The Rules of Public Engagement

THE RULES OF PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

A Project of the Public Agenda in cooperation with
the American Assembly*
July, 1993

by Daniel Yankelovich and John Immerwahr

Even under ideal conditions, the relationship of the public to foreign policy is replete with difficulties. Compared to domestic issues, opinion polls show that average Americans know less about foreign policy, care less, are more volatile in their views, and base their attitudes more on slogan-like generalizations (e.g., no-more-Vietnams) than on the specific merits of the issue. So, except when war threatens, the challenge of engaging the public in foreign policy is formidable.

Today's conditions are far from ideal, and engaging the public is particularly daunting in the present post-cold war climate of opinion. As former Senator Charles Mathias observed in a previous American Assembly volume, "The greatest problem that confronts American leadership with respect to future foreign policy is to achieve a new national . . . consensus in the absence of a powerful threat."1

For the past two generations our nation's adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union has been the framework within which all foreign policy initiatives were evaluated. Absent that framework, it is difficult for the public to know what criteria to bring to bear in making foreign policy judgments. For forty years, leaders and public alike were prepared to go to great lengths to contain a menacing Soviet power; today there is no consensus that the country should spend even a fraction of the "peace dividend" to ensure a peaceful, democratic Russia.

Ever since the troubles of the economy have come to preoccupy the public mind, voters have pushed foreign policy issues to the rear of the national agenda. Although for much of the postwar period foreign policy ranked near the top of the public's concerns, the combination of mounting concern for domestic issues and the collapse of the Soviet Union has greatly reduced public interest in international problems. On the Gallup/ USA Today index of fifteen issues for discussion and debate in the 1992 presidential campaign, national defense ranked fourteenth out of fifteen, with only 43 percent feeling that it was a "very important issue" (Gallup/USA Today, January 1992). When the goals of foreign policy are discussed, by two to one margins (62 percent to 31 percent), voters give greater priority to the pursuit of our economic interests than to more traditional political-military objectives. In brief, the gap between foreign policy leadership and the public–large under any circumstances–is particularly difficult to bridge under present conditions.

Traditionally, leadership has managed this gap by limiting the influence of the public in the foreign policy arena. Most foreign policy initiatives are taken without much public consultation. Even on issues that involve putting U.S. troops in harm's way, such as in Somalia, leadership sometimes does not even bother to consult or inform the public until after the fact.

Increasingly, however, despite its low level of interest in foreign affairs, the public insists upon being in the loop, especially when sacrifice and hard choices are involved. The public has come to feel that foreign policy competes with domestic problems for attention and resources. As a result, the public is no longer prepared to delegate critical foreign policy decisions to the judgment of experts; there is a concern that foreign policy leaders will distract the country from more pressing domestic issues. As the nation struggles to find solutions to both its domestic and foreign problems, leaders can expect a new aggressiveness and insistence on the part of the public that it be directly engaged in shaping the new post cold war foreign policy.

Here we bump up against an unexpected obstacle. In the past, foreign policy leaders may have been reluctant to go to the trouble of engaging the public in complex foreign policy issues. But they never doubted their ability to do so. Yet the sad truth is that the foreign policy community has little or no idea how to go about engaging the public under these new post-cold war conditions.

What foreign policy leaders do understand is the conventional top-down method for winning public support. In this approach, leaders first get together and hammer out policy positions among themselves. This process, which might take months or even years on complex policies, is often characterized by extensive, open, and thoughtful debate. But once a position is reached, the process of winning public support for it is usually far less thoughtful and open. It then becomes largely a matter of selling the public on decisions that leaders already have made.

The techniques for selling the public are familiar. Leaders make speeches, brief reporters, write op-ed pieces, and appear on talk shows to convey their thinking and to share a tiny fraction of their knowledge with the public. In effect, leaders present a simplified version of a lawyer's brief to the public, justifying their policy recommendations in a one-way process of communication.

Let us hasten to add that the top-down method is quite appropriate for many issues. It works well when public interest and concern are low, either because the issue is highly technical or because it does not touch people's lives directly. The decision of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to implement the shuttle program, for example, was intensely debated within the expert community but, appropriately, most of the public discussion was focused on selling the program to the public. The traditional method also works well on issues where no special sacrifices or actions are demanded of the public. Many foreign policy decisions have no immediate impact on the public. There is no special reason to engage the public in a lengthy debate about our policy toward Namibia, for example. Finally, this process works well when the goals of the policy are widely shared by the public and the leadership community, as in the cold war era.

But the top-down selling approach is surprisingly ineffective for other issues. It does not work well when the public has a real stake in the issue, such as military intervention in Bosnia or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It does not work well when the public does not share leadership's assumptions and priorities. It is especially ineffective on issues where demands will be made on the public, and where the public is expected to accept sacrifices. As a growing number of observers have noted, the top- down approach has not even worked well for domestic policies; it is hardly likely to do much better for foreign policy.

So we are confronted with a prickly dilemma: foreign policy issues have grown more elusive and less clear-cut. The public is eager to focus on urgent domestic concerns but is unwilling to delegate the shaping of foreign policy to experts who might give foreign policy too large a share of the resources needed to fix our domestic problems. Foreign policy leaders are (more or less) willing to engage the public to win its support, but don't know how to do so, and, worse yet, don't know that they don't know.

What is needed, then, is a new method for winning public support for vital foreign policy initiatives. Let us call this new method "engaging the public," to distinguish it from the top-down approach.

Engaging the public differs from top-down communication in a number of ways. Instead of selling the public on policy positions that leaders have prepackaged, the public is drawn into the process of deliberation and policy formation. Instead of one-way communication, there is dialogue between public and leaders. Instead of a public relations campaign, a more complex process of debate, discussion, and interaction between public and leaders is instituted.

Engaging the public is more difficult than selling or information sharing. It demands more time and energy from leaders, and greater sensitivity to the nuances of the public's thinking. Its difficulty should not be minimized. The price of winning public support for issues that require this approach is the adoption of a new set of rules for public engagement in foreign policy issues. These rules of engagement are the principal subject of this chapter.

