Benjamin Goldsmith & Yusaku Horiuchi: Global Public Opinion, US Foreign Policy and Public Diplomacy

The USC Center on Public Diplomacy was pleased to host Benjamin E. Goldsmith, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and Yusaku Horiuchi, Associate Professor in the Crawford School of Economics and Government at Australian National University on January 28, 2010, to discuss their research on U.S. foreign policy and international public opinion. Attendees of this discussion included graduate students in the USC Master of Public Diplomacy program.

In their discussion, Professors Goldsmith and Horiuchi, both also research associates with the United States Study Centre in Sydney, explained how U.S. public diplomacy may impact world opinion on U.S. foreign policy. Specifically, they explored whether U.S. public diplomacy, in the form of international visits by senior-level leaders, impacts world opinion on U.S. foreign policy, and whether public opinion in other countries affects their respective foreign policies toward the United States.

The professors emphasized credibility as a constant and conditional factor when measuring the effectiveness of public diplomacy. Their research showed that both the general image of the United States and the credibility of its leaders are critical in the United States' ability to shape international attitudes of itself and its foreign policy. They claimed that “soft power” is certainly an influence on international relations, though it is conditional on both the credibility of the state communicating the message as well as on the salience of an issue.

Click here to read Professor Goldsmith and Horiuchi’s paper, “Spinning the Globe? U.S. Public Diplomacy and Foreign Public Opinion.”

About Benjamin Goldsmith
Benjamin E. Goldsmith is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney and a Research Associate with the United States Study Centre, Sydney. His research and teaching are in the areas of international relations, comparative foreign policy, and political psychology. He is the author of articles in leading academic journals including European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Politics, and Security Studies, as well as the book Imitation in International Relations: Observational Learning, Analogies, and Foreign Policy in Russia and Ukraine. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (Michigan 2001), an M.A. in Russian Area Studies (Georgetown 1995), and has previously taught at universities in the United States and Singapore.

About Yusaku Horiuchi
Yusaku Horiuchi is an Associate Professor in the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University and a Research Associate with the United States Study Centre, Sydney. He earned an M.A. in international and development economics from Yale University in 1995 and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. His research and teaching interests include political economy, public opinion and research methods. He has published articles in American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Political Science Review, among others.