Ideology at Water’s Edge: the Hypothesis of Asymmetric Responsiveness
Despite continuity in the ideational assumptions behind domestic and foreign
policy opinions, it is often felt that a sense of common national purpose may trump
ideological preferences when the nation is threatened from abroad. In this view, objective
international circumstances can offset other differences, as people reach for a common
conception of the national interest, indicating that ideology stops at water’s edge,
especially when foreign dangers loom. This will be termed the realpolitik hypothesis. If,
however, ideology is the dominant force behind foreign policy opinions, i.e., a force more
powerful than objective international conditions, we would not expect the gap to be
narrower when times are threatening than when they are halcyon. In that case, we would
conclude that political worldviews reach well beyond water’s edge. We will term this the
ideolpolitik hypothesis.
To get a rough notion of the predictive values of the two hypotheses, we may
compare the structure of public opinion at periods marked by varying levels of perceived
external danger, to see whether the size of the ideologically-based gap depends on that
danger. For this purpose, we complement our study of 2002 with one of comparable
CCFR surveys for 1979 and 1994. In 1979, the world appeared fairly threatening. The
superpower détente of the Nixon-Kissinger years was rapidly crumbling, with US
accusations of Soviet subversion in the Horn of Africa, claims that its massive armored
force threatened Western Europe, and worries about Moscow’s ICBM programs. At the
same time, the United States accelerated its push for a large arsenal of MIRVs and cruise
missiles, while talk of détente became a political liability to US presidential candidates.
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