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Democracy requires that citizens' opinions play sonic role in shaping policy outcomes, including in foreign policy Yet, although the literature on public opinion and foreign policy has made great progress in recent decades, scholars have reached no consensus concerning what the public thinks, or thinks about, with respect to foreign policy, bow it comes to hold those opinions, or whether those opinions influence (or even should influence) foreign policy. In this article, we first review the extensive gains in scholarly knowledge in the area of public opinion and foreign policy over the past several decades, emphasizing relatively recent work. We then suggest a framework, based on the concept of market equilibrium, aimed at synthesizing the disparate research programs that constitute the literature on public opinion and foreign policy. To do so, in addition to considering the relationship between leaders and the public, we incorporate a third strategic actor, the mass media, which we believe plays a critical role alongside citizens and elites in shaping the public's attitudes about, and influence on, foreign policy. Our goal is to clarify the multifaceted relationships between these actors and foreign policy outcomes. Adapted from the source document.

1 Mass media and political economics -- 2 Collective decision-making and market provision of information -- 3 Public good provision, electoral selection and informationacquisition -- 4 Theory and evidence from Norway: Newspaper circulationand local government efficiency -- 5 The geography of local television markets and the allocationof federal funds in the United States -- 6 Concluding remarks -- 7 References

The relationship between media coverage of Helmut Kohl in seven leading German print media & the opinions of the German general public about the politician, 1975-1984, is investigated. Data were obtained via: (1) a content analysis of the media presentations, coding 6 dimensions of characteristics; & (2) 72 representative public opinion (PO) surveys. Comparison of the time series by cross-lagged correlations shows that evaluation shifts in the media precede similar evaluation shifts in PO with a time lag of about 3-6 months for the whole period of investigation, & a somewhat shorter time lag for the time of Kohl's chancellorship. Evaluation shifts in the political magazines Der Spiegel & Stern were more closely related to PO than evaluation shifts in the national dailies. 2 Tables, 2 Figures, 48 References. Adapted from the source document.

Recent theoretical models propose that mass media, apart from any influence they may have on personal opinions, can also influence an individual's perceptions of what other people are thinking. But how this influence on perceived public opinion might take place remains a question. One answer proposed here—the persuasive press inference—suggests that people infer public opinion from their perceptions of the content of media coverage and their assumptions of the persuasive impact of that coverage on others. Data were gathered in an experiment measuring participant responses to news stories on two current issues, each presented with either a favorable or unfavorable slant. The slant of both news articles had a significant effect on participants' judgments of public opinion on those issues, even when adjusted for the effect of projected personal opinion. Findings supported the hypothesis that people appear to estimate public opinion based on their own reading of press coverage—an indirect effect of mass media that can have significant consequence.

This article examines relationships between media content, public opinion, and foreign policy in the United States and the United Kingdom. The investigation proceeds in two stages. First, an agenda-setting analysis demonstrates a strong connection between the salience of foreign affairs in the media and the salience of foreign affairs for the public. Second, two potential effects of varying issue salience on foreign policymaking are examined: (1) issue priming and (2) policymakers' reactions to issue salience. Analyses rely on a combination of U.S. and U.K. commercial polling data and the American National Election Study. Results point to the importance of mass media and issue salience in the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy.

5 pages, 6 figures. ; This letter focus on the effect of repulsive interactions on the adoption of an external message in an opinion model. With a simple change in the rules, we modify the Deffuant \emph{et al.} model to incorporate the presence of repulsive interactions. We will show that information receptiveness is optimal for an intermediate fraction of repulsive links. Using the master equation as well as Monte Carlo simulations of the message-free model, we identify the point where the system becomes optimally permeable to external influence with an order-disorder transition. ; We acknowledge financial support by the MEC (Spain) and FEDER (EU) through project FIS2007-60327. TVM acknowledges the support of FCT (Portugal) through Grant No. SFRH/BD/23709/2005, MP is supported by the Belgian Federal Government (IAP project "NOSY: Nonlinear systems, stochastic processes and statistical mechanics"). ; Peer reviewed