The key differences between top-down communication and engaging the public reflect radically different theories of how public opinion actually works, theories that are almost never made explicit. It is only when we clarify the difference between two implicit theories of public opinion that a workable strategy for engaging the public becomes clear.

The top-down approach is based on the theory that public opinion is driven by information and persuasion. In this view, what prevents people from supporting a position is that they do not understand the issues and the reasons leaders support the positions they take. The appropriate role of leadership would appear obvious: leaders inform the public about the issues and present a cogent case for their preferred policy solution. The theory leads to the three-step model schematized in Figure I.

On the surface, this approach appears to make sense. Since leaders have much more information than the public, it is up to leaders to impart some of their information persuasively. Once the leaders' arguments are absorbed, the public is expected to reach the same conclusion.

The engagement approach is based on a more complex model of how public opinion works. Over the last several decades, together with colleagues at the Public Agenda Foundation (in collaboration with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation), we have been studying how public opinion develops on a series of policy issues, domestic and foreign. What we have learned is that public opinion moves through a multistage journey, starting from ignorant, volatile, impulsive, initial responses to issues (which we call "raw opinion") to firm, thoughtful, and responsible judgments (which we call "public judgment").2 At certain stages the public does assimilate information, but the information component is often of secondary importance, as compared to people's values and moral convictions. The journey from raw opinion to public judgment is largely a matter of reconciling conflicting values and overcoming emotional resistances–a journey in which information plays a relatively minor role.

Sending foreign aid to the Russians, intervening militarily in Bosnia, lifting the ban on gays in the military, endorsing the export of jobs to Mexico, putting American troops under United Nations command, encouraging Japanese investment in American businesses–these are matters of deep concern that engage our prejudices, emotions, and values, as well as our minds. In the end, these kinds of policies cannot be effectively sold to the public in the traditional top-down manner.

Instead of seeking to inform and persuade as in the top-down model, leaders need to stimulate people to be more thoughtful, to confront their own prejudices and resistances, to embrace long-term goals as opposed to the impulses of the moment, to weigh the pros and cons of policy choices seriously and responsibly. They need to make it possible for the public to participate in the same deliberative process that they, the leaders, have shared. Average Americans are as capable of carrying out this difficult chore of citizenship as their leaders–if we cast the issues in their framework (not that of the experts) and if they are given the time to deliberate, the necessary incentives, and the right kind of communicative leadership.

Those leaders who are willing to go to the trouble of engaging the public in this kind of deliberative process need to ground themselves in a better understanding of how public opinion works when people's feelings, prejudices, and moral values are aroused. In the balance of this chapter, we will set forth the various stages of public deliberation and suggest what rules of engagement are appropriate at each stage.

Analysis of the public's response to hundreds of issues shows that the public moves through seven distinct deliberative stages in the journey from raw opinion to public judgment. These stages sometimes overlap, but they warrant being distinguished from one another for a very practical reason: the rules for engaging the public differ at every stage. Leaders defeat their own purposes when they take actions inappropriate for the stage the public has reached. The seven stages are schematized in Figure 2.

In what follows we describe the seven stages of public opinion, and the rules of engagement appropriate to each.

The first stage of the long journey to public judgment is the public's growing awareness that a problem is developing. What drives public awareness is a combination of events reported by the media and people's own responsiveness to the world around them.

At this initial stage of the journey the methods for creating public awareness are identical for both the top-down and engagement approaches. In both, it is the job of experts and the media to sound the "wake-up" call. Leaders traditionally have understood this as an important part of their role. Since this stage of the journey is well understood, it is not surprising that our culture has developed highly effective means for calling people's attention to an issue. Indeed, this stage calls for precisely the kind of one-way communication (with an active leadership and a passive public) that leaders are most comfortable with. It is only when we get into the later stages that new and less familiar communication approaches are called for.

An excellent example of an issue that has grown gradually in public awareness is the competitiveness problem. One indicator is awareness of the trade deficit. In 1977 only a bare majority (53 percent) was aware of the trade deficit (Roper, September-October 1977). But as the trade deficit grew, as more and more attention was directed toward it by the media, and as people experienced the impact of stagnant economic growth on their own lives, consciousness of America's competitiveness problem grew accordingly. By the mid-1980s awareness of the trade deficit had reached the 75 percent level, and by the end of the decade awareness exceeded 80 percent (Los Angeles Times, 1985; Gallup/Times Mirror, January-February 1989). By now, awareness and concern about the competitiveness crisis are nearly universal. Seventy percent say that making the US more competitive in world trade is one of the most important problems facing the country today (Yankelovich, Clancy, Shulman, September 1992), and 89 percent are concerned that US industry is becoming less competitive in the global economy (Harris/Business Week, March 1992).

Turning to another issue–the future of the former Soviet Union-- we can see that leaders have led a large majority of the public to at least this first stage of awareness. Sixty percent of the public says that it has been following political developments in the former Soviet Union (CBS News/New York Times, March 1993).

It is important to note that the growth of public awareness on issues is not always automatic; there have been spectacular examples where important issues failed to capture public attention. The key factor here is almost always the role of the press. (As political scientist Bernard Cohen observed a number of years ago, "The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about."3 When the media fall down on their job of bringing an issue to the attention of the public, public awareness is inevitably stalled. The savings and loan crisis, for example, developed gradually and was well known to many in the banking community, but the media paid relatively little attention to it until the problem reached an advanced state. Had the media been more alert, taxpayers might have been saved hundreds of billions of dollars.

To gain public support for a solution, it is not enough for people just to be aware of a problem. Before beginning the hard work of deliberating about it, people must be convinced that unless something is done about the problem soon, the consequences will be dire.

The shift from awareness to urgency is rarely automatic. The public can be aware of a serious problem for years without assigning urgency to it. For example, people have been aware of many environmental threats for decades without developing a sense of urgency. People were aware of rising health care costs and the growth of the federal budget deficit for many years before concluding that action was urgently needed.

