Knowledge and the position of attitudes to a European foreign policy on the real-to-random continuum

Abstract

The paper begins with the debate about the stability, the structure and the relevance of attitudes to foreign policy and argues that the cognitive aspect of the issue has a crucial bearing on whether one comes down on the side of the 'conventional wisdom' (the so-called Almond-Lippmann consensus) or the side of the 'revisionists' in this debate. It goes on to suggest, however, that the underlying issue is not one of 'true attitudes' versus 'non-attitudes' but rather a matter of where any particular set of attitudinal responses is located on a real-to-random continuum. Having considered some evidence concerning the public's knowledge of the European Union, the paper puts forward four hypotheses concerning the negative impact of lower levels of knowledge on the structure of attitudes. With some minor qualifications, the four hypotheses are supported by the Eurobarometer data analysed. Attitudes to a European common foreign and security policy are particularly susceptible to variations in knowledge, and the conclusion is drawn that, at lower levels of knowledge, such attitudes come suspiciously close to the wrong end of the real-to-random continuum.