Does Public Opinion on Foreign Policy Affect Elite Preferences? Evidence from the 2022 US Sanctions against Russia

Does public opinion on international affairs affect elites’ policy preferences? Most research assumes that it does, but this key assumption is difficult to test empirically given limited research access to elite decisionmakers. We examine elite responsiveness to public opinion on sanctioning Russia during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We fielded a pre-registered experiment within the 2022 TRIP survey of US foreign policy practitioners, offering a rare opportunity for a fairly large elite survey experiment (N = 253). We used contemporary public polling highly supportive of increasing sanctions as an information treatment. Our research design, involving a salient issue and real-world treatment, substantially expands on previous work. Exposure to the treatment raises elite support for increasing sanctions from 68.0% to 76.3% (+8.3 pp.). While meaningful, this effect is smaller than those identified elsewhere. We argue that this difference is driven by pre-treatment dynamics related to issue salience and ceiling effects, and is therefore all the more notable. We provide evidence for substantial treatment effect heterogeneity depending on subject-matter expertise, degree of involvement in political decision-making, and gender, but not party identification. While our results support previous research, they highlight issues of external validity and the context-dependence of elite responsiveness.