Taking Foreign Policy Personally: Personal Values and Foreign Policy Attitudes

Previous research has shown that on issues of foreign policy, individuals have “general stances,” “postures,” “dispositions” or “orientations” that inform their beliefs toward more discrete issues in international relations. While these approaches delineate the proximate sources of public opinion in the foreign policy domain, they evade an even more important question: what gives rise to these foreign policy orientations in the first place? Combining an original survey on a nationally representative sample of Americans with Schwartz’s theory of values from political psychology, we show that people take foreign policy personally: the same basic values we know people use to guide choices in their daily lives also travel to the domain of foreign affairs, offering one potential explanation why people who are otherwise uninformed about world politics nonetheless express coherent foreign policy beliefs.