Opinion formation in foreign policy: the Swiss experience

Electoral Studies 18 (1999) 453–471 www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud

Opinion formation in foreign policy: the Swiss experience Lionel Marquis*, Pascal Sciarini Department of Political Science, University of Geneva, 1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland

Abstract Applying John Zaller’s model of opinion formation to survey data covering 15 years (1981– 95) of direct democracy in Switzerland, this paper provides a contribution to the debate about opinion formation in foreign policy. On the one hand, the Swiss experience contradicts the widespread view that citizens are poorly informed about and little interested in foreign affairs. On the other hand, direct democracy often translates into governmental defeats in this field. We address these mixed results and show that opinion formation in foreign policy is not a special case, and differs from that in domestic policy only with respect to the circumstances under which it occurs. In particular, we highlight the unusual type and level of conflict within the elite on foreign policy issues, which translates into distinct patterns of attitudes among the public.  1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Opinion formation; Foreign policy; Direct democracy; Survey data; Switzerland

1. Introduction The issue of opinion formation in foreign policy has attracted renewed interest in Europe, as a result of the recent waves of referendums on the European Union (e.g. Fitzmaurice, 1995; Franklin et al., 1994, 1995; Hug and Sciarini, 1999; Jahn and Storsved, 1995). In the US, by contrast, the debate about elite-mass interactions in foreign affairs has a long tradition. Since Lippmann’s (1965 [1922]) and Almond’s (1950) seminal works, the role played respectively by the public and the political * Corresponding author. Tel.: ⫹ 41-22-7058373; fax: ⫹ 41-22-7058364; e-mail: [email protected] 0261-3794/99/$ - see front matter  1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 6 1 - 3 7 9 4 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 1 7 - 7

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elite in defining foreign policy has been subject to intense controversy. According to the “top-down” approach, citizens are particularly ignorant and apathetic in foreign affairs and, therefore, are easily manipulated by political leaders. The late Lippmann (1965 [1922]) considered public opinion as a “democratic malady” that threatened the normal course of rational foreign policy. The “mood theory” (Almond, 1950; Free and Cantril, 1967), as well as the realist approach to international relations (Kennan, 1954; Morgenthau, 1956), came close to this view.1 Conversely, the “bottom-up” approach maintains that the public has sound preferences and a distinct impact on the formulation of foreign policy. According to the “idealist/liberal school” (e.g. Russett, 1972, 1993; Nincic, 1992) and scholars working in the field of normative democratic theory (e.g. Dahl, 1961), citizens are responsible political actors that impose constraints upon the policy alternatives of elites through various mechanisms (e.g. voting, polls, interest group activity, etc.). Moreover, citizens are said to be a source of wise foreign policy, preventing the pursuit of policies which might be in the parochial interests of policy-makers (Ripsman, 1994) or even restraining the “war-making proclivities of leaders” (Holsti, 1992, p. 440). Both the top-down and bottom-up approaches are extreme portrayals, of course, and suffer from several shortcomings.2 Most noticeably, they are grounded on simplistic conceptions of elite and masses—treated as unitary actors (Risse-Kappen, 1991)—and of the process of influence between them, which is mainly seen as a one-way street. In other words, neither of the two approaches takes the process of opinion formation seriously. In contrast, there is an extensive literature on opinion formation, information diffusion and the measurement of attitudes in surveys. Elaborating on earlier work by Converse (1964, 1970), scholars in this field have put forward interesting models of how individual opinions are formed. A decisive progress was made when it was acknowledged that citizens’ responses to public policy options vary according to individuals’ characteristics, most obviously according to their level of knowledge (e.g. Gamson and Modigliani, 1966; Sigelman and Johnston Conover, 1981; Zaller, 1992). However, this work has seldom been applied to the study of foreign policy-making. In this paper, we link these two strands of research by applying John Zaller’s (1992) model of opinion formation to survey data covering 15 years (1981–95) of direct democracy in Switzerland. Based on three variables, Zaller’s RAS (Receive– Accept–Sample) model is parsimonious enough to be applied to a variety of cases. At the same time the model is fairly sophisticated, since it takes into account the 1 Holsti (1992, p. 439) summarizes the three propositions that were dominant at the time of the “Almond–Lippmann consensus”: “(1) it (the public) is volatile and thus provides inadequate foundations for stable and effective foreign policies, (2) it lacks coherence or structure, but (3) in the final analysis, it has little impact on foreign policy”. Stressing the specificity of foreign policy, Morgenthau (1956, p. 532) maintained that “the rational requirements of good foreign policy cannot from the outset count upon the support of a public opinion whose preferences are emotional rather than rational”. 2 Since the 1960s, many authors (e.g. Cohen, 1973) have warned against normative and excessive theses about the influence of citizens and elite on foreign policy. The experience of the Vietnam War strongly contributed to this change. It worked as a “catalyst in the re-examination of the conventional wisdom” (Holsti, 1992, p. 459) and stimulated a growing body of “revisionist” literature (e.g. Caspary, 1970; Nincic, 1988; Page and Shapiro, 1993).

