Scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the importance of public attitudes for shaping the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy. Economic sanctions emerged as one of CFSP's central tools. Yet despite the emergence of sanctions as a popular instrument in the EU foreign policy toolbox, public attitudes towards sanctions are yet to be studied in depth. This article explains public support for EU sanctions, using the empirical example of sanctions against Russia. It looks at geopolitical attitudes, economic motivations and ideational factors to explain the variation in public support for sanctions. The conclusion suggests that geopolitical factors are the most important, and that economic factors matter very little. Euroscepticism and anti‐Americanism play an important role in explaining the support for sanctions at the individual level.

Do voters’ assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the ‘clarity of responsibility’ in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion-inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi-presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship.

While public opinion about foreign policy has been studied extensively in the United States, there is less systematic research of foreign policy opinions in other countries. Given that public opinion about international affairs affects who gets elected in democracies and then constrains the foreign policies available to leaders once elected, both comparative politics and international relations scholarship benefit from more systematic investigation of foreign policy attitudes outside the United States. Using new data, this article presents a common set of core constructs structuring both American and European attitudes about foreign policy. Surveys conducted in four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) provide an expanded set of foreign policy‐related survey items that are analysed using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). Measurement equivalence is specifically tested and a common four‐factor structure that fits the data in all four countries is found. Consequently, valid, direct comparisons of the foreign policy preferences of four world powers are made. In the process, the four‐factor model confirms and expands previous work on the structure of foreign policy attitudes. The article also demonstrates the capability of ESEM in testing the dimensionality and cross‐national equivalence of social science concepts.

Scholars have recently begun to examine how authoritarian rulers cooperate with each other in order to fend off popular challenges to their power. During the Arab Spring the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) supported fellow authoritarian regimes in some cases while backing opposition movements in others. Existing theoretical approaches fail to explain this variation. Advancing the study on authoritarian cooperation, this article develops a theoretical approach that sets out to explain how authoritarian regimes reach their decisions. Drawing on poliheuristic foreign policy analysis, it argues that perceptions of similarity serve as a filter for estimating threats to regime survival at home. If regimes perceive the situation in other countries as similar to their own, supporting other authoritarian regimes becomes the only acceptable strategy. In contrast, if perceptions of similarity are low, regimes also consider other options and evaluate their implications beyond the domestic political arena. Applying this framework to the example of the GCC states during the Arab Spring, the analysis reveals covariation between perceptions of similarity and threat among GCC regimes, on the one hand, and their strategies, on the other.

This article reviews the general characteristics of the ‘crisis’ faced by the EU when confronted by the George W. Bush administration in the US, and considers it in relation to the EU's capacity for collective international action. On the basis of a range of examples, it appears that the EU's foreign policy ‘crisis’ was limited to one end of an extensive spectrum, and that in other areas there is considerable evidence of success in maintaining solidarity and proposing alternative policies. The article concludes by proposing an approach to EU collective international action that can account for and accommodate this unevenness, and which might be applied to EU–US relations more generally.

This article investigates the combined effect of experiential and reflective learning on student learning in international politics. It proceeds from the premise that students need a more realistic view of decision-makers so as to understand the logic and context of foreign policy-making better. A board game was used to model the foreign policy decision-making environment, and written and oral reflections were utilised to link students’ personal experience to abstract concepts of foreign policy analysis. Using a quasi-experimental design, both qualitative and quantitative data were used to test the hypotheses about students’ altered views of decision-making and their interest in and learning about foreign policy analysis. Results show that, in comparison with the impact of traditional lecturing combined with discussions, the benefits of experiential and reflective learning are very small. The little support for the existence of such benefits that was uncovered comes from qualitative data and a few statistical measures based on student self-evaluation. Quantitative analyses based on objective measures provided little evidence for a difference between the two teaching approaches. The article concludes with a call for improving the effectiveness and evaluation of reflective learning methods and putting the theories of reflective learning into practice more profitably in international relations.

Nicolas Sarkozy's reintegration of NATO's military command in 2009 has been presented as radical, given the traditional Gaullist stance of an arm's length relationship with NATO and the US. This article argues first, the difficulty for any French political leader to alter radically the course of French foreign and defence policy; second, that Sarkozy’ policy is merely conforming to a longer-term trend of negotiating between European and Atlantic positions dating from the beginning of the twentieth century.

This study explores the relationship between state–citizen relations and changing notions of volunteering in Japan. I map Japan’s state–citizen relations through an analysis of the transformations of volunteering in Japan from “hōshi” (mutual obligation) to “borantia” (borrowed from the English “volunteer”). The article broadly considers these paradigm shifts in terms of the context of the role International Non Profit Organisations (INPOs) play in Japanese foreign policy.

This article, as an introduction to the Symposium, discusses the determinants and evolution of attention to defence and foreign policy issues in France. It thereby contributes to existing debates on the relative power of presidents in this area. It then provides a short overview of the different contributions to the symposium. It argues that there is some measure of agreement in the analyses of current relations between France and the US, especially concerning the weight of history. Yet, at the same time, the articles provide a variety of views and approaches to the current state of these relations.

The relationship between France and the US is complex and characterised by frictions, which derive from the interests (and not the susceptibilities), of the two partners (Iraq, NATO, Afghanistan, the Middle-East). In order to avoid a return to past suspicions, the two allies need to establish a more structured dialogue, and cope with the new international agenda through more permanent structures. This requires a new culture of cooperation on both sides.

Despite fierce politicization in arms‐exporting democracies, we lack systematic research on mass public preferences on arms transfers. We propose that citizens either apply a deontologist (rejecting transfers categorically) or consequentialist (trading‐off economic, strategic and normative aspects) calculus of preference formation. Conducting population‐representative survey experiments ($N=6617$$N=6617$) in Germany and France, two global top‐five major arms exporters, we find that 10–15 per cent of respondents follow deontologist considerations, a preference structure potentially relevant for all foreign policies involving the use of military force. Still, a majority shows differentiated preferences, giving largest weight to normative considerations, with assessments affected by moderating features (e.g., scenarios of just war). Principled rejection of arms trade and a large consequentialist weight for normative factors are more pronounced in Germany compared to France, indicating that public opinion might pose a stronger constraint for government policy in this country. Respondents' preferences match opinion polls on post‐Russian invasion Ukraine armament, indicating high external validity of our experiments.

What factors explain the persistence of emotion in public policy? Applying the multiple streams framework, it is hypothesised in this article that the more intense the fear and the longer it persists under high salience, task unfamiliarity and complexity, and inconsistent preferences, the less likely it is for policy to change. The study examines the Greek attempt to block international recognition of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (1990–1993) and finds the power to build coalitions through emotional arousal that in the short run helps reframe losses and paradoxically undermines political support in the long run. Illuminating the emotional endowment effect within the logic of appropriateness, the article concludes that policy is made under certain conditions on the basis of validating emotions.

This article explores processes of coalition governance in foreign policy. Specifically, it argues that such processes are shaped by two interrelated dimensions of coalition set-up: first, the allocation of the foreign ministry to the senior or a junior coalition partner and, second, the degree of policy discretion which is delegated to that ministry. Bringing these two dimensions together, the article distinguishes four types of coalition arrangement for the making of foreign policy, which are expected to have predictable implications for the process of foreign policy-making and, ultimately, for the foreign policy outputs of multi-party coalitions and their quality.