elite consensus and cleavages trickle down to mass public opinion. The second view, then, distinguished between three different publics: mass public that is not interested in foreign policy matters, attentive public, and there is the elite.

  The linkage between public opinion and policy formation is more complex than that suggested by these earlier views. Holsti says that although American policy makers tend to be more inclined to internationalism than the American public, the policy makers are restrained by their perception of what the public will tolerate. Policy maker believe that the public is harder to convince about internationalist policies and the lack of public support could jeopardize any undertaking. Holsti concludes that there is no direct linkage between public opinion and policy information, but that policy maker’s perceptions of public opinion set the parameters for foreign policy behavior.

Does public opinion matter in nondemocracies as much as democracies? The short answer is yes. Democratic structure allow public opinion to manifest itself in different ways than do nondemocracies structure. But there is a gray area that we have to understandable when public opinion is a political resource wielded by different actors (including the public opinion itself) in different ways.

Public opinion matters to government and foreign policy even in nondemocratic states because government legitimacy derives not from elections but from the mass public’s perception of the given regime’s adherence and faithfulness to powerful transnational symbol. When we turn to democratic system, Thomas Risse Kaplan conclude that mass public has an important indirect effect as it appears that the main role of the public in liberal democracies is to influence the coalition-building process. Then, public opinion is used by elites and interest groups in establishing their claims to dominate a policy coalition.

But there is another actor that needs to be considered here beside those mentioned above – mass media. Some observers and policy makers a phenomenon called “CNN effect”. Media plays a powerful role in setting the public agenda. Once media broadcast images of mass starvation, ethnic conflict, or some other sort of mass suffering, the images arouse strong emotions in the public then turn to their elected officials and demand some strong and morally correct response.

When a foreign policy arises, someone attempts to explain the problem and its solution, that’s we called “framing”. Framing is not so easy. Framing is the act of selecting and highlighting some facets of events and issues and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation and/or solution. Frames works best if it has cultural resonance, that is, frames that evoke words and images that are selecting noticeable, understandable, memorable, and emotionally charged in the dominant political culture

In the last, we conclude that public opinion matters, but scholars seem to agree that its impact on policy making indirect. Public opinion seems to matter most when it has been filtered through either the perceptions of elite policy makers or interest groups and political party activity.