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interaction between elite political communications, and the citizens’ information and political predispositions. To be sure, Zaller’s model is clearly taking the top-down approach: it is rooted in the assumption that the formation (and change) of opinions in the public is driven by the political messages delivered by the elite. This however does not mean that we back the top-down approach in an absolute manner. Rather, we see opinion formation as the product of an interactive process of mutual influence from elite to masses, and from masses to elite.3 But we believe that Zaller’s model is particularly well-suited to illuminate the phase of opinion formation that we will focus on in this paper, namely the information campaign which takes place before a direct-democratic vote. During this phase, the process of influence is mostly onesided, with the elite trying to gain support for their view through campaign propaganda and voting recommendations. As the country with the most far-reaching experience in direct legislation and referendum campaigns (Butler and Ranney, 1994; Cronin, 1989; Kriesi, 1995; Linder, 1994; Trechsel and Kriesi, 1996), Switzerland provides a unique “laboratory” for the study of opinion formation in foreign policy.4 In the next section we briefly present Zaller’s model of opinion formation. In the empirical section we explore whether and how foreign policy constitutes a specific case with respect to opinion formation of individuals. Data on citizens’ characteristics and attitudes are based on the so-called VOX-surveys that have been carried out following every national referendum held in Switzerland since 1981.5 In addition to individual data, we also use aggregate data to highlight the characteristics of the ballots in the two policy domains, especially with respect to the level of conflict within the elite.6 Based on these two data-sets, we present the operationalization of Zaller’s model and then turn to the application of the model. We systematically compare the results obtained in foreign and domestic politics. In conclusion, we recall our main findings and discuss their implications for the ongoing debate on opinion formation in foreign policy. 2. Zaller’s model of opinion formation Zaller’s model of opinion formation is premised on some basic axioms concerning the “reception” and “acceptance” of political messages.7 First, the reception of elite 3 In Switzerland, the most conspicuous example of the influence of masses over elite occurs when the electorate opts for the status quo and rejects a governmental proposal in a referendum. See Hill and Hinton-Andersson (1995) for a model designing a reciprocal influence process between elites and masses. 4 It is worth noting that the Swiss political system mixes direct democratic and representative elements. That is, popular votes take place in a context which leaves a lot of room for leadership by the political elite. 5 The VOX-surveys are based on a combination of random and quotas sample of municipalities and citizens (600 to 1000 interviews), representative of the Swiss electorate by sex, age, occupation, and place of residence. The Universities of Geneva, Bern and Zurich have developed the VOX data bank. 6 These data come mainly from a data set developed by the Research and Documentation Center on Direct Democracy at the University of Geneva. 7 With respect to these two processes, Zaller is greatly indebted to McGuire’s (1969) work. But in addition to the explanation of how individuals acquire information and make up their mind, Zaller’s theory also addresses the processes that account for the individuals’ utilization of her internalized information in response to survey questions (sampling mechanism).

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communication depends on the individual citizen’s political awareness (or attentiveness), i.e. on her degree of knowledge (or “cognitive engagement”) about the issue at stake: the greater her cognitive involvement in an issue, the more likely she is to be exposed to a given political message and to understand it, i.e. the more likely she is to “receive” the message. Second, according to the “resistance axiom”, political predispositions regulate the acceptance or non-acceptance of the political communications a person is exposed to. Defined as “stable, individual-traits”, political predispositions are “at least in part a distillation of a person’s lifetime experiences”, and “also partly depend on social and economic location and, probably at least as strongly, on inherited or acquired personality factors and tastes” (Zaller, 1992, pp. 22–23).8 According to the model, political predispositions interact with political awareness to determine the amount of resistance to political messages. More specifically, it is assumed that individuals tend to resist arguments that are not consistent with their political predispositions, but they might do so only if they possess the contextual information that enables them to assess these arguments in light of their predispositions.9 In other words, the most aware citizens are heavily exposed to political communication but, at the same time, prone to scrutinize (and select) them in light of prior beliefs; the least aware citizens, in contrast, pay so little attention to politics that they are not likely to be influenced by political communication at all. Going one step further, Zaller adds to this “reception-acceptance” model the role played by the elite. More precisely, he expects the reception and resistance mechanisms to operate differently when a project is strongly supported by the elite and when the elite is divided. When the views among the elite converge, a mainstream effect is likely to occur. In that case, popular support increases with the citizens’ level of awareness, regardless of their political predispositions. By contrast, when the elite is divided, conflicting arguments are delivered and citizens are exposed to (typically) two competing flows of communication. As a result, a polarization effect is likely to occur. In this case, the relationship between the level of political awareness and support for one of the views of the elite is expected to be conditional on predispositions: support is likely to increase with the level of awareness among citizens whose predispositions are consistent with that view, but to decrease among those whose predispositions are not consistent with it. In sum, the model predicts that if the elite agrees on a given issue, the acceptance of political communications is mainly a function of reception, i.e. depends on citizens’ level of awareness: the more citizens are informed or politically involved, the stronger their support for the elite’s proposal. When the elite is divided, the political communication of the dominant elite may fail either because it is not received (due to citizens’ insufficient political awareness), or because it is received but not accepted (due to incompatibility between the message and citizens’ political predispositions).

8 It is worth mentioning that, according to Zaller (1992, pp. 22–28), political predispositions are not affected by any kind of elite influence, neither in the short nor long run. 9 “The key to the model is the selective resistance of highly aware persons to the messages which they encounter” (Geddes and Zaller, 1989, p. 321).

