Foreign Policy Analysis (2014) 10, 23–41

Delineating the Scope Conditions of the

Poliheuristic Theory of Foreign Policy
Decision Making: The Noncompensatory
Principle and the Domestic Salience of
Foreign Policy1
KAI OPPERMANN
Institute for Political Science and European Affairs, University of Cologne

The poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making would benefit

from being clearer in spelling out the conditions under which it holds
more or less analytic promise. The article makes the case that the con-
cept of issue salience can help the theory address its shortcomings in
this respect. In particular, the explanatory power of poliheuristic
theory’s two-stage model largely depends on the noncompensatory prin-
ciple of major domestic political loss avoidance on the first stage of the
model to simplify the choice set to be considered on the second stage.
This is more likely to happen, however, in the case of issues that are
highly salient to a government’s selectorate than in the case of issues
that are of low salience in the domestic arena. The poliheuristic theory
should thus be more powerful if it is applied to domestic high-salience
rather than low-salience decisions. These theoretical contentions are
illustrated in a case study on the decision making of the British Labour
government under Tony Blair in the fields of European security and
defense policy and the single European currency.

The poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making has established itself
as one of the leading theoretical efforts at bridging the cognitive–rationalist
divide in foreign policy analysis (FPA). In particular, the theory has proposed a
two-stage analytic model which combines a heuristics-based decision strategy that
ties in with cognitive approaches and a subsequent stage that corresponds to
rational choice explanations of decision making (Mintz and Geva 1997; Mintz
2004). What is more, the basic tenets of poliheuristic theory have been substanti-
ated by an impressive array of case studies, quantitative analyses, and experimen-
tal studies (for overviews see Redd 2003; Mintz 2005).
What must still count as a weakness of poliheuristic theory, however, is that it
has not put much attention to spelling out its scope conditions (see Walker and
Cohen 1985:291–296; for exceptions, see Below 2008; Redd 2008).2 Although
the theory has been claimed to be “generic” (Mintz 2005:95) and thus suitable
1
Author’s notes: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Interna-
tional Studies Association in Montreal. I wish to thank Klaus Brummer, Charles F. Hermann, Thomas Jäger, and
Steven B. Redd, as well as the anonymous reviewers and journal editors at FPA for their comments and suggestions.
2
Scope conditions “state the circumstances under which a pattern or relationship holds” (Ragin 2000:61). While
the idea of delineating the scope of theoretical arguments is widely seen as legitimate and essential in social sci-
ence, the concept of scope conditions has received surprisingly little systematic scrutiny (Goertz and Mahoney
2009:307).
Oppermann, Kai. (2012) Delineating the Scope Conditions of the Poliheuristic Theory of Foreign Policy Decision Making: The
Noncompensatory Principle and the Domestic Salience of Foreign Policy. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1111/j.1743-
8594.2012.00182.x
© 2012 International Studies Association
24 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

for analyzing all sorts of foreign policy (and domestic) decisions, “we ought
always to remember that theories in the social sciences are unlikely to be univer-
sal in their applicability” (King, Keohane and Verba 1994:103). At the very least,
poliheuristic theory should be expected to hold more analytic promise under
certain conditions than under others. To be explicit about these conditions, in
turn, would make the theory better conform to the standards of “good” theoriz-
ing in the social sciences (King et al. 1994:100–105), and, more specifically, it
would follow up on the call to tackle the notion of scope conditions in FPA
(Hudson 2007:186–187).
In this respect, the article contends that poliheuristic theory can benefit from
the concept of issue salience, which has so far not systematically been linked to
the poliheuristic framework. In particular, the concept provides a criterion for
assessing the extent to which the noncompensatory principle on the first stage
of the theory can be expected to reduce the decision matrix on the second stage
and thus for evaluating the analytic utility of poliheuristic theory in a particular
case.3
In order to substantiate this proposition, the article is organized as follows.
The first section will briefly discuss the basic tenets of poliheuristic theory and it
will in particular attend to the role of the noncompensatory principle. Section
two will introduce the concept of issue salience, and section three will spell out
the advantages of relating the concept to poliheuristic theory. Finally, section
four will present an illustrative case study on the European policy decision
making of the British Labour government under Tony Blair in the fields of
European defense and the single European currency.