A good example of awareness without urgency in foreign policy is the issue of giving aid to Russia. For several years, the nation's leadership has been concerned about the dangers of potential instability in the former Soviet Union. As we have seen, leadership has succeeded in making the public aware of the issue. But attempts to give aid to Russia real urgency for the public have so far been less successful.

These concerns would suggest a certain amount of urgency regarding the need to help Russia. But there is actually little support for doing much more to help. The vast majority of the public (75 percent) thinks that we are already helping Russia to move toward capitalism and democracy (Gallup, March 1993). Fifty-four percent oppose, giving more aid to encourage Russia to adopt a democratic government and a market economy; only 38 percent favor doing this (Yankelovich Partners/Time/CNN, March 1993).

This example shows that while the public may play back concerns expressed by foreign policy experts, it obviously does not give them the same weight. Although these worries may be urgent for leaders, for the public they remain low-level concerns. The possible dire consequences required to give an issue real urgency remain remote and theoretical, rather than real and pressing. Soviet nuclear technology does not seem to be spreading, and places like Iraq seem to get what they need from other sources. While people may be waiting in longer lines than ever in Russia, the public is not deluged with daily pictures of starving stick-figure babies (as they see in the coverage from Africa).

In fact, for the vast majority of people, the real danger is that we will give so much aid to Russia that we will not have enough left for our own domestic needs. Three-quarters of the public says that what concerns them is that the United States will give too much financial aid to the former Soviet republics when we badly need it here at home; only 15 percent says that they are concerned that we may not provide enough aid (Los Angeles Times, January 1992). The dire consequence that people worry most about, in other words, is that the United States might sacrifice its own well-being for the Russians.

Focus group respondents, for example, express fear that if we help the Russian economy, the result will be a loss of US jobs. People are worried that goods produced by low-wage workers in the former Soviet republics will undercut US products. For many people, the idea of helping the Soviet Union evokes memories of helping other former enemies such as Japan and Germany, countries that are now seen as taking away American jobs.

At this stage, the top-down and the engagement approaches begin to diverge from one another. Leaders often assume that if the public does not see the urgency of a problem, it is because people do not have enough information about it. But, as we see from the example above, people are aware of at least some of the consequences of failing to come to Russia's aid, and they still are not convinced of its urgency–or even its desirability.

How should leaders go about the task of imparting a sense of urgency to the public on issues such as this? We propose that they keep in mind two rules of engagement that will make the dire consequences of inaction real for the public. While there is no guarantee that these will work every time (even under the best of circumstances, the public may simply not share leadership's priorities), following these two rules will give leaders a much better chance than will the top-down approach.

Rule: Identify the reasons for the urgency gap. There are many possible reasons why, on any particular issue, the public may not share leadership's sense of urgency. One reason is different priorities. With respect to aid to Russia, for example, the foreign policy community is still mainly focused on the military and political threat (e.g., the failure of democracy leading to authoritarianism), while the public is much more concerned with the economic threat. This difference in emphasis is not surprising. It is difficult for foreign policy experts to shed habits of thought ingrained over several generations. The reality is that the public has probably made the transition from the cold war era faster than the experts have. In any event, the experts and the public are in different stages of the transition, and consequently do not see things in the same light.

Another reason the public may not share the experts' sense of urgency is that the threat may be too abstract and, therefore, not real enough to rouse people to action. For decades people felt no urgency about rising health care costs, because the costs were paid by others through the third-party payment system. It was only when employers began to require higher co-payments for fewer services that people demanded action.

A third reason for the urgency gap is more subtle. Most people feel excluded from foreign policy decisions. Looking in from the outside, they adopt the stance of critics rather than participants. The attitude is, "It is their problem, not ours." When people feel excluded, it is difficult to stir up feelings of urgency.

These are only a few of the causes of an urgency gap, but perhaps they are enough to indicate why it is imprudent to guess at the public's frame of mind. The likelihood is that the guess will be wrong, since the public and the foreign policy community rarely think alike. There is a variety of research techniques available for revealing the public's mindset, but policy makers should be wary about relying on "quickie" media sponsored polls. They are rarely subtle enough to dig beneath the surface, nor are they usually concerned with the reasons that public urgency is lacking. Once leaders understand why the public does not share their own sense of urgency, they will be in a better position to connect the dire consequences of inaction concretely to the public's deepest concerns.

Rule: Stimulate grassroots demand for action. Ideally the demand for action should well up from below rather than be imposed from above. When the demand for action comes directly from the public, people feel ownership in the issue and engage it as participants rather than as critics.

What would make aid to Russia assume greater urgency for the public? The best solution would be for leaders to credibly attack the public's zero-sum assumption: "aid helps them, hurts us." This assumption may be unfounded but it has to be understood and responded to sympathetically, even to the point of acknowledging that, at first glance, it seems plausible. The argument that we might, putatively, save defense dollars in the future will not be persuasive.

The case can be made persuasively only if the policy itself can be broadened so that it results in direct economic benefit to the United States. Can Russian oil make us less dependent on the Middle East? Can American jobs be created by helping Russia to build a new infrastructure? Can access to vast new markets help to simulate our own economy, as happened in Western Europe after the war? A positive answer to these questions would transform what appears in the mind of the public to be a zero-sum strategy into a win-win strategy.

In brief, if the policy justification of aid to Russia were shifted from a military-political one to an economic one, and if this shift were both real and credible (and not merely spin control), then thoughtful segments of the public would begin to demand action rather than brush aid to Russia aside as a deflection from the nation's real priorities.

As an issue becomes more urgent, there is a growing desire for action. At this stage, people start to look for solutions. Sometimes ideas for solutions rise up from the grassroots, such as the nuclear freeze movement of the 1970S. But typically solutions are shaped and presented by leadership.

Characteristically at this stage people begin to grope for an answer to a problem they are starting to take seriously. Not surprisingly, they may initially overreact to proposals for solutions without having thought through the complexities of the issue and the consequences of their views. At this stage of public opinion, people's responses are unstable and given to rapid fluctuation.

What makes both this stage and the following one difficult to grasp is that the public's deliberative process diverges from the more systematic process that leaders seek to adhere to in their formal analysis of issues. When leaders in the military, government, business, or think tanks deal with a problem formally, they follow a systematic approach that starts with the analysis of a problem and concludes with choosing among an array of options for dealing with it.

