Testing Foreign Policy Belief Structures of the American Public in the Post-Cold War Period: Gross Validations from Two National Surveys

Abstract

The basic attitudinal structure underlying the American public's for eign policy preferences is assessed by using both exploratory and confir matory factor analyses on two major post-cold war surveys containing many similarly worded questions-by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CC, 10/94) and the Times Mirror Center (TM, 9/93). Although previous studies had stressed only two or three primary attitudinal fac tors and usually ignored factor intercorrelations, our exploratory analy ses of these data sets consistently yielded at least four distinct and readily interpretable factors, including two correlated "outward-focused" factors (Global Altruism and U.S. Global Interest), a U.S. Domestic issues factor bearing on foreign policy (e.g., jobs protection), and a Military Security factor. Building upon these results, confirmatory factor analyses using LISREL found that a four-factor model provided probabilistically close fits to both the CC and TM data sets and that accuracy of fits declined with various simpler models.