Poliheuristic Theory and the Noncompensatory Principle

At its core, poliheuristic theory posits a two-stage model of foreign policy deci-
sion making: In the first stage, actors apply a noncompensatory strategy of deci-
sion making, which serves as a cognitive shortcut to simplify the decision
problem by eliminating unacceptable alternatives and by reducing the decision
matrix; in the second stage, actors switch to a compensatory mode of informa-
tion processing and opt for that choice among the remaining alternatives, which
promises to minimize risks and maximize benefits (Mintz 2004:6–7). In building
a theoretical bridge between the cognitive and rationalist schools of analyzing
foreign policy, the most innovative feature of poliheuristic theory clearly is its
transfer of the noncompensatory principle of decision making to FPA in the first
stage of the model (Redd 2002:340–341).
The defining characteristic of the noncompensatory principle is that decision
makers do not make trade-offs across different dimensions or attributes of a given
policy alternative: If an alternative scores low on one key dimension, a high score
on another dimension will not compensate for it. Decision makers thus rely on
dimension-based rather than alternative-based information processing on avail-
able decision options. They do not sift information on all dimensions of a given

3
A possible alternative to considering issue salience as a scope condition of poliheuristic theory would be to
conceive of the concept as an additional variable within the poliheuristic model (see Mahoney and Goertz 2004:660
–662). In fact, “it is sometimes the case that one researcher’s scope condition is another’s causal condition” (Ragin
2000:62). The relevance of this distinction has been brought to my attention by an anonymous reviewer. I have
decided to discuss issue salience as a scope condition of poliheuristic theory, however, mainly because it better fits
with the article’s narrow, domestic politics-centered view on poliheuristic theory which––as will be argued below––
enjoys stronger support in the literature. Considering issue salience as a scope condition of the theory, in particu-
lar, has the advantages of maintaining the parsimony and distinctiveness of the poliheuristic model, of clarifying
the domain in which the theory is likely to be most successful, and of identifying hard cases for poliheuristic analy-
ses (see George and Bennett 2005:119–120). The article returns to this discussion when it attends to the implica-
tions of a broader understanding of poliheuristic theory for its main argument on the role of issue salience.
 K AI O PPERMANN 25

alternative and then do the same for the next alternative, but they focus on one
dimension at a time and evaluate their options on that dimension alone before
they move on to the next dimension. If an alternative fails to meet the cutoff
value on the dimension that is reviewed first in that sequence, decision makers
will not consider any further dimension but reject the alternative outright.4
Foreign policy decision making is non-holistic, non-additive and order-sensitive.
Decision makers begin with defining the key dimension on which they first judge
their options and then eliminate any option which they consider unacceptable on
this key dimension, that is which ranks below their predetermined “satisficing”
threshold on the attribute in question (Mintz 1993:598–603; Mintz and Geva
1997:84–87). This is an expression of the priority that decision makers attach to
loss avoidance—the “avoid major loss principle” (Goertz 2004:21).
Critically, poliheuristic theory then goes on to specify that the paramount
dimension for assessing alternative courses of action in foreign policy decision
making concerns the alternatives’ domestic political ramifications. The original
formulation of the theory explicitly “sees domestic politics as ‘the essence of
decision’” (Mintz 2004:7). In fact, the term “poli” in poliheuristic theory has
been taken to refer not only to the use of multiple heuristics in foreign policy
decision making but also to the theory’s focus on domestic politics (Redd
2003:103–104; Stern 2004:108; Mintz and DeRouen 2010:79). Accordingly, empir-
ical applications of poliheuristic theory for the most part employ the impact of
foreign policy decisions on the decision makers’ domestic political fortunes as
the crucial dimension on the first stage of the model (see, for example, DeRouen
2003; Brulé 2005; James and Zhang 2005; Kinne 2005; Ye 2007).
It is important to note, however, that a broader understanding of poliheuristic
theory would relax the assumption that domestic politics is the only conceivable
noncompensatory dimension in foreign policy decision making (see Goertz
2004:15; Keller and Yang 2008:706–707; Brummer 2012). According to this view,
the initial stage of the two-stage model can also involve the noncompensatory
screening of alternatives on other dimensions, including economic, military, or
bureaucratic politics concerns. Indeed, Keller and Yang (2008) have theorized
that the identity of the noncompensatory dimension and the priority attached to
domestic politics will be shaped by the leadership style of decision makers and
by situational variables of the decision context. While the present article readily
acknowledges this broader perspective on poliheuristic theory, it still starts out
from a narrow, domestic politics-centered understanding of the model, which is
more commonly used in empirical case studies and which arguably better
reflects on the theory’s original propositions, although core statements of the
theory are certainly somewhat ambiguous in this respect (see Mintz 2004:6–8).
At the same time, it should be emphasized that the broader view of poliheuristic
theory does in no way invalidate the argument for linking the concept of issue
salience to the poliheuristic framework, but only affects the implications of this
argument for the scope and application of the theory. The subsequent discus-
sion will attend to these different implications when appropriate.
Following the lines of a narrow reading of the theory, the poliheuristic frame-
work thus stipulates that decision makers consider the domestic audience costs
of their foreign policies to be noncompensatory: they will reject any alternative
which they judge unacceptable in terms of their domestic political repercussions.
Decision makers are assumed to be loss-averse and driven not so much by a
quest for domestic political gains than by a desire to avoid domestic audience
costs (Mintz and Geva 1997:83–84). Political advisers, in turn, are seen to play a

