ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the impact of public opinion on the foreign policy-making process in four liberal democracies with distinct domestic structures: the United States, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Japan. The analysis of the interaction between public opinion and elite coalition-building processes in the four countries reveals that the policy outcomes differ according to variances in domestic structures and not in the international status of the states. In their later works Peter Gourevitch and Peter Katzenstein, who had previously argued about the respective merits of institutionalist versus coalition-building concepts, both moved toward combined approaches that basically emphasized three factors: The United States, France, Germany, and Japan are characterized by distinct domestic structures. While it is the purpose of this paper to explain the patterns of public opinion, a note is offered on the developments in public opinion in the US as compared with developments in France, Germany, and Japan.
