Author: pstaniland

The question of whether mass publics pay attention to foreign affairs is a fundamental one. Some have expressed skepticism of whether the public knows or cares enough to form opinions, suggesting that, to the extent there is a coherent attitude it is driven by “elite cues” – ordinary people drawing their opinions from leaders or parties they trust. Others have pushed back, suggesting that the public can somewhat independently form attitudes that reflect objective conditions, rather than either being incoherent or simple reflections of elite cues.

This is a particularly interesting question in the case of India. On the one hand, we could imagine that in an electoral democracy that operates in a complex, often difficult international environment, the public should have strong incentives to pay attention. The stakes are high, and there are instances in which politicians faced serious criticism over foreign policy (Nehru after the 1962 war, for instance). On the other hand, Indian domestic politics are themselves wildly complex, usually have little to do with geopolitics (with occasional exceptions), and are focused on pressing issues of governance, identity, development, and coalitional wrangling. Indeed, most regular surveys of Indians going back decades (such as by CSDS) spend very little time asking about foreign policy.

In our new book (Open Access at present), Aidan Milliff and I examine this question in the context of Indians’ views of the US, China, and Russia/USSR (and Chapter 1 provides an overview of the literature summarized above).

Our findings are nuanced.

It is clearly the case that only a subset of the Indian population regularly expresses opinions on foreign affairs in surveys – as in other societies, the “foreign policy public” is non-representative and biased by education and socioeconomic status. The public that is responding to these questions is not the same as the actual public, which is less informed and/or less interested than the foreign policy public. This makes it unlikely that voters or elections are consistently driven by foreign policy, especially since in India there is evidence that lower-SES citizens are not less likely to vote than (the far less numerous) higher-SES citizens (a contrast to the US, where the less-educated turn out less). To be clear, this is not a criticism: citizens have remarkably strong reasons to focus more on feeding their families or pursuing representation in the state than on studying the finer points of Russian foreign policy or keeping track of Paraguayan election results.

That said, among the foreign policy public, we find that attitudes are quite coherent, responsive to events, and broadly consistent with Bruce Jentleson’s classic framing of a “pretty prudent public.” Moreover, we find non-response rates dropped on some very highly salient/public issues, so even people who are not normally tuned in to international affairs may start paying attention during crises. This opens potential space for bottom-up constraints or pressures on policymakers under narrow-but-important conditions.

We also found evidence of public knowledge about the United States that puts to shame Americans’ knowledge of India – for instance, in 1968, 78% of respondents (in a very limited urban sample, to be clear) knew about LBJ’s decision not to stand for reelection, and in 1960, 80% of respondents knew the political party of John F. Kennedy. By contrast, in 2023, 40% of Americans had not heard of Narendra Modi.

We cannot make confident claims about elite cueing, but do find several cases in which public opinion trended in a very different direction than government discourse – for instance, views toward China in the 2010s start dropping well before the Indian government’s public turn toward a more assertive stance. Elite cues are obviously important, but also not determinative. Indian political leaders certainly have a lot of “slack” between their foreign policies and public opinion, but it is not infinite, nor is it consistent across issues.

I know it’s a cliche, but I actually am thrilled that Aidan Milliff and I have a new book out today – and it’s open access online for the next couple of weeks.

The photo below is of the 1961 International Images survey conducted by the Indian Institute for Public Opinion (IIOPO) that I’d serendipitously found in the The University of Chicago Library in the summer of 2017. These were regular surveys of the urban Indian public’s views of foreign countries and international topics. I knew others had referenced these surveys, but hadn’t found systematic use of them.

Over the ensuring 9 years, Aidan, excellent UChicago RA’s, and I tracked down remaining issues, compiled an index of questions, found raw data stored at the Roper Center, and compared these pre-2000 data with post-2000 surveys of Indians’ views from other pollsters, trying to identify continuities and differences over time.

The initial goal was to build a comprehensive view of Indians’ attitudes toward foreign policy. That may need to wait, given the enormous quantity of material! We ended up focusing on Indian views of China, the US, and Russia/USSR since the 1950s, which forms the core of our new monograph. We explore trajectories over time in attitudes toward the major powers, who has constituted India’s “foreign policy public,” individual-level sources of variation in these views, drivers of change, new and unanswered questions, and implications for both research and policy. There are cool maps, and graphs, and interesting historical vignettes.

Moreover, we indexed numerous other foreign policy questions that exist in these publications (N=1,500). This index will be available online for those who want to know where to consult the IIOPO publications.

I’m grateful to Aidan for being a spectacular coauthor, numerous great RA’s, thoughtful and demanding peer reviewers, and Kai He and the editorial team of the fast-growing new Cambridge University Press Elements Series in Indo-Pacific Security.

What did we end up finding? You should read the whole thing to find out! But I’ll be rolling out a few takeaways in the coming days.

The one I want to begin with: the Indian public has not seen major power competition through a zero-sum lens. Rather than a hard US-Soviet or US-Russia trade-off in public attitudes, we see extended periods during the Cold War and afterward (including since 2022) in which public sentiment was broadly positive toward both countries simultaneously. There is a broad, public basis for “multi-alignment.” US policy during the Cold War and at times since (i.e. after the Russian invasion of Ukraine) has pushed India to make choices, but this is not how the public sees the world. There are important implications for Washington in a world of diffusing power and ongoing geopolitical rivalry.

