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This paper studies the impact of public opinion on presidential decision-making in foreign policy. Although a good deal of research looks at this general question, beyond the broad distinction between crisis and non-crisis decisions, the literature is largely inconclusive. We begin from this central distinction, utilizing the International Crisis Behavior Project’s criteria as the starting point for case selection. To observe in detail how differing patterns of public attentiveness influence foreign policymaking, we compare four cases: the 1991 Gulf War; the 1999 U.S. intervention in Kosovo; the U.S. response to Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s; and U.S.-Japanese economic relations between 1988-1992. To move beyond the broad question of “public opinion and foreign policy,” we propose a more precisely specified analytical model, conceptualizing foreign policy decision making as a five-stage process: problem representation, option generation, policy selection, implementation, and policy review. At each decision stage, the question is asked: How influential was public opinion on a president’s decision? The model generates several testable hypotheses. For instance, foreign policy crises tend to produce a public that is highly attentive throughout all stages of the decision process. While strategic imperatives often overwhelm domestic political considerations in the early stages of a crisis, the relative importance of public opinion as a decision premise tends to increase during later stages, with presidents apt to sacrifice strategic effectiveness to pacify a highly attentive domestic audience during the implementation phase. Conversely, salient non-crisis foreign policies produce a selectively attentive public, whose greatest influence is likely to be on the president’s selection of policy rather than the manner in which that policy is implemented. Freed from the constraints of an attentive public, presidents are afforded considerable autonomy in implementing non-crisis policy in a manner consistent with their vision of the national interest, even if the general public does not share that same vision. This paper outlines the model and provides a brief overview of each of the cases, then assembles data on aggregate public opinion from a wide range of surveys and polls, and analyzes the resulting time series to compare the pattern of public involvement to the model’s predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a new explanation for the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan. Mori's low ratings in 2000 were especially low and Koizumi's popularity in 2001 was impressively high. Yet the ways in which the LDP managed those two years are consistent with a more general strategy of calibration. The Mori cabinet was frequently reshuffled to raise public support for the prime minister and his party. When those efforts failed, Mori stepped down, after less than a year on the job. Koizumi, in contrast, managed to serve a year and half in office before juggling the cabinet. Though he sometimes irritated fellow LDP politicians by challenging party norms, they tolerated the changes in exchange for greater public support for the party.

In this research paper, I seek to test the claim that negative public opinion and media coverage have had a significant impact on Japanese ODA policymaking, by examining their effect on Japanese aid policy towards China since 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are clientelistic behaviors and programmatic position-taking of legislators substitutive, complementary, or orthogonal? Existing literature has theorized the two modes of political competition as substitutes, yet, empirical support for this assumption has been provided by data that involves extensive dichotomous coding of party platforms and dichotomous framing of public opinion questionnaires. Consequently we do not know much about how these two modes of political competition relate to each other when they coexist. Using Japanese legislator surveys, this paper develop two independent measures of programmatic position-taking using a multidimensional scaling procedure developed by Poole (1998) and test competing hyptheses. Our results do not lend strong support to the substitutive argument widely believed in the literature. We find that the levels of clientelism and programmatic position-taking are weakly complementary for economic issues and weakly substitutive for security issues. Only the effort-based measure of clientelism has substitutive effects on programmatic position-taking, although the effect is moderate. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines China's and Japan's popularity campaigns toward Southeast Asia, a vital neighbor to both. It contextualizes soft power campaign in democratic and non-democratic settings and discusses their similarities and differences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My project examines the efforts of the Chinese government, particularly in education and propaganda, and its effects on nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiments in youth. Is nationalism a result of independent mobilization and thinking on the part of the ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]