views about military action changed as a function of randomized information about public
support for a military strike. Moreover, when asked directly, most Israeli policymakers reported
that bucking public opinion would entail significant political costs.
To test for selection, we fielded experiments on the mass public in both Israel and the
United States, and found that voters treated foreign policy as a major criterion for voting. When
foreign policy positions were exogenously assigned, voters strongly preferred parties or
candidates whose foreign policy positions matched their own. In both countries, foreign policy
was as important as economic or religious policies, and far more potent than non-policy
considerations such as gender, race, or political experience. Moreover, in the United States,
many voters crossed party lines to support candidates who shared their foreign policy views.
These findings have important empirical, theoretical, and normative implications.
Broadly, our findings suggest that scholars can gain insight into foreign policy by studying the
opinions of ordinary citizens, an approach taken by a large recent wave of international relations
scholarship. By demonstrating that leaders respond to public pressure when making foreign
policy, and that citizens strive to select leaders whose foreign policy preferences match their
own, this article underscores the value of recent efforts to measure and explain the preferences of
citizens.
Moreover, our experiments bolster many influential theories of international relations in
which citizens play a prominent role in shaping foreign policy. The long list includes, for
example, work on liberalism (Moravcsik 1997), the democratic peace (Doyle 1986; Maoz and
Russett 1993), selectorate theory (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003), audience costs (Fearon 1994),
diversionary war (Gelpi 1997), the democratic advantage (Lake 1992; Reiter and Stam 2002),
two-level games (Putnam 1988; Milner 1997), and theories about how citizens help enforce