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There are considerable concerns about public perceptions of intelligence stemming directly from the highly politicized nature of intelligence estimates in the run-up to the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this article we use a new public attitudes dataset to provide the first ever analysis of British public confidence in MI6 and Government use of intelligence. The article demonstrates that the public have relatively high confidence in the intelligence produced by MI6 but are extremely sceptical about how the Government will present that intelligence. Using an ordered logit model this article then examines the factors that influence public perceptions of both intelligence and Government, finding that women are a lot less confident in both the intelligence services and government presentation of intelligence than men, suggesting that this might help explain gender differences in support for military action. The study also demonstrates that party identifiers and Catholics have very low confidence in the intelligence produced by MI6. The study shows that public confidence in both government and intelligence has a strong effect on support for preventive military action against terror camps, suggesting that the intelligence agencies need to avoid being contaminated by political agendas as much as possible if the intelligence case for future military actions is to be supported by the public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]