Elite Misperceptions in Foreign Policy

Many models of domestic politics in international relations presume that political elites correctly perceive public preferences, even as a growing body of research in political behavior calls this assumption into question. Leveraging seven paired surveys of 4,852 foreign policy elites and 13,687 members of the American public from 2004–24 on twenty-four different questions, we show elites systematically misperceive public opinion in foreign policy, misperceiving the public as more isolationist and inward-looking than it actually is. We replicate this finding with a paired experiment showing that elites effectively underestimate the public’s responsiveness to cues from international organizations, and that elites with isolationist stereotypes underestimate public approval the most. These dynamics – which operate predominantly through stereotyping, rather than projection – have important implications for the study of political elites, public opinion about foreign policy, and efforts to test theoretical models of domestic politics in international relations using public opinion data alone.