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3. Exploring the specificity of foreign policy Since the partial revision of the Swiss constitution in 1977, the domain where direct democracy applies to foreign policy issues has been enlarged (Malinverni, 1979; Kreis, 1995). As in domestic politics, there is now a compulsory and an optional referendum.10 Between June 1981 and June 1995, 121 popular votes were held at the federal level. Among the 112 votes covered by the VOX surveys, four dealt with foreign policy issues: United Nations (UN) membership in March 1986, membership to the Bretton-Woods institutions (IMF and World Bank) in May 1992,11 participation in the European Economic Area (EEA) in December 1992, and the creation of a United Nations Swiss Blue Helmets Corps in June 1994. Both the vote on UN membership and EEA membership were compulsory referenda, whereas the two other issues were put on the ballot through the use of the optional referendum.12 In the next section we present the operationalization of Zaller’s model, starting with the individual variables (political awareness, political predispositions, and the voter’s decision), and continuing with the measurement of conflict within the elite. On this basis, we then turn to the application of Zaller’s model. 3.1. Individual variables 3.1.1. Political awareness Our measurement of a citizen’s level of political awareness is a scale based on two sets of items. The first set measures her knowledge of the title and content of a project submitted to vote, as well as her knowledge about the voting recommendation issued by the Swiss government.13 The second set consists of a measure of the extent to 10

According to article 89 al. 3 of the Constitution, the “optional referendum” applies to international treaties which are of an indefinite duration and cannot be denounced (let. a), which provide for membership in an international organization (let. b), or entail a multilateral unification of law (let. c). That is, by collecting 50 000 signatures of citizens in 90 days any group may oppose an act adopted by the Parliament and call for a final decision by the electorate. In addition, article 89 al. 4 states that any other kind of international treaty can be submitted to the optional referendum if Parliament decides to do so. Furthermore, the “mandatory referendum” applies to membership in collective security organizations or in a supranational community (art. 89 al. 5), i.e. a referendum automatically takes place without popular impulsion. Lastly, the “popular initiative” provides any group with the opportunity to ask the Swiss electorate to vote to amend the Constitution, whatever the subject; 100 000 signatures of citizens are required. 11 Membership in the Bretton-Woods institutions actually required the adoption of two separate bills (an accession act and a participation act), but the issue at stake was obviously the same. No wonder both votes display very similar results, and were covered by one single survey. Three votes on the creation of new national highways (in 1990) were also covered by one single survey. 12 During the period under consideration no popular initiative was launched in the field of foreign policy. 13 The questions are labeled as follows: (1) “Last week-end there was a federal ballot. Do you remember the title of the project at stake? Can you tell it to me?” (open-ended question) (2) “Can you please briefly describe the content of the project?” (open-ended question) (3) “The Federal Council and the Parliament issued a vote recommendation on this ballot. Did they recommend a yes or a no?”. On this basis we build an indicator of “knowledge about an issue” that ranges from 0 (no knowledge at all) to 3 (perfect knowledge).

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which she is able to motivate her choice in an open-ended question.14 The resulting scale ranges from 1 to 4, where 1 means no competence and 4 a high level of competence.15 Table 1 depicts the level of awareness of Swiss citizens in the votes on foreign policy and on domestic policy held at the federal level between 1981 and 1995. We can see from Table 1 that on average Swiss citizens’ level of awareness is significantly higher in foreign policy than in domestic policy. In votes on foreign policy about one third of the electorate is highly “aware” of the issue at stake; only one voter out of five lacks any information or knowledge about it. In domestic policy votes, by contrast, one third of the voters displays a very low level of awareress, whereas only one seventh is highly aware. This result is in sharp contrast with the claim that citizens know little about foreign affairs.16 Similarly, the high voting turnout displayed by referendums on foreign policy (53.8 per cent, against 41.8 per cent for domestic issues, on average) is hardly compatible with the view that citizens are apathetic and passive in this field.17 It should be added that the high level of citizens’ awareness and the high voting turnout in foreign policy votes are presumably two sides of the same coin: in recent years foreign affairs have become a major issue in Table 1 Citizens’ awareness in foreign and domestic policy: percentage of citizens in each category of awareness Level of awareness

Foreign policy

Domestic policy

Very low Low Middle High

19 12 36 33 100% (n ⫽ 3653) 4 votes

35 18 33 14 100% (n ⫽ 98 660) 108 votes

14 The question is labeled as follows: “Can you tell me the reasons why you put a ‘no’ (resp. a ‘yes’) in the ballot? What is the first major reason for this choice? And what is the second?” On this basis we built an indicator, the “ability to motivate one’s vote decision”, which ranges from 0 (persons who could not justify their choice) to 2 (persons who provided two correct (i.e. logically acceptable) reasons to motivate their choice). 15 This scale is derived from the combination of the two above mentioned indicators of awareness (“knowledge about an issue” and “ability to motivate one’s vote decision”): awareness is said to be “high” (level 4) when both indicators are maximal (i.e. equal 3 and 2, respectively); awareness is “middle” (level 3) when “knowledge” equals 3 and “ability to motivate” equals 1; awareness is “low” (level 2) when “knowledge” equals 2 and “ability to motivate” varies between 1 and 2; awareness is “very low” (level 1) in all other cases. See also Bu¨tschi (1993) and Marquis (1997). 16 Additional analyses, not reported here, demonstrate that citizens’ level of awareness is even higher in foreign policy than in any other policy domain (Marquis, 1997, pp. 52–54; Sciarini, 1996). 17 This also holds if we control for the unusually high participation rate displayed by the vote on the European Economic Area in 1992. Nevertheless, figures on voting turnout should be looked at cautiously: it is not easy to measure the political mobilization that is due to a particular legislative act since very often several proposals appear together on a single ballot (“multipack” effect).

