Report on Public Opinion and American Foriegn Policy by J Michael Hogan
... Morris Article Report Report on “Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy” J. Michael Hogan J. Michael Hogan’s essay, “Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy” questions the effectiveness of our nation’s current methods in assessing public opinion as means to determine American policies, or more specifically, American foreign policies. Throughout the article, he concentrates on a concept founded by Gerald Hauser and Carole Blair that suggests “the liberal democratic conception of the public is…. ... ” This notion implies that practices, such as polling, are not a good form of accurately portraying the opinion of the American public. Therefore, I will label this view as “public-as-fiction, structural formalism.” This essay aims to demonstrate my claim by citing several examples derived from each section of Hogan’s essay and will focus on two specific “X’s”: the formalist “X” (assessing public opinion), and the structuralist “X” (the nature of public opinion). The Introduction The first—and, perhaps, most extreme—example of Hogan’s view can be found when he again quotes Hauser and Blair who state, “the people have been reduced to a depoliticized estate that renders mass loyalty to a government which does not include them in it’s decision making process”(p. ... He then, however, tones this message down subtly by explaining that “American policy-makers sometimes act contrary to public opinion” (p. ... Hogan goes on to state that “public opinion is discovered, not through survey research, but through analysis of rhetorical documents containing history as mediated or filtered by political leaders” (p.