4
Strictly speaking, the poliheuristic theory employs one particular noncompensatory decision rule, the elimina-
tion-by-aspect rule. For an overview of different noncompensatory decision models, see Mintz and DeRouen
(2010:35–37).
26 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

central role in sensitizing decision makers to such costs of their choices (Mintz
1993:600–601; 2004:9; Redd 2002:352–357).
It is precisely this specification of the noncompensatory principle, however, that
has come in for criticism. In particular, poliheuristic theory has been challenged
to elaborate on when decision makers are likely to find foreign policy alternatives
unacceptable for their domestic political implications and to spell out the condi-
tions under which the noncompensatory status of domestic audience costs will
prove more or less restrictive (Dacey and Carlson 2004:53–54; Keller and Yang
2008:688–689). In particular, the added value of poliheuristic theory in no small
part relies on the noncompensatory principle to cut down the number of decision
alternatives which analysts have to investigate on the second stage of the model to
a manageable level (see James and Zhang 2005:46–47; Ye 2007:320–321). This will
only be the case—according to the narrow understanding of the theory—if
domestic audience costs are indeed high enough to eliminate a number of
options on the first stage of the model which, in turn, cannot be taken for granted
but should depend on the issues in question. It is the main contention of the arti-
cle that the concept of issue salience can help poliheuristic theory address the crit-
icism in this respect and thereby contribute to the task of spelling out the
conditions under which applying the theory holds more or less promise.

The Concept of Issue Salience

Issue salience refers to the relative importance and significance that an actor
ascribes to a given issue on the political agenda (Soroka 2003:28–29; Wlezien
2005:556–561).5 It is a measure of the attention actors devote to an issue and of
the issue’s overall prominence in the minds of decision makers. In analyzing for-
eign policy, the concept can be employed to take account of the cognitive short-
cuts of human actors to select which information they process before deciding on
a course of action. Following the basic tenets of cognitive psychology, decision
makers can be conceived of as “cognitive misers” (Fiske and Taylor 1984:11–12)
who have to economize on their scarce capacity to process information. That cog-
nitive scarcity concerns not the availability of information per se but rather the
actor’s attentiveness to information. In order to cope with the “bottleneck of
attention” (Jones 1994:65), human actors resort to heuristics which produce
simplified subjective representations of their decision-making environment and
delimit the amount of information they need to take up. In consequence, their
attentiveness is highly selective and they use but a tiny fraction of available infor-
mation when making choices (Simon 1985:301–302; Vertzberger 1990:7–10).
A foremost cognitive short-cut of actors to reduce the informational burden of
decision making has been referred to as the “top-of-the-head” phenomenon
(Taylor and Fiske 1978). According to this heuristic, decision makers will be
primed to base their choices above all on information which they can most easily
bring to mind. For the purpose of analyzing foreign policy decision making, in
turn, the top-of-the-head phenomenon can be operationalized by the concept of
issue salience. That concept is strictly relational and reproduces the trade-offs
that human actors in the arena of foreign policy face when they focus their
attention on some issues at the expense of others. Of the countless political
issues that compete for their attention at any point in time, these actors will con-
centrate their cognitive capacity primarily on issues which are amongst their
uppermost concerns, that is, which they consider most salient. The availability
heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1982:11–14), moreover, would suggest that
previous cases of decision making on a particular issue which were highly salient