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Swiss politics, and have given rise to heated referendum campaigns that provided citizens with abundant information (see below). 3.1.2. Political predispositions Various studies have shown that the opposition between the left and the right is a very salient—and perhaps the most salient—dividing line in Swiss politics, both among the political and party elite (Hug, 1994a; Kerr, 1981; Kriesi, 1980; Lehner, 1984; Sciarini and Finger, 1991), and among the public (Inglehart and Sidjanski, 1975; Caramani, 1996). Therefore, we use ideological orientation along the left-right dimension as an indicator of a citizen’s political predispositions. This is measured on the basis of a citizen’s party identification and is divided, for our present purposes, into three categories: left, center-right and far right.18 In Switzerland, the most distinctive political cleavage is clearly between left parties (e.g. Social-Democratic Party, Communist Party, and Greens), on the one hand, and center-right (Radical Democratic Party, Christian-Democratic Party, and some smaller parties) and far right parties (Swiss People’s Party, Swiss Democrats, Car/Freedom Party), on the other. However, we assume that foreign policy differs from domestic policy in this respect. More specifically, we assume that in foreign policy a realignment of political forces has occurred during the last 10 years. While Switzerland’s policy of neutrality used to induce a very hesitant involvement in foreign affairs, changes in the international environment (the processes of globalization and European integration, the end of the Cold War) have given new impetus to its foreign policy (Germann, 1994; Sciarini et al., 1997). Political parties have had to clarify their preferences accordingly.19 This has led to the emergence and strengthening of a new cleavage along the line of the desired level of “openness” versus “closedness” of the country.20 Inside the governing coalition, the Social-

18 According to our survey data, the size of these ideological camps is stable across votes: about 43% of the partisans are supporters of the center and moderate right parties, whereas 40% are close to the left parties and 17% to the far right parties. Our operationalization of political predispositions is admittedly not optimal, since it leaves out about 40% of the survey respondents that do not express any party identification. Unfortunately, the obvious indicator of political preferences (the left-right self placement) was introduced as a standard question in the VOX-surveys in December 1988 and, therefore, is not available for almost half of the surveys in our data set. We nevertheless carried out additional analyses based on a reduced set of votes and using the left-right self placement as an indicator of predispositions. These analyses lead to similar—albeit less clear-cut—results than those presented below. 19 This process proved initially painful, since most parties were internally divided on the issue. The emergence of environmental issues in the late 1970s provides an interesting example of how Swiss parties ultimately react to new challenges. Unable to adapt in the first place, the party system then progressively integrated ecological demands, which led to a shift in the meaning of the left-right opposition (Finger and Sciarini, 1991; Sciarini and Finger, 1991). 20 First identified in studies of the national referenda held during the 1980s on issues relating to the army, labor, and immigration (Sardi and Widmer, 1993), this new cleavage has become central in foreign politics (Sciarini, 1996). The process of opening the country to the impulses of regional integration or international co-operation challenges the Swiss policy of neutrality and the desire to preserve traditions and national sovereignty. The popular vote on the EEA is a case in point in this respect (Kriesi et al., 1993; Sciarini and Listhaug, 1997).

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Democratic Party (the main party of the left) has taken a clearer stance in favor of international cooperation. Conversely, on this issue (as well as on others) the Swiss People’s Party has drifted towards the radical right in the 1980s and 1990s (Schloeth, 1996). Together with the small nationalist and isolationist parties of the extreme right (Swiss Democrats, Car/Freedom Party), it opposes any opening of Switzerland towards the outside world. Lastly, the two main center-right parties in government (the Christian Democratic Party and the Radical Democratic Party) have adopted a more pragmatic stance. They support openness, albeit in an incremental fashion. In sum, in domestic politics we expect the main opposition to occur between the left and the (moderate and far) right, whereas in foreign policy the left and the moderate right presumably oppose the far right. 3.1.3. The voter’s decision The voter’s decision—the dependent variable in our analysis—is the outcome of a process of opinion formation among individuals.21 It can take basically two forms: support or rejection of a government proposal. In the case of a referendum (be it mandatory or optional) the proposal is submitted to the voters by the Swiss government. Here, a “yes” on the ballot means voting in support of the government. Conversely, in the case of a popular initiative, it is a “no” on the ballot paper that signals support of the government’s view.22 At the aggregate level, the share of votes in support of a government proposal provides an indicator of overall government support. Here, again, foreign policy appears as a specific case, due to the limited popular support enjoyed by the Swiss government’s proposals in this field (Papadopoulos, 1996; Hug and Sciarini, 1995; Sciarini, 1996): while the mean percentage of yesvotes in support of governmental proposals amounts to 60 per cent in domestic policy referenda, it is lower than 45 per cent in foreign policy (see Table 2). As a matter of fact, between 1981 and 1995 Swiss citizens have followed the government’s voting recommendations in more than three cases out of four in domestic policy, on average (Sciarini and Trechsel, 1996; Trechsel and Kriesi, 1996), but in only one out of the four foreign policy votes held during that period (see also Table 3). 3.2. The level of conflict among the elite For our present purposes two measures of conflict among the elite are available. The first is based on the percentage of yes-votes on a legislative act in the National 21 Voting turnout is low in Switzerland, on average, but there are strong variations from one vote to the next. Therefore, focusing on “voters” would not only raise problems of statistical significance, but would also give too much weight to issues where voting turnout was high. Therefore, we include in the analysis both the respondents who indicated that they took part in the ballot and those who indicated that they did not. To test the robustness of our findings, we carried out additional analyses focusing on “voters”. These results concord with those presented here, and can be obtained from the authors on request. 22 Popular initiatives are usually launched by groups dissatisfied with the way the Swiss government and Parliament handle a given issue. Not surprisingly then, in only one case out of 39 in our data set, the Swiss government and Parliament recommended the adoption of a popular initiative (i.e. the initiative that asked for a holiday on the national celebration day).

