Elite-Public Gaps on Salient Foreign Policy Issues: Experimental Evidence from the 2022/23 US Sanctions on Russia

Do Western publics and political elites hold different views on foreign policy? If so, what might account for these differences? Recent research (e.g., Kertzer 2022) suggests that although ‘elite-public gaps’ exist, they are largely driven by ‘mundane’ compositional differences (e.g., education, age, income). We test this proposition by examining two distinct aspects of foreign policy opinion: (1) baseline attitudes and (2) decision-making behavior. We do so in a highly salient real-world foreign policy crisis, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We present evidence from a paired experiment with US executive staffers (n = 253) and the general US public (n = 1.004) run from November 2022–January 2023. We ask whether respondents support increasing US sanctions on Russia. For the control group, this assesses baseline attitudes. We randomly vary whether respondents receive an information treatment of contemporary public polling highly supportive (80%) of increasing sanctions. This examines respondents’ responsiveness to public opinion in decision-making. We find that the public is far less supportive of increasing sanctions than executive staffers are at baseline (54.8% vs. 68.0%), but that it is far more responsive to public opinion (+15.6 vs. +8.3 pp.). Having established notable elite-public gaps at face, we examine whether these differences are simply driven by demographic differences. We do so by matching our two samples through several procedures, producing a dataset of elites and ‘elite-like’ citizens. In line with past research, we find that gaps diminish. We supplement this with further experimental data from US-based think tank staff (n = 228) and IR faculty (n = 789). This extends the literature on elite-public gaps to cover highly salient real-world events.