In the hurly-burly of political life, however, decision making is much less systematic, and much more based on trial and error. Culturally, Americans react to problems by rushing to action, giving short shrift to lengthy and laborious analysis: people leap to solutions without pausing to formulate alternatives and without deliberating at length on which solution would be optimal. Instead, people focus on one solution at a time, moving on to alternatives only when serious doubts develop. This may not be the ideal way to approach a problem, but it is the way the American political process works.

One example of this trial-and-error style of thinking is the public's reaction to NAFTA. People have reached the stage of urgency both about the problem of immigration and the potential threat to American jobs. Over the past several years, as leaders tossed out ideas about how to deal with this issue, the public initially reacted favorably, eagerly seeking a solution to the problem.

The early reactions to a North American Free Trade Agreement thus tended to be more emphatic than what developed later.

In other words, people seemed surer and more positive–about their position in 1991 before they had really had a chance to think about the subject. Two years later, in 1993, after the issue had been ventilated in the 1992 presidential election, people were saying that they had not heard enough about it. Rather than starting with a need for more information and gradually moving toward a solution, people started with a proposed solution, and only gradually came to realize that they needed more thinking and information about the problem.

An understanding of how public opinion works at this stage suggests two rules for engaging the public in the deliberative process.

Rule: Assume that poll results about solutions are soft. It is at this third stage that public opinion polls are most misleading. Policy makers need to learn that opinion polls conducted before solutions have been fully absorbed are merely initial–and highly tentative–reactions rather than either final support or ultimate rejection.

When people are first reacting to a solution, their opinions are highly unstable, and poll results can and do shift dramatically based on small changes in the wording or order of questions. In some of the early opinion polls on NAFTA, for example, support for the agreement changed by large margins based on small changes in question wording. The reason for this is clear: sometimes people are saying yes to a solution when all they really mean is that they want someone to deal with the problem; they are not yet focusing on the drawbacks of that particular solution. At other times, the public reacts violently against a proposal, because it has not yet realized that its unattractive implications may be necessary. In both cases, what it is registering is an initial reaction, rather than a firm judgment one way or the other.

The danger is that policy makers will overreact in two different ways. If the poll results show that the public opposes a promising solution, policy makers may throw up their hands in disgust and assume that the public is completely hopeless (rather than working to facilitate the public's movement through this stage). In other cases, leaders make the opposite mistake: they seize upon favorable early opinion polls as a mandate and rush ahead, only to find that public support evaporates when the implications of the choices become clearer.

Rule: Use policy proposals as "trial balloons." Leaders can sometimes accelerate the public's deliberative journey through the use of trial balloons. If leaders know that a policy will encounter serious public resistance (for example, military intervention in Bosnia) the sooner resistances can be brought into the open, the sooner they can be confronted and dealt with. This is the subject of stage four, which follows below.

When people start to consider new policies seriously, the journey to public judgment hits its most serious obstacle. Most foreign policy initiatives encounter some resistance. The question is, how much, how serious is it, and how can it be confronted.

Sometimes resistance is mild; other times it is fierce and unyielding. The key point is that resistance always indicates the presence of strong feelings. People don't resist new proposals simply because they don't have the facts. They resist either because the proposal conflicts with established values and beliefs, or because it collides with their interests (raising their taxes, threatening their jobs, causing them inconvenience). These perceptions may be erroneous or exaggerated. If so, factual information can help to dispel the misconceptions. But when strong feelings are involved, simply giving people the facts can be an ineffective and alienating tactic for those whose feelings are being ignored.

During the presidential campaign of 1992, for example, there was some discussion about lifting the ban on gays in the military. But it wasn't until after the election, when the proposal to lift the ban began to loom as a real possibility, that serious resistance started to emerge; only then did the conflict come to the surface. On the one hand, there is in the culture a general movement toward acceptance of alternative life styles. Majorities of the public are comfortable, for example, with the idea of a gay person serving in the president's cabinet (Gallup, June 1992). (Indeed, only a minority of the public says that being gay would disqualify someone as a presidential candidate.) But, on the other hand, many people still harbor a deep-seated emotional antipathy toward homosexuality and a lingering conviction that it violates moral values. Their emotional resistance is triggered when they imagine themselves sharing close quarters with a gay or lesbian person. When the proposal to lift the ban on gays in the military is taken seriously, it causes these conflicts to come to the surface.

In politics, we are most familiar with conflicts between groups of people, such as the bitter and irreconcilable conflict between pro-choice and pro-life groups on the abortion issue. But most conflicts on public policy issues take place within the individual psyche. These kinds of inner conflicts usually lie dormant until events force them to surface. (For example, in good economic times an individual might support both affirmative action and a seniority system; economic cutbacks cause a conflict between these values as society makes hard choices about who will be laid off first.)

People find it difficult enough to deal with emotional conflict in their personal lives. When it comes to public policy, they are under less pressure to resolve the conflict. If they can avoid doing so, they will.

One good example of inner conflict is the public's view of the proper role of the United States in world affairs. On the one hand, people say that they want the United States to assume a lower profile in world affairs, but on the other hand, they are not quite ready to relinquish or share American power with our allies or with international organizations such as the UN. What is at stake here are two conflicting value systems that people wish to embrace simultaneously. On the one hand, voters want to focus on the domestic economy and limit our commitments abroad. At the same time, the appeal of a special leadership role in world affairs–moral, political, military- is deeply embedded in our national identity. There is a deep suspicion of our allies and a sense that, when the chips are down, the United States must ultimately act on its own.

Survey findings document this conflict. Some of the most interesting findings focus on the concept of the United States as the world’s police officer. Only a small minority of Americans (21 percent) endorses this concept in principle, while 75 percent opposes it

On specific issues, however, there is strong support for the United States playing the role of world police officer. Some examples:

The conflict crystallizes when people are asked about relations between the United States, the UN, and our traditional allies. One side of the public's thinking resonates with the idea that the United States should not attempt to "go it alone" in foreign policy:

But when people are asked questions that evoke the other side of the conflict (namely that the United States must stand up for its own interests), large majorities support the notion of unilateral US action. For example, almost two-thirds of the public (63 percent) believes that the United States should be willing to commit troops on its own in some cases (Gallup, December 1992).