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Table 2 Measures of government support among the elite and the public, in domestic and foreign policy Party elite (% of votes in support)

Parliament

Mean 78.9 domestic politics Mean foreign 72.2 politics

People (% of Difference elite ⫺ people (in % votes in of votes in support) support)

Parties’ vote cues

Parliament ⫺ people

Parties’ vote cues ⫺ people

N

75.6

60.5

18.3

15.1

108

72.8

43.2

29.0

29.6

4

Council (the lower Chamber of the Swiss Parliament).23 The second is based on the percentage of vote recommendations in support of a project issued by political parties during a referendum campaign. During this phase political parties—as well as other political and economic actors such as interest groups or ad-hoc committees24—adopt a position on the ballot and try to influence opinion formation through vote recommendations. Twelve parties are considered here, representing more than 95 per cent of the votes at national elections. To take account of the variations in electoral strength among parties, a party’s vote recommendations is weighted by its electoral result at the most recent national election.25 These measures provide straightforward indicators of the level of conflict within the party elite. They read as follows: the higher the percentage of yes-votes in support of a government proposal (i.e. the closer to 100 per cent), the higher the consensus; the lower the percentage of yesvotes (i.e. the closer to 50 per cent), the higher the conflict. Both the measure based on the final vote in Parliament and the one based on vote recommendations mirror the level of conflict within the party elite. It should, however, be noted that they may significantly differ from each other. First, the two measures do not focus on the same persons within a given party: in the case of the parliamentary vote, a party’s position is defined by the national MPs of the party; in the case of the vote recommendation, a party’s position reflects the decision of the party members more broadly, since it is taken at a general assembly. Second, the method used to calculate support among the elite differs from one measure to the next: the measure based on vote recommendations assigns to a party the decision

23 The lower Chamber is elected through proportional vote and mirrors the economic and political forces in Swiss politics more accurately than the second federal Chamber, which represents the cantons. 24 Ad-hoc committees often consist of individual members of political parties who want to participate actively in the referendum campaign, in order to support (resp. oppose) a project that they strongly like (resp. dislike). 25 We coded a party that did not issue a voting recommendation and provided its followers with the freedom of choice, as if it had opposed the governmental proposal.

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taken at the general assembly, irrespective of possible oppositions inside the party; the measure based on the final vote in Parliament, by contrast, reflects MPs’ individual votes. Third, these measures mirror the preferences of the party elite at two different points in time, that is, at the end of the parliamentary process, and one or two months prior to a popular vote, respectively. Several months may pass between the two,26 which may lead the members of the elite to up-date their preferences and, possibly, issue a different recommendation than the one held in Parliament.27 Table 2 shows how the average level of government support varies from the parliamentary elite to the party elite, and from elite level to mass level, this in domestic and foreign policy votes, respectively. In both domestic policy and foreign policy the level of government support among the party elite, as measured by the distribution of votes in the National Council, is very similar to that based on parties’ vote recommendations. In addition, the level of support by the elite is only slightly higher in domestic politics than in foreign affairs. In contrast, domestic and foreign policy differ strongly with respect to government support by the party elite on the one hand, and by the public on the other. In fact, while the level of government support is overall higher within the elite than within the public, this holds especially in foreign policy, where the difference of government support between the two groups is quite substantial (30 per cent, on average, against 15–18 per cent in domestic policy). How can we account for these contrasting results? One possible interpretation would be that foreign policy indeed differs from domestic policy with respect to the process of opinion formation or, more specifically, with respect to the impact of the elite’s political messages on the voters’ decision. We will discuss the validity of this claim in the empirical section. Before doing this, however, we would like to point to another possible explanation, one that stresses the specific circumstances under which opinion formation occurs in foreign policy. As we already mentioned, recent votes on foreign policy induced unusually intense referendum campaigns. In each case, the minority camp within the party elite, backed by powerful interest groups and ad-hoc committees, was able to mobilize far more resources than its mere electoral strength would have suggested. In foreign policy, therefore, simple measures of conflict based on parliamentary votes or on vote recommendations do not adequately mirror the actual distribution of the pro and contra arguments delivered by the elite during a referendum campaign. No wonder, then, that according to our measures government support turns out to be so much lower within the public, than within the party elite. In sum, while the parliamentary votes and parties’ vote recommendations seem to provide satisfactory indicators of the political messages delivered by the elite in domestic policy, in foreign policy we need a more fine-grained measure of the actual information flows from the elite to the public. Thus, for each of the four foreign 26 Between 1947 and 1995, the time between the final vote in Parliament and the popular vote amounted to about 10 months for advisory referendums, 8 months for compulsory referendums, and 6 months for popular initiatives, on average (Sciarini and Trechsel, 1996, p. 224). 27 To a certain extent, these changes may reflect inconsistency among the party elite. This assumption does not only hold theoretically, but has also found empirical support, especially in the case of optional referendums (Sciarini and Trechsel, 1996; Trechsel and Sciarini, 1998).