I have a new article out with the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I argue that debates over democratic backsliding and competitive authoritarianism in South Asia, while still important, need to be complemented by a renewed focus on how militaries exercise power and influence across much of the region. The fall of the Rajapaksas in Sri Lanka and Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh showed how quickly governments with backsliding tendencies could fall. By contrast, in Pakistan and Myanmar, recent years have seen a further deepening of military entrenchment, while in Bangladesh and even Nepal, militaries emerged as decisive players in moments of political paralysis. This has important implications for these countries’ future trajectories (especially in periods of deadlock or renewed crisis), as well as their links to other states. Please go read the whole thing!

Richard Gray has a thoughtful piece in the Pacific Polarity Substack on ways for young people to enter the foreign policy community in a current era when many of the natural entry points no longer exist. I’m not part of this community, other than unpaid nonresident affiliations with a couple of thinktanks, but many of my students are looking to become part of it, so I found it very valuable. A few excerpts that jumped out to me:

“Do not expect to get a research internship for a well-known think tank for your first role. These are fiercely competitive roles that will receive hundreds of applicants every cycle. Your early internships are unlikely to fall neatly within foreign policy. As such, your goal is to pursue internships that are both interesting and broadly applicable to your long-term objectives”

“if you have the time and capacity, do something eccentric.

During undergrad, I directed a conference with National Taiwan University, the first undergraduate conference of its kind between an American and Taiwanese university (you can read about here). It took me hundreds of hours in preparation and was the second most stressful thing I have ever done, but the event and its consequences were pivotal for my later career stages. Part of the reason I landed my first think tank internship was that a guest speaker at my conference was a fellow at the organization, which made me recognizable to the hiring team. The conference also positioned me well as someone who had an idea and executed it without dramatic failure”

“You want to be specialized enough to be taken seriously as a young person, but broad enough to adapt to geopolitical swings.

On one hand, your areas of interest cannot be as broad as “foreign policy,” “international affairs,” or “international security.” Many high-profile figures operate as generalists, but they are typically people with many years of experience who either have a Dr. by their name or have intimate knowledge of how the American bureaucracy functions. As an early-career person, you need greater regional and subject matter focus, whether that is maritime security in the South China Sea, critical mineral security in Sub-Saharan Africa, or industrial strategies in Central America.

On the other hand, you don’t want to become so specialized that your skills are inflexible and fail to match most job opportunities. The policy environment shifts at a breakneck pace, and you do not want to be left behind current events. “

“I have sat on both sides of the hiring-applying equation, and recognize how dispiriting it can be to be at the mercy of decisions made by someone else, decisions that are often hasty, arbitrary, and sometimes preferential. There is a restlessness in preparing application materials, submitting on career portals, gaming out interviews, scouring LinkedIn, and … waiting. There are thousands just like you at this very moment, feeling that same emptiness in the pit of their stomach, at a standstill as the world appears to move beyond them.

Nevertheless, what an exciting moment in human history. China is now a mammoth, Southeast Asia is bustling, technologies are advancing at the frontier and diffusing throughout societies, and global challenges are interlocking at a dizzying pace and magnitude.”

“Ask yourself: if you were fielding hundreds of applicants, would you choose yourself? If not, what would it take to get there? Becoming more defined in your lane will make it more difficult for you to be replaced and insulate you from the whims of government or specific funding sources. With accumulated expertise, targeted networking, and differentiation comes a cosmos of your own creation.”

This is a valuable piece in Himal Southasian by Sanjeev Satgainya going over the key players in the March 5 election:

“Elections in a multi-party democracy are about political parties, but this election is also about something more – competing interpretations of how a democracy should function: quick and disruptive, procedural and reformist, or experienced and centralised.

The three figures currently dominating the national conversation exemplify these three interpretations: Balendra Shah, or “Balen”, of the upstart Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), an outsider to Nepal’s political establishment and a symbol of impatience with it; the Nepali Congress’s Gagan Thapa, an institutional reformist; and K P Sharma Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist), ousted as prime minister by the September protests, a seasoned centraliser of executive power.”

Zack Cooper has a very sober assessment of the failure of America’s Asia strategy out in Foreign Affairs, one I strongly agree with. He argues that the most plausible strategy that can be cobbled together at this point is a retrenched version of defending the first island chain, rather than a comprehensive pivot into competition across the region.

Most of the piece focuses on East Asia, but there are important implications of this strategy for India and Thailand that I wanted to highlight:

“This approach would trim U.S. commitments while retaining some of the most capable U.S. allies and partners, including Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The United States would likely maintain its presence in Australia and South Korea, given its enduring alliances with both countries and its desire to avoid leaving crucial allies out of the U.S. defense perimeter, a costly mistake Washington made ahead of the Korean War. But it would leave most of the rest of the region off the list of U.S. priorities, including the treaty ally Thailand and the emerging great power India. In practice, this could mean, for example, abrogating the U.S. alliance with Thailand and stating explicitly that the United States will not intervene if China encroaches on the territory or maritime claims of partners on the Asian mainland.’”

India can continue making hopeful noises about America as a long-term strategic partner, and I think there is certainly a possibility of that (including in high-tech areas), but it is also the case that the US may be far less useful as a strategic backstop than one might have thought a decade ago.