Understanding the Behavior of Public Opinion in Contemporary Foreign Policy

As a part of political life and illuminating broker, public opinion is a necessary evil in foreign policy. While the traditional approach considers confidentiality as the main element of foreign policy, regarding mass media as a detached intellect of public opinion and idealistic interpretation about foreign policy, repudiate the independent political life of public opinion, the new approach emphasizes the influence of public opinion on foreign policy by criticizing the traditional approach and accents on the reduction of the informative monopoly of policymakers due to globalization and the cognitive revolution. The importance of public opinion in the modern approach is such that the inconsistency between public opinion and foreign policymakers will decrease rational decision making. In other words, the availability of foreign policy has turned the new millennium into a citizenship’s century. Accordingly, analyzing the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy is the main question of this paper. Despite the interpretations of the researchers of international relations that consider public opinion as unattractive and inactive forces, the main hypothesis of this paper regards public opinion rational actor who affects the foreign policy according to the environment and the subject of the decision. This paper will test the hypothesis by using the pluralistic sociology approach and cognitive priority.