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policy votes in our data set, we have used a measure based on newspapers ads financed by the elite during the referendum campaign. More specifically, we have calculated the surface of ads in support and against a given project in the three major Swiss German daily newspapers during the last month prior to the direct democratic vote.28 Since ads are used by the elite as a means to convince voters, they constitute a straightforward measure of elite controversy during the very last phase of the process of opinion formation. As we can see from Table 3, this measure tells a very different story. Results reported in Table 3 are striking. In two votes (EEA membership and Swiss Blue Helmets Corps) the elite’s political communications, as measured by the surface of newspapers ads, are far more evenly distributed between pro and contra arguments than is suggested by parliamentary votes or parties’ voting recommendations.29 Thus, in both cases the level of conflict was actually quite high. In the two other votes (IMF membership and UN membership) newspapers ads suggest that the no-side was far more active than the yes-side during the referendum campaign; in the vote on UN membership, there is even a shift from a situation of consensus in support of the project to a situation of consensus against the project. Given the highly contradicting messages issued by the political elite through parliamentary votes and parties’ vote recommendations, on the one hand, and through newspapers ads, on the other, it is fair to assume that these two votes were very controversial as well, i.e. that citizens were exposed to contradictory political communications. Consequently, all four votes on foreign affairs in our data-set should be seen as cases of conflict among the elite. In the next section, the application of Zaller’s model of opinion formation will help to test the validity of our assumption regarding the realignment of parties in foreign policy. More important, we will test whether and how a particular type and level of conflict among the elite—in interaction with the voter’s political awareness and political predispositions—influences a voter’s decision for or against a government proposal. Table 3 Measures of government support among the elite, according to foreign policy project Project

Party elite (% of votes in support) Newspapers ads (% of ads in support) Parliament Parties’ vote (overall surface, in cues cm2, in parenthesis)

People (% of votes in support)

UN membership IMF membership EEA membership Swiss Blue Helmets Corps

63.8 72.7 67.6 84.7

24.3 56.1 49.7 42.8

28

79.3 63.5 71.4 77.2

17.1 27.4 49.1 54.2

(12 104) (5 509) (209 408) (31 376)

The newspapers are: Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung, Tages-Anzeiger, Blick. Schneider and Hess (1995) come to a similar conclusion in their analysis of the EEA referendum campaign. 29

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4. The application of Zaller’s model We start the analysis with the application of Zaller’s model to the votes on domestic policy (Fig. 1), and will then turn to foreign policy votes (Fig. 2). In line with the discussion in the previous section, in domestic policy we use the parties’ vote recommendations as an indicator of conflict among the elite.30 That is, we use the average percentage of vote recommendations in support of a government proposal displayed by the total set of domestic policy votes (75.6 per cent) as a threshold to distinguish acts where there is “consensus” among the elite, from acts where there is a “conflict”.31 Starting with the domestic cases where the elite is fairly united (Fig. 1, left-hand side), we see that the support for government proposals tends to increase with higher levels of political awareness, among both supporters of left and center-right parties (from 67 to 77 per cent among the former, and from 61 to 75 per cent among the latter). As is assumed by Zaller’s model, a situation of consensus within the elite tends to lead to a “mainstream” effect: support for the government increases with higher political awareness, regardless of political predispositions. Note, however, that

Fig. 1. The impact of citizens’ awareness, political predispositions and conflict among the elite on government support in domestic policy.

30 Since in domestic policy the measure of conflict based on vote recommendations yields very similar results than that based on parliamentary votes, we can use either of the two. 31 This threshold also makes sense substantially: to reach a 24.4 per cent threshold, a minority that opposes a governmental proposal must almost necessarily include at least one of the four governing parties, whose overall electoral strength varied between 81.6 per cent in 1979 and 69.7 per cent in 1991.

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the correlation between government support and political awareness is rather low, especially among followers of far right parties. Results are more clear-cut in cases where there is a conflict among the elite (Fig. 1, right-hand side). In line with theoretical expectations, the relationship between the citizens’ political awareness and government support differs strongly according to political predispositions: government support increases with higher levels of awareness among supporters of center-right and far right parties (from 61 to 73 per cent among the former, and from 59 to 73 per cent among the latter), while it decreases with higher level of awareness among supporters of left parties (from 50 to 34 per cent). While the difference in attitudes between left and right partisans is small among the least aware individuals (11 per cent), it increases up to almost 40 per cent among the best informed citizens. In other words, when the elite is divided and the public is exposed to competing messages, the “polarization” effect hypothesized by Zaller is clearly at work. It occurs along the left-right dimension and pits followers of center-right and far right parties, against citizens with left political preferences. These results are all the more significant since they are based on rather crude categorizations of the independent variables (two, respectively three categories), and on a high number and wide variety of domestic policy votes. They contrast with earlier studies based on survey data (Kriesi, 1994; Trechsel and Sciarini, 1998) and aggregate data (Hug, 1994b; Sciarini and Trechsel, 1996), which have left us very sceptical with respect to the impact of party recommendations on voters’ behavior in referenda in Switzerland.32 However, all these studies share a similar shortcoming: they are grounded on the implicit assumption that parties’ voting recommendations have a standard impact on opinion formation, regardless of citizens’ attributes33 and of the level of conflict within the elite. Now, what happens with respect to Swiss foreign policy? Here again, Zaller’s model proves to be a consistent predictor of opinion formation (Fig. 2). In accordance with the high level of conflict that prevails in foreign policy votes, government support displays the expected polarization effect. Among followers of left parties, support for governmental proposals increases with higher levels of awareness (from 43 to 65 per cent). Among supporters of far right parties, by contrast, government support decreases as a function of political awareness (from 50 to 20 per cent). Lastly, government support remains stable (around 55 per cent) across all levels of political awareness among the electorate of center-right parties. Still, we can see from Fig. 2 that opinion patterns in foreign affairs differ from 32 Survey evidence seems to suggest that few voters with party sympathies actually know the vote recommendation of their preferred party. In addition, of those that do, only a small fraction votes according to party cues. Based on aggregate data Hug (1994b) found that political parties could only be confident of winning in a referendum vote if all tendencies represented in the parliament adopted a unanimous voting recommendation. Other scholars showed that direct democracy is demanding in the sense that it requires high levels of consensus for the parliamentary elite to make sure that a policy proposal will be endorsed by a majority of voters (Sciarini and Trechsel, 1996). 33 This shortcoming is particularly obvious in the case of studies based on aggregate data. But it also holds for studies based on individual survey data, where citizens are at best distinguished according to their party preference.

