The convergence of American elites’ domestic beliefs with their foreign policy beliefs

Contemporary scholarship on elites’ foreign policy beliefs is based upon the implicit assumption that the dimensions underpinning these attitudes are separate and distinct from those which undergird attitudes about domestic politics. Indeed, the dominant conception of Americans’ foreign policy beliefs uses labels to describe dimensions—militant internationalism and cooperative internationalism—which are relevant to international affairs but meaningless to domestic policy attitudes and disputes. Such accounts imply that people do not possess common principles, or ideology, that structure beliefs across both issue domains. We argue that the analytical barrier between foreign and domestic policy beliefs is artificial, at least for elite beliefs. Data from the 1988 Foreign Policy Leadership Project survey and the 1988--1992 Leadership Opinion Project panel study demonstrate that foreign and domestic policy beliefs share a common structure. Since this structure is strongly associated with simple self‐placement scores on a left/right continuum, we label it liberalism/conservatism. This finding reaffirms earlier research about the importance of ideology in constraining elites’ beliefs. It also provides a possible explanation for the evidence that elites’ general stances towards militant internationalism and cooperative internationalism have remained remarkably stable despite the end of the Cold War: because these dimensions are anchored in ideology and reflect core values, they were not moved much by transformations within the international arena.