When both values are directly pitted against each other, the result is a kind of stalemate, as we can see in the following question:

Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, do you think the United States should share world power with other nations, or should we use our power to ensure that no other nation can challenge our dominance in world affairs? (Yankelovich, Clancy, Shulman, March 1992.)

This example helps to illuminate the nature of what we mean by resistance: the presence within the same individual of two conflicting values. In this instance the two values are a belief in the "special mission" of the United States to act unilaterally to protect its own interests and to impose its own moral standards, coexisting with a belief in the need to act in concert with allies and to delegate the world police officer role to international bodies such as the UN so that we can pay more attention to urgent domestic concerns.

People are reluctant to give up either value. This reluctance gives rise to a variety of forms of resistance: wishful thinking ("Surely we can do both if we put our mind to it"), avoidance ("Why can't we just ignore the conflict?"), contradictory thinking (support of mutually exclusive policy options), and procrastination ("Maybe if we are lucky it will just go away").

This stage and the next highlight the most important differences between the two models. The greatest limitation of the top-down model is that it is often ineffective in dealing with resistance caused by conflicts in values because it either ignores them or rides rough- shod over them. The reason it does so is because the top-down theory of public opinion assumes that the public's thinking process is driven by information and persuasion. Most resistance, however, cannot be overcome by giving people more information or even by providing a more persuasive argument. Rarely do the arguments of policy makers address the fundamental value conflicts that are at the root of resistance.

By contrast, the engagement model takes seriously the emotional resistance caused by conflicts in values. Three rules of engagement are important here.

Rule: Allocate time and attention to countering resistance. The first principle is simply that foreign policy leaders take into account that such conflicts exist and cannot be ignored. Acknowledgment of this reality can take several forms. Leaders can give people more time to "work through" these conflicts. Leaders can also make sure they understand the public's inner conflicts and how these differ from their own concerns. The foreign policy community has its own subculture and value system. It is sufficiently removed from the general culture that leaders should never assume that their own value conflicts (or lack thereof are shared by the general public. It is always worth making the extra effort to learn the precise nature of the public's inner conflicts when resistance makes itself felt.

Rule: Bring the conflict into the open. Leaders must be prepared to bring the conflict into the open where it can be confronted and discussed. One reason the race problem continues to fester in the United States is that the real nature of racial conflicts is rarely made explicit. As long as white Americans are reluctant to discuss the sources of tension with black Americans as openly as they do among themselves in private, then the processes of reconciliation, compromise, and resolution cannot proceed. Making conflicts explicit and giving both sides of the conflict their proper weight and dignity are important leadership functions without which procrastination and resistance can persist indefinitely.

Rule: Create the conditions for public resolution to occur. Finally, leaders must recognize that the public has to do the heavy lifting here. Leaders alone cannot overcome these resistances. Leadership needs to provide a format for people to work through the conflicts themselves. But if an issue has real urgency, and leadership has successfully identified the resistance that stands in the way of facing the issue squarely, then the public itself can do the hard work of resolving its own value conflicts. And, with some leadership support, it will do so. If people can get together (literally or figuratively) and deliberate, they will almost always gravitate toward balance and compromise.

It is this deliberative process that is almost totally absent from today's American life, due partly to the dominance of the top-down model.

Once people have worked through their resistances to dealing with an issue, they are ready for the hard work of sorting out choices, weighing their pros and cons, and beginning to make the difficult tradeoffs. We call this stage "choicework," to connote both the process of wrestling with choices and the fact that this is a very arduous task for the public.

This stage is an easy one for policy makers to understand. This is how leaders themselves come to grips with an issue when they are being systematic: an array of options is developed, their costs and consequences are thought through and discussed, and a choice is made. What is new and different about the engagement model is the idea that at least on certain issues–the public must take part in a similar process.

One of the advantages of involving the public in the choicework process is that it is an excellent way to transfer a sense of ownership. If foreign policy leaders want people to make a real commitment to policies so that they stand behind them even when they involve hard choices or sacrifices, leaders need to find a way to help people become invested in those decisions. Obviously, many foreign policy issues do not require this level of public ownership. But for the few that do, there is no better way to bring the public toward a stable and responsible position.

In practice, this stage and the preceding one often overlap. Weighing alternative choices is a good way to bring people's resistances to the surface to work them through. But while these stages may overlap in time sequence, the business of seriously weighing alternatives usually does not begin until people's emotional resistances have been confronted and reduced.

In other words, there are two analytically distinct tasks the public must accomplish once an issue has been fully engaged. One involves resolving value conflicts that arouse emotional resistance–a task for the heart as well as the mind. The other is a more purely cognitive task (weighing pros and cons). The relationship between the two is often complex. Deciding among competing alternatives is hard work intellectually, especially when choices involve difficult-to-assess tradeoffs. Decisions become even harder when there are deep-seated conflicts of interests and moral values to be worked out.

The engagement model and the top-down approach differ strikingly at this stage. The essential contrast is between including the public in the deliberative process versus simply giving people information or selling them on a previously decided option.

For the public to share fully in the deliberative process, a number of conditions must obtain. All of them revolve around the concept of "choicework"–the empirically grounded discovery that the single best mechanism for advancing public deliberation is to give people real choices to mull over.

Research on public thinking about scores of public policy issues shows that presenting choices is a far better method for advancing deliberation than merely laying out the arguments for a single solution: presenting choices gives people a systematic way to consider the consequences of alternative solutions so that they can be weighed against each other thoughtfully and judiciously. Examination of choices is the essence of the deliberative process; it is the one that leaders themselves follow when they are serious about solving a difficult problem.

The message to foreign policy leaders is this: a solid public consensus for new policies is most likely to flow from including the public in the consideration of choices. This means that leaders must give up their double standard, which has traditionally meant presenting options to each other but single solutions to the public.