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Fig. 2. The impact of citizens’ awareness and political predispositions on government support in foreign policy.

those in domestic politics, and this in two respects. First, and in line with our assumption, in domestic politics a high level of conflict within the elite results in a polarization between center-right and far right followers, on the one hand, and supporters of the political left, on the other, whereas in foreign politics the opposition is between the left and the far right. Second, and less expectedly, in foreign politics the level of political awareness has almost no impact on the decision of citizens close to center-right parties. In fact, this result makes sense empirically: the “cautiously open attitude” adopted by center-right parties in foreign policy, which we mentioned above, could not prevent internal dissent. These parties, and especially the two members of the governing coalition (the Radicals and the Christian Democrats), were (and still are) divided with respect to the definition of Swiss foreign policy and the desired level of openness of the country.34 As a result, they voiced contradictory messages that could hardly convince their followers, not even the most aware among them. Thus, the limited impact of the elite’s communication on opinion formation among center-right followers should not come as a surprise. One cannot expect citizens to behave in a predictable way when the elite’s discourse is confusing. As a final analysis, we test the validity of Zaller’s model when controlling for the 34 Empirical results support this argument. If we use as an indicator of internal dissent the number of cantonal sections that formulate a voting recommendation which differs from that of the national party, we see that 5 sections of the Radical Party and 3.8 sections of the Christian Democratic Party challenge the national party line in foreign policy, on average, against 1.9 and 1.7 sections in domestic policy. The two other governing parties display a high internal cohesion in domestic, as well as in foreign, policy: within the Social-Democratic Party the average number of cantonal deviations is 0.0 in foreign policy and 0.7 in domestic policy; the corresponding figures are 1.8 and 1.4 among the Swiss People’s Party.

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importance of legislative acts. As we mentioned earlier, the four foreign policy votes in our data-set were all major issues, whereas many of the domestic policy votes were presumably of minor importance. This could make the comparison between the two policy domains quite problematic. In order to be more confident in our results we replicate our analyses for a subset of all major domestic policy votes. Note, however, that it is methodologically and empirically very difficult to measure the “importance” of an act, not least because of the different conceptions of “importance” held by elite and masses. With this caveat in mind, we use as an indicator of “importance” a question in the survey that asks respondents to characterize the salience of a given vote.35 We use the average level of salience displayed by the total set of votes as a threshold to distinguish major issues from minor issues.36 Our results hold up well to this additional test. Focusing on major domestic policy votes does not only confirm the existence of the expected mainstream and polarization (between the left and the right) effects depending on the level of conflict among the elite, but even reinforces our previous conclusions: coefficients are overall stronger for this sub-set of votes than for the whole set of domestic policy votes, especially in cases of conflict among the elite.37

5. Conclusion Based on a wide set of popular votes in Switzerland, we have tested whether and how foreign politics constitutes a specific case with respect to opinion formation. At first glance, the Swiss experience yields ambiguous results. On the one hand, our results clearly back the idealist/liberal schools’ view that citizens are well informed about and active in foreign policy. On the other hand, the Swiss experience provides some support to the realists’ and elitists’ claim that citizens’ participation in foreign policy has destabilizing effects: citizens more frequently oppose the choices made by the elite in this field than in domestic affairs, thus preventing national authorities from fulfilling their policy goals. 35 Respondents were asked to characterize the importance of a given issue on a scale ranging from zero (not salient at all) to ten (very salient). Alternatively, one could use as an indicator of “importance” the legal status of the vote, i.e. the type of direct democratic institution (compulsory referendum, optional referendum, and popular initiative). For example, one could assume that acts subject to the compulsory referendum are more important than acts subject to the optional referendum, whereas issues put on the ballot through citizens initiatives are presumably of minor importance. This does, however, not hold empirically. First, acts subject to the compulsory referendum are not submitted to the voters because they are intrinsically important, but because this is legally required (any amendment to the federal constitution, whatever its subject or importance, requires a compulsory referendum). Second, popular initiatives often put major issues on the ballot. The use of voting turnout to distinguish major votes from minor votes would not be appropriate either, given the “multipack effect” mentioned above. 36 According to this definition one foreign policy vote (the referendum on IMF membership) appears as a borderline case with respect to importance, whereas the three other foreign policy votes indeed concerned major issues. 37 The gamma coefficients are highly significant and amount to 0.13 among center-right voters, 0.15 among far right voters, and ⫺ 0.28 among left voters.

