Uncovering Hidden Publics: Understanding the Relationship between Public Opinion and Foreign Policy in the Arab World

Within International Relations (IR) theory, public opinion emerges as a rather elusive and complex concept. This is evidenced not only in the many attempts in the literature to define and refine the concept itself, but also in unsettled debates over what exactly public opinion can and should achieve. The question of how and to what extent public opinion shapes political outcomes is also a contested one, and existing research testing the potential of public opinion has tended to focus on democratic societies, where there is an abundance of data. Far less attention has been paid to this relationship in non-democratic societies, characterized by the absence of institutions and mechanism allowing for the uninhibited expression of public preferences. Research in non-democratic states has been hampered by methodological complexities: the general attitude has been that where we cannot measure public opinion, we cannot theorize about it. Political public opinion has traditionally been understood as being possible “only under conditions of political freedom,” and the climate for this type of research in regions like the Arab world has been virtually nonexistent (Tessler 2011). As Risse asks, “[d]oes the empirical evidence confirm the conventional wisdom that public opinion does not count in those countries, or do systems that are not democratic in the Western sense provide the masses with different ways to influence policies?” (1991, 512). While there is comparably limited understanding of the interplay between opinion and foreign policy in non-democratic states, the notion of public opinion as a tool that lends legitimacy to political leadership is extremely relevant. My research is situated within this gap, where there is a lack of consensus in International Relations (IR) theory concerning the extent to which domestic public opinion can and should inform a state’s foreign policy and where little is understood about its potential in closed political states. My research asks: what is the nature of the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy in non-democratic settings, and specifically in the Arab world, where we have seen a proliferation of public opinion research in the past decade. I explore whether, how, and to what extent public opinion may shape decision-making processes and outcomes, in the face of political constraints that may inhibit the free expression of public preferences.