The rules of engagement for this stage dictate that special effort is required in preparing the conditions for public choicework.

Rule: Provide enough choices. The choices have to be the right ones, and there must be enough of them. It is not enough to present choices if all are inadequate.

In some cases choices can be confined to two alternatives. In the national debate about the response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 199l, the country eventually focused on two fairly clear choices: direct military intervention or continued sanctions. In most cases, however, such as improving trade relations with Japan, the issues are tremendously complex and the choices manifold. Unless the choices presented to the public include at least one credible solution to a problem that people feel is urgent, the deliberative process will be aborted.

Rule: Use the public's framework, not the experts'. The choices must be defined in the public's terms rather than in the terms experts favor. Frequently experts use terms that mean something very different to the public. During the cold war, for example, there were countless discussions of arms control. By arms control, most experts meant achieving a balance of arms, usually at a high level. To the public, however, the idea of arms control meant arms reduction. In effect, the two groups were talking past each other, thinking that they were speaking to each other but not really communicating. In fact, the public's conception of arms reduction was not employed until the very last years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Rule: Allocate sufficient time. Deliberation takes time. It is not enough to present choices, do an instant poll, and expect that the process has been completed. It takes an irreducible minimum amount of time to work through difficult choices, especially if strong feelings are involved. Even when an issue does not stir emotional conflicts, it takes time to grasp and absorb all of its implications. It often takes leaders themselves months or even years to come to a consensus or compromise; it is hardly reasonable to expect the public to do it overnight.

Rule: Give the public an incentive. Because deliberation is hard work, people must be motivated to do it. One of the most effective incentives is to convince people that leaders will actually listen to them and take their thoughts seriously after they have gone to the trouble to debate and work their way through an issue.

A national election forces leaders to listen. In a presidential election, a debate on foreign policy will draw 70 to 80 million viewers. This same debate, in a nonelection context, might have only 1 or 2 million viewers. The main reason people follow debates in presidential elections more closely than debates at other times is that an election offers them an incentive; at some future date they will vote, and their vote may make a difference.

Elections on specific issues, however, are neither practical nor even desirable. People must have an incentive, but it need not be as tangible as an election. Any sign that leaders are heeding the public's concerns will serve as an incentive. Informally, through their speeches and interviews with media, leaders may invite the public to debate various choices. More formally, other mechanisms can be invented to give the public a sense that leaders are really listening. The Public Agenda Foundation, for example, has experimented with what it calls "public choice campaigns," where leaders and the media work together at the city or state level to present a range of choices on a controversial issue. The final step of the process is a mail-in "ballot" where citizens register their final opinion, with some assurance that leaders will take what they say seriously. The public is hungry for any sign that leaders are responsive to their views. A great deal has been said about public apathy, but our experience has been that as soon as the public comes to feel that leadership is genuinely interested in what it has to say, the apathy melts away as if by magic.

Rule: Make leadership debates meaningful to the public. Our research suggests that indirect and vicarious methods of expediting the public's choicework can also be used to great effect, if done well. For example, congressional debates carried by the media will sometimes directly engage the public. When they do, people feel that they are participating in the debate themselves.

Unfortunately, most congressional debates are remote from the public's concerns and do little to advance the public's choicework. Debates fail to engage the public when they are pursued in either a lawyer-like or a partisan manner–the usual style of congressional debates since most people in Congress are lawyers and partisans.

On rare occasions, however, leadership debates do speak directly to the public. Here again, the national debate in 1991 over the proper response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provides an excellent example of how the public can become vicariously involved in the deliberative process. The debate in Congress over military intervention or continuing nonmilitary sanctions was strikingly different from the usual partisan, lawyer-like format. The voters appreciated the difference and were helped by it. In this case their elected representatives were seen to be seriously deliberating and searching for an answer to a very difficult problem. The legislators agonized over the issue and were honest in expressing their own doubts and reservations. Rather than advancing interest group positions or offering lawyers' briefs, they drew on their own personal experiences and values, and the public was able to identify with them.

This form of public deliberation (which was widely covered by the media) creates a climate where the public feels it is participating in an extended process of debate and deliberation. The public nature of the debate helped people to do the choicework associated with stage five. As a result, Operation Desert Storm developed strong public support.

In the final stages of the process, people sign on, having worked through both their emotional resistances and the weighing of pros and cons. Full resolution moves through two distinct stages, as people advance from intellectual assent to a full commitment of both heart and mind. Empirical research shows that the cognitive aspects come first, while the moral and emotional aspects lag behind. People form a resolution first in their heads; it takes a while for their hearts and consciences to catch up.

One area where people have come to at least an intellectual resolution is on the question of women assuming combat missions in the military. The public has thought this issue through and is ready to accept the concept on an intellectual level. In this connection it is interesting to contrast attitudes today with attitudes a decade ago.

Once again, there is a striking contrast between attitudes toward women in the military and attitudes toward gays in the military. (The issue of gays in the military remains stuck in stage four -- resistance.) A January 1993 survey showed that people oppose lifting the ban on gays in the military by margins of 48 percent opposed to 43 percent in favor (Yankelovich Partners, Time/CNN, January 1993).

Although Americans have intellectually accepted combat roles for women in the military, it is far from clear that they have emotionally accepted its full consequences. The American public remains uncomfortable with the idea of women in the front line. It will take time for this new reality to be emotionally internalized.

One area where Americans have made a full stage seven commitment is to the maintenance of a strong defense. Given the concern that people have with the economy, one might expect that deep cuts in the defense budget would be enormously popular. But there is strong support for only moderate cuts. People have thought this issue through, and support intellectually, emotionally, and morally the concept that America must remain strong, even though the cold war has ended and domestic issues cry out for greater resources.

Here are the rules of engagement that are useful to observe in these last stages of resolution.

Rule: Synthesize conflicting values. When two conflicting values are both important to the public, resolution can be enhanced by compromises that preserve at least some elements of each of the conflicting values. Political leaders are usually comfortable with reaching compromises among themselves, but some inspired tinkering has to be carried out with the public as well.

