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While questions about the diplomatic effectiveness of hawkish or dovish policies are crucially important, little research has been conducted on the domestic political risks and benefits associated with a chosen policy. This paper provides evidence to suggest why elites avoid the use of inducements and focus on more hawkish policies. Specifically this article focuses on the public opinion risks associated with offering an inducement that does not result in a change in behaviour of a target state. Using an experiment embedded within a wider survey instrument, we assess public ex post evaluations of government behaviour towards a nascent nuclear power that is believed to threaten British national security. The study examines not only the rewards associated with successful policies and the costs of failure, but also whether those costs are particularly heavy when it is dovish policies that fail. The results indicate that the public does have a particular aversion for unsuccessful engagement policies. Successful policies are generally more popular than unsuccessful policies, but a hawkish failure wins more public sympathy than a failed inducement. These results provide an important explanation as to why inducements tend to be avoided on the international stage: the risks of failure are too severe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion researchers agree that citizens use simplifying heuristics to reach real, stable preferences. In domestic policy, the focus has been on citizens delegating judgement to opinion leaders, notably political parties. By contrast, citizens have been held to deduce foreign policy opinions from their own values or principles. Yet there is ample scope for delegation in the foreign policy sphere. In this exploratory study I use a ‘process-tracing’ method to test directly for delegation heuristic processing in university students' judgements on the Iranian nuclear issue. A substantial minority sought guidance on foreign policy decisions, either from parties, international actors or newspapers. This was not always simple delegation; some used such heuristics within more complex decision-making processes. However, others relied on simple delegation, raising questions about the ‘effectiveness’ of their processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]