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However, these mixed results at the aggregate level go hand in hand with more straightforward patterns of attitudes formation at the individual level. In both domestic and foreign policy we found empirical evidence of consistent interactions between the elite’s discourse and citizens’ political predispositions and awareness, as they are conceptualized in Zaller’s theory. According to Zaller’s theory, public opinion on major issues is a response to the relative intensity of competing political communications addressing those issues at the elite level. As a matter of fact, in votes on domestic politics we could identify the “mainstream” and “polarization” effects hypothesized by the author, depending on the level of conflict within the elite. The predictions of Zaller’s model proved accurate in foreign policy, too: in line with theoretical expectations, the unusually high elite controversy induced by foreign policy issues results in an overarching “polarization effect” within the public. Therefore, the Swiss experience tends to demonstrate that opinion formation in foreign policy is not a specific case in itself, but differs from that in domestic policy only with respect to the circumstances under which it occurs. First, foreign policy appears as a specific case with respect to the level of conflict among the elite, since all four foreign policy votes in our data set turned out to be highly conflictual. To be sure, in each case the Swiss government gained a fairly wide support for its foreign policy proposals from the Parliament and the party elite. But it could not prevent the minority camp within the party elite from mobilizing a sizeable opposition during the referendum campaign. Second, foreign policy also differs from domestic policy in regard to the configuration of conflict at stake. Empirical evidence provides support for our assumption of a realignment within the party system. In domestic policy conflict among the elite typically leads to a polarization between the left and the (moderate and far) right, whereas in foreign policy polarization occurs between the left and the far right. In line with Zaller’s model, the specific type and level of elite conflict existing in foreign policy votes translates into a distinct pattern of attitudes of the public. Thus, in addition to the specific opposition between left and far right parties (and followers), we have also highlighted the lack of a clear profile of center-right parties in foreign policy, which accounts for their limited impact on opinion formation. Most recently, the Radical Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Party have moved to a more positive attitude towards opening Switzerland to the outside world. If this move goes on, it is fair to assume that forthcoming votes on foreign policy will display (even) more clear-cut results with respect to the joint impact of elite discourse, political predispositions and political awareness on opinion formation. The major finding of this study—that opinion formation in foreign policy is not intrinsically different from that in domestic policy, but occurs under special circumstances (type and level of conflict among elites)—does not seem to be a Swiss specificity, but presumably applies to many Western European countries. Indeed, the popular votes on European integration held in several countries in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty and the widening process of the European Union have revealed both the salience of foreign policy issues and the (sometimes very) unusual political alignments within the party system and among the public (e.g. Bogdanor, 1994; Bjorklund, 1996; Franklin et al., 1994, 1995; Hug and Sciarini, 1999; Pettersen et

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al., 1996; Siune and Svensson, 1993; Siune et al., 1994). A reanalysis of these votes in light of Zaller’s model would certainly provide an important contribution to the study on voting behavior and the role of partisanship in referendums on European integration. Further comparative research along these lines would also help demonstrate whether or not opinion formation in foreign policy constitutes a specific case. Acknowledgements We wish to thank Brook Boyer, Simon Hug, Kenneth Kollman, Hanspeter Kriesi, Wolf Linder and Derek Lutterbeck for their most valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial support (grant no. 4042-046408/1). References Almond, G., 1950. The American People and Foreign policy. Yale University Press, New Haven. Bjorklund, T., 1996. The three Nordic 1994 referenda concerning membership in the EU. Cooperation and Conflict 31 (1), 11–36. Bogdanor, V., 1994. Western Europe. In: Butler, D., Ranney, A. (Eds.), Referendums around the World. The Growing Use of Direct Democracy. The AEI Press, Washington DC, pp. 24–97. Butler, D., Ranney, A. (Eds.), 1994. Referendums Around the World. MacMillan, London. Bu¨tschi, D., 1993. Compe´tence pratique. In: Kriesi, H. (Ed.), Citoyennete´ et De´mocratie Directe. Compe´tence, Participation et De´cision des Citoyens et Citoyennes Suisses. Seismo, Zu¨rich, pp. 99–119. Caramani, D., 1996. The Swiss Parliamentary Election of 1995. Electoral Studies 15 (1), 128–138. Caspary, W.R., 1970. The “mood theory”: a study of public opinion and foreign policy. American Political Science Review 64, 536–547. Cohen, B.C., 1973. The Public’s Impact on Foreign Policy. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, MA. Converse, P.E., 1964. The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In: Apter, E. (Ed.), Ideology and Discontent. Free Press, New York, pp. 206–261. Converse, P.E., 1970. Attitudes and non-attitudes: continuation of a dialogue. In: Tufte, E. (Ed.), The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, pp. 168–189. Cronin, T.E., 1989. Direct Democracy. The Politics of Initiative, Referendum, and Recall. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London. Dahl, R.A., 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London. Finger, M., Sciarini, P., 1991. Integrating “new politics” into “old politics”: the Swiss party elite. West European Politics 14 (1), 98–112. Fitzmaurice, J., 1995. The 1994 referendum on EU membership in Austria and Scandinavia. A comparative analysis. Electoral Studies 14, 226–232. Franklin, M., Marsh, M., McLaren, L., 1994. Uncorking the bottle: popular opposition to European unification in the wake of Maastricht. Journal of Common Market Studies 32, 455–472. Franklin, M., Van Der Eijk, C., Marsh, M., 1995. Referendum outcomes and trust in government: public support for Europe in the wake of Maastricht. West European Politics 18, 101–117. Free, L.A., Cantril, H., 1967. The Political Beliefs of Americans. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick. Gamson, W., Modigliani, A., 1966. Knowledge and foreign policy opinions: some models for consideration. Public Opinion Quarterly 30 (2), 187–199. Geddes, B., Zaller, J., 1989. Sources of popular support for authoritarian regimes. American Journal of Political Science 33 (2), 319–347.

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