Cutting the defense budget is a good demonstration of this principle. People want to devote all available resources to the domestic economy, but they also value a strong America. If the country were to pursue either radical cuts in the defense budget or no cuts at all, one or the other value would be flatly rejected. The idea of moderate cuts preserves elements of each conflicting value.

Rule: Make the broader context explicit. To ensure final resolution, leaders must relate policies to a broader vision. Whether it be working with the UN to achieve the world police officer role, or US Japan trade, or support for European unity, policies must be articulated in a way that stresses their place in the larger context of America's interests and ideals. The issue of a strong defense has such powerful support precisely because it has been attached to a broader vision of America's role in the world.

In foreign policy more than domestic policy, people think in terms of general principles (often encapsulated in slogans and code words). People easily forget the specific pros and cons of an argument, but they remember the general principles (e.g., "protect American jobs," "create a level playing field," "keep America strong") and relate policies to them. The key here is to find and articulate the general principle that will reinforce resolution.

Rule: Celebrate the result. Finally, leadership needs to find occasions to pause to recognize and celebrate a genuine accomplishment of democracy. Reaching public judgment on an important issue is no small task, and everyone deserves–and needs–to be congratulated on achieving it. This includes leaders, experts, and the public alike.

We have presented our framework for reaching public judgment analytically, separating out seven conceptually distinct stages. To give a sense of how it can be applied in practice, it may be helpful to focus on a single policy issue, and ask how leaders who want to invite the public to participate in the process might use this framework as a way of understanding what needs to be done.

Let us take as our example competitive relations with Japan. We can assume, as William Reinsch argues in his chapter in this volume, that the United States has yet to find a consistent and effective response to Japanese economic competition.

The first question for leaders is whether this is an issue where public judgment is required. It is neither practical nor desirable to engage the public on all foreign policy issues; indeed the public can focus only on a small number of central issues at any given time. But there is no question that U.S.-Japan relations is an area where public judgment is needed. The Japanese economic challenge affects the lives and financial well-being of every American. More to the point, the public has, in effect, a veto over any far-reaching solution it does not accept. Effective responses to Japanese economic competition demand an active level of commitment from the public–as voters, as jobholders, and perhaps as taxpayers. Finding a sound response to Japanese competition is thus a prime candidate for applying the seven-stage framework.

The first point to be observed is that there is no problem with stage one, "building awareness." Americans are aware of the issue and have been for a number of years, if for no other reason than that they are constantly reminded of it by the universal presence of Japanese consumer products.

Leaders will find, however, that there is a need for action on stage two–the public's perception of the urgency of the problem. At this writing, the Japanese economic threat (which has had a high degree of urgency in the public's mind for quite some time) has lost some of its intensity. In the 1992 presidential campaign, candidate Ross Perot shifted the public's attention to the federal budget deficit, giving the public a new economic villain and diverting attention from competitiveness with Japan. (There is, of course, a relationship between the two issues, but it is indirect because the federal deficit problem focuses more on rising health care costs and other entitlements than on competitiveness.) Also, for a variety of reasons, including their own economic difficulties, attention grabbing Japanese investments in US real estate–such as the purchase of Rockefeller Center have come to a halt.

The task for leaders is not to create an entirely new sense of urgency, but to reinvigorate one that lies just beneath the surface of public attention. This involves stressing the connections between foreign trade and American jobs, the standard of living, and the nation's future economic well-being. The public senses these links but needs to have them reinforced.

The most serious obstacles to engaging the public on this issue arise when we move to the next three stages. As we will discuss in more detail below, Americans have not been offered an adequate range of options to engage their thinking (stage three: "first response to solutions"), leaving unraised and unresolved the deep-seated resistances and value conflicts that must be confronted (stage four: "resistance"). The institutions that will ultimately allow the public to debate and discuss choices and to weigh their pros and cons (stage five: "choicework") are not yet equipped or ready to do so. In the rough and tumble of political life, these stages need to be addressed in an overlapping fashion, but it clarifies the process to think of them seriatim.

So far, the main choices of policies toward Japan offered to the public fall along the continuum of what Reinsch calls "managing the relationship," characterized by a wearying series of disputes and resolutions of specific problems (baseball bats, leather, rice, etc.). We share Reinsch's view that such an approach "requires no vision and little leadership, [and] . . . does not by its very nature address . . . larger developments."

The public is not engaged by this approach for several reasons. The first is so obvious that it is easy to overlook. No one has invited the public to participate–not the president, nor the Congress, nor the media. And on issues of this sort it requires a deliberate effort to formulate options the public can understand, and to invite people to consider them. Secondly, this approach is designed to contain the problem, not solve it. By definition it focuses only on the short term and on narrow tactics, but so much energy is devoted to it that none is left over for addressing the fundamental terms of the relationship. From the public's point of view, all that it offers is the prospect of continuing an unattractive status quo. Third, the policy of managing the relationship does not address what the public takes to be the real issue, namely that the problem does not lie so much with Japan as with our own economy. Indeed, more than two-thirds of the public believes that we are blaming the Japanese for problems of our own making. In the absence of other choices (which might have a better chance of engaging the public), people's thinking becomes blocked, further dulling the urgency of the issue.

The most appropriate step at this point would be for leaders to invite the public to move into stage three ("first response to solutions") by presenting a wider range of choices, both to underscore the urgency of the issue and also to give some concrete choices to chew upon.

Fortunately, as Reinsch implies, there are credible choices that fall outside of the narrow range of managing the relationship. At one end of the spectrum are those choices that regard Japan as a unique adversary in world economic competition, calling upon the nation to "fight fire with fire." This might include strategies such as a serious industrial policy, where, as in Japan, government supports R&D, provides special preferences for competitive industries, and carries out an aggressive managed trade policy. At the other end of the spectrum, leaders might propose a cooperative, win-win relationship where the two countries seek out areas of mutual economic benefit, engage in much wider technological cooperation and initiate joint efforts to develop new markets in Eastern Europe and other areas where the world economy can benefit. In between these two ends of the spectrum are a variety of possible options, featuring both competition and cooperation (these options are the most realistic and promising).

