Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy

Scholarship on elites and foreign policy has made important advances in identifying who elites are, what elites want, and how elites influence foreign policy. This review assesses these advances, focusing on the tension between elites’ expertise, on the one hand, and resentment of elites as selfish or unrepresentative of the people's interests, on the other. What remains missing in the literature on elites and foreign policy are the dynamics of elite politics. The same elites can behave very differently in different settings, and elites frequently do not get what they want on foreign policy despite strong preferences. To understand this variation, we need more research on three kinds of elite politics: how elites attain their positions; their incentives once they arrive in those positions; and how elites relate to each other and to mass publics. Without attending to elite politics, we miss important sources of state behavior. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Annual review of political science (Palo Alto, Calif. Print)

• Publication date

  2021-12-13

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1146/annurev-polisci-041719-103330
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

• Public opinion and international organizations

  2026cites this paper
• France and Algeria: ideas of the nation in the French political elite discourse 1954–1956

  2026cites this paper
• Everyday Reconciliation: Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions of Relational Repair in the Aftermath of Violence

  2025cites this paper
• Perceptions of China Among American Elites: Sources and Change 1979–2022

  2025cites this paper
• Navigating in the Global South: The ASEAN-Chile Development Partnership and Its Strategic Opportunities*

  2025cites this paper
• Political Elites and Attitudes Toward International Organizations in the Trump Era

  2025cites this paper
• Women against Putin: gendered security threats and female leaders

  2025influential citation
• Where Have All the Experts Gone? The Shifting Marketplace for Foreign Policy Ideas on Capitol Hill

  2025cites this paper
• Has World War III started? Geopolitical preferences, conspiratorial thinking and individual threat perceptions of a global conflict in Slovakia

  2025cites this paper
• The Transition from Quantitative to Computational Methods in Foreign Policy Analysis

  2025cites this paper
• Who Gets Targeted with Soft Power? Evidence from Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar

  2025cites this paper
• Inside the Situation Room

  2025cites this paper
• Wars of Ignorance

  2025cites this paper
• Smoke and Mirrors: Strategic Messaging and the Politics of Noncompliance

  2025cites this paper
• An explanation of social conflict? social class and moral foundations. Three meta-analysis.

  2025cites this paper
• Understanding foreign policy through political settlements: insights from Tanzania

  2025cites this paper
• State Sovereignty in the Sahadow of Great Power

  2025cites this paper
• Anchor or overreach? Explaining divergent responses to Indian maritime diplomacy in Mauritius and the Maldives

  2025cites this paper
• Navigating US-China technology competition among Middle Powers: study of Chilean response

  2025cites this paper
• Can Taiwan survive partisanship? Evidence from two survey experiments

  2025cites this paper
• How Small-State Allies Perceive Germany

  2025cites this paper
• German “pacifism” and the Zeitenwende

  2025cites this paper
• Polarization versus professionalism: military and civilian views on the domestic use of the military

  2024cites this paper
• Advisers and Aggregation in Foreign Policy Decision Making

  2024cites this paper
• Stakeholder Cues, National Origin, and Public Opinion Towards Firms: Evidence in the Context of the First Bank in an American Indian Nation

  2024cites this paper
• Keep the Peace at Home to Shape the Peace Abroad: A Study of Elite Influence on Winston Churchill and British Foreign Policy at the Yalta Conference, 1945

  2024cites this paper
• Us and Them: Foreign Threat and Domestic Polarization

  2024cites this paper
• Informational lobbying and commercial diplomacy

  2024cites this paper
• Research on the legal principles of foreign policy identity in international relations

  2024cites this paper
• Stakeholder perspectives on factors that influence global prioritization for MNH in humanitarian settings

  2024cites this paper
• Structured description, foreign policy analysis, and policy quality during the Biden decision to withdraw from Afghanistan

  2024cites this paper
• Foreign Policy Appointments

  2024cites this paper
• Does Public Opinion on Foreign Policy Affect Elite Preferences? Evidence from the 2022 US Sanctions against Russia

  2024cites this paper
• The “Commitment Trap” Revisited: Experimental Evidence on Ambiguous Nuclear Threats

  2023influential citation
• Crypto-Atlanticism: The untold preferences of policy elites in neutral and non-aligned states

  2023cites this paper
• IO survival politics: international organisations amid the crisis of multilateralism

  2023cites this paper
• Career connections: transnational expert networks and multilateral cybercrime negotiations

  2023cites this paper
• Using Process Tracing to Investigate Elite Experience Accrual: Explaining Margaret Thatcher’s Support for US Air Strikes Against Libya

  2023cites this paper
• Partisanship and congressional intelligence oversight: the case of the Russia inquiries, 2017-2020

  2023cites this paper
• Just Patronage? Familiarity and the Diplomatic Value of Non-Career Ambassadors

  2023cites this paper
• Brazil’s Emergence in the United States’ ‘Backyard’: Domestic Leadership and Systemic Status

  2023cites this paper
• Issue-Image Trade-Offs and the Politics of Foreign Policy: How Leaders Use Foreign Policy Positions to Shape Their Personal Images

  2023cites this paper
• Co-Optation at the Creation: Leaders, Elite Consensus, and Postwar International Order

  2022cites this paper
• When does liberal peace fail? Trade and nationalism

  2022cites this paper
• Experiments and Surveys on Political Elites

  2022cites this paper
• Businessmen Support Amidst the Turmoil: The Second Year of Bolsonaro’s Presidency in Brazil

  2021cites this paper
• Scholarship @ Claremont Scholarship @ Claremont

  year unknowncites this paper