If the public were presented with a much wider array of proposals, the journey to public judgment would move rapidly into stage four, "resistance." We can predict that proposals such as the ones we have just mentioned will provoke strong emotional reactions and deep value conflicts. On the industrial policy choice, for example, the public clearly is sick of conflict between government and business and wants them to cooperate to improve our national competitiveness. At the same time, however, people are deeply suspicious of attempts to help business. Many are afraid that steps such as tax cuts to stimulate investment will translate into greater corporate profits and higher CEO salaries, rather than more jobs for Americans. People are equally apprehensive about greater efforts to cooperate with Japan. The general perception is that cooperation with Japan, both after World War II and in the race to commercialize new technologies, has invariably left the US poorer and Japan richer. Nonetheless, the goal is not to avoid these sources of resistance, but to surface them and let people finally wrestle with them.

With an array of new options the process of "choicework" (stage five) can begin. Leaders should present these choices (or others) to the public, and then create mechanisms for average Americans and leaders to engage in dialogue about them. The goal, at least initially, is not to sell the public on any one choice, but to advance the deliberative process. This is the area where the most new institutional thinking is required. American society is only beginning to experiment with institutions that are necessary to permit millions of people to participate in genuine dialogue about issues. One mechanism is to institute citywide or regional campaigns (such as those that have been developed by the Public Agenda Foundation and the Kettering Foundation) that integrate news media, discussion groups, town meetings, and citizen balloting. New interactive technologies may also be promising, although so far they have mostly been used in precisely the wrong way, emphasizing superficial "instant" reactions, rather than deliberation on complex problems.

To move into stages six and seven ("resolution"), decisive leadership is required. After a period of national discussion and dialogue, it would be appropriate for a president (who, it is assumed, has participated actively in the dialogue) to recommend one of the options with strong conviction. His or her choice will undoubtedly have been modified by the national dialogue (if it is a real one and not a phony form of "spin-meistering"). In advancing a recommendation, the president would spell out all of the reasons why that particular choice serves the national interest better than the alternatives. If the public has been actively engaged in the dialogue up to that point, it will be ready to hear president, press, Congress, and interest groups debate the choices and to give genuine support to their resolution.

The top-down model grows out of a conception of political leadership implicit in the theory of representative democracy where leaders take responsibility for solutions, and the electorate holds leaders accountable for results. Taking their case to the public may help leaders to inform people and win their support, but the main avenue of public accountability in the top-down model is at election time when leaders who have not done a good job can be replaced ("Throw the rascals out"). The division of tasks is clear: the leaders do the thinking, the public judges the results.

This concept has great strengths, but time has shown that it also has serious limitations. In today's world, accountability only at election time is frustrating to the electorate. For one thing, our governance system has evolved ingenious ways to insulate itself from the public, and the public, excluded from the process, fights back by blocking solutions that require it to make sacrifices. As a result, the country is increasingly trapped in a far more serious gridlock than that between the legislative and the executive branches, much discussed in the 1992 presidential election.

The adequacy of the top-down model of leadership is now being questioned in many quarters, not just in government. Nowhere has the top-down model been more deeply entrenched than in large corporations. Traditionally in the corporate world the boss makes the decisions; employees are informed of them and expected to carry them out. But some corporations have discovered that under today's conditions of brutal global competition, there are serious limits to the old style of top-down communication with employees. In virtually all major business corporations today, the management styles of the mass production era are being transformed to fit the new age of information.

The old management methods work well enough when employee obedience and conformity will do the job; they don't work well when what are needed are employee initiative and dedication–not just better compliance with the rules but genuine commitment. Companies are discovering that if they are required to reinvent the company so that it can prosper in today's world, they must shift from the top-down form of management to one where people are empowered rather than ordered around, and where a vision of the future is shared by all rather than being the exclusive concern of senior management.

The result is a form of business leadership essentially political in nature. Instead of the boss barking orders, managers have to find ways to make people think for themselves and internalize the goals of the institution. There is still a boss; indeed the CEO function becomes more important than ever, because at the end of the deliberative process it is up to the boss to articulate its results and draw inferences from it about the future direction of the company.

In the world of theory, scholars (including philosophers such as Germany's Jurgen Habermas and American social thinkers such as Jane Mansfield, Amitai Etzioni, and James Fishkin) have also been exploring the concept of deliberative democracy based on new principles of communication and leadership. A number of research institutions and foundations such as the Public Agenda, the Kettering Foundation, the Markle Foundation, and more recently The American Assembly, are also exploring these concepts.4

This way of thinking has yet to penetrate the world of foreign policy. In the cold war era, it was not needed. The foreign policy community was entrusted with carrying out a goal–contain Communist expansion–which virtually all Americans accepted. Today there is no comparable single threat and no widely shared goal. There is, in fact, a disparity in emphasis, with the leadership continuing to stress America's political-military-moral objectives, while the public has shifted its emphasis to the economic domain.

As a result, foreign policy leaders need to find new ways to work with the public. What is called for is not just new communication techniques, but a new concept of leadership, one that shifts from the traditional "we do the thinking" style to one that encourages a more deliberative public. This will not be required all the time, or for every issue. On most decisions, foreign policy leadership can continue as usual, with most of the decisions made outside of the spotlight of the public. But on a few critical issues where real public commitment is required, a new deliberative form of leadership is needed. The seven-stage theory of public opinion presented here should give leaders a practical method for seizing upon it and making it work.

*This version is published as Chapter 2 in Beyond the Beltway, New York; The American Assembly, 1994.

1. Charles M.C. Mathias, "Limits of Leadership: The United States," in Muller and Schweigler, eds, From Occupation to Cooperation: The United States and United Germany in a Changing World Order, New York; W.W. Norton, 1992, p. 77.

2. For a more detailed discussion of this concept, see Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World, Syracuse; Syracuse University Press, 1991.

3 . Quoted in Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, "Structuring the Unseen Environment," in Journal of Communication 26:2 (1976), p. 13.

4 . For a more detailed discussion of this concept, see Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World, Syracuse; Syracuse University Press, 1991.