5
The introduction of the concept of issue salience in the following paragraphs draws on our account in Opper-
mann and Spencer (2011).
 K AI O PPERMANN 27

to an actor should be easily retrievable from its memory and should thus make it
more likely for the actor to attach high salience to subsequent decision contexts
on the respective issue as well.6
Along these lines, the salience of foreign affairs issues has been studied for dif-
ferent domestic actors, including political parties, members of parliament and—
in particular—public opinion. The most established methods for measuring the
domestic salience of foreign policy are public opinion polls, expert and elite
surveys, party manifesto data, and media content analyses (see Jennings and
Wlezien 2011:545–547; Oppermann and De Vries 2011:4–14).
The theoretical significance of studying issue salience in FPA, above all, is in
assessing the role of domestic actors in foreign policy decision making. In partic-
ular, the concept captures a cognitive precondition for these actors to influence
the conduct of foreign policy. The formal powers of actors in the domestic arena
to assert their preferences in foreign affairs will be of little use if the issue in
question has not sufficiently drawn their attention. By contrast, the higher the
salience of a foreign affairs issue to a domestic actor is, the more mobilized the
actor will be to make its views heard and the more consequential its preferences
and power become.
Decision makers, in consequence, will only have to reckon with domestic audi-
ence costs for going against the wishes of their constituents if the issue in ques-
tion has crossed a domestic “salience threshold” (Van Belle 1993:172).7 As long
as a foreign policy issue ranks below this threshold, decision makers can expect
their policies to remain largely unsanctioned. The higher the decision makers’
estimate of an issue’s salience to their domestic constituents is, in contrast, the
more prominent the prospect of potential audience costs will loom in the deci-
sion-making process.
Thus, the salience of foreign affairs issues in the domestic arena is a determi-
nant of the significance of domestic constraints on the making of foreign policy.
When foreign policy decision makers presume that an issue is highly salient to
their domestic constituents, domestic-level political incentives will weigh more
heavily on their decision calculus than when the domestic salience of the issue is
low. In terms of Walter Carlsnaes’ tripartite framework (Carlsnaes 1993:18–21),
the domestic salience of foreign policy issues as perceived by the foreign policy
decision makers can be construed of as a cognitive filter on the dispositional
dimension of explanation that mediates the impact of structural factors in
domestic politics on the decision makers’ intentional foreign policy behavior.
It is important to note, moreover, that there is a conceptual distinction
between the salience of foreign policy issues to the domestic constituents of gov-
ernments and its subjective representation in the minds of decision makers. On
the one hand, it is the former which affects the scope of possible domestic audi-
ence costs of foreign policy decisions to governments. On the other hand, it is
the decision makers’ perception of how salient an issue is in the domestic arena
—and thus their anticipation of possible audience costs—which shapes the role
governments attach to the likely domestic repercussions of their foreign policies
in the decision-making process.
On the level of empirical research, however, this conceptual difference should
largely be inconsequential. Although it has been argued that decision makers

6
I owe this clarification of the relationship between the availability heuristic and issue salience to an anony-
mous reviewer.
7
This threshold, however, is difficult to quantify. In fact, the domestic salience of foreign policy issues is a con-
tinuous, not a categorical phenomenon, and the distinction between high-salience and low-salience issues only
serves as an analytical heuristic. In addition, issue salience is by definition a relational concept. A specific foreign
policy issue can only be classified as a high-salience issue relative to another issue. In the empirical analysis, there-
fore, the distinction between high- and low-salience issues will always have to come from a qualitative and compara-
tive summary judgment of different measures of issue salience.
28 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

may be less informed about the domestic salience of policy issues than about the
popularity of different policy options (Knecht and Weatherford 2006:708–709),
it is nonetheless plausible to assume that they have both a political interest and
the adequate means to obtain a fairly accurate assessment of the salience which
their domestic constituents attach to different foreign policy issues. For one,
these constituents have been shown to signal their foreign policy priorities to
decision makers (Hill and Hurley 1999). For another, governments are well
aware of the role of issue salience in electoral and party politics and thus make a
deliberate effort in taking up the bottom–up signals from their constituents
(Aldrich, Gelpi, Feaver, Reifler and Sharp 2006:491–496). Of particular impor-
tance, in this context, is the dual role played by media reporting on foreign pol-
icy which is both a foremost driver and indicator of the salience of foreign
affairs in the domestic arena as well as an important source of governments to
learn about the foreign policy priorities of their constituents (Powlick 1995:432–
439).
There is thus a strong case, in the empirical analysis, for employing the sal-
ience of foreign affairs issues to the domestic constituents of governments as a
proxy for the decision makers’ perception of the salience of these issues in
the domestic arena. In particular, this offers the opportunity of getting around
the methodological problems involved in assessing subjective representations of the
domestic salience of foreign affairs on the level of decision makers and of
relying, instead, on the tried and tested methods of measuring the salience of
foreign policy on the level of domestic constituents.

Issue Salience and Poliheuristic Theory

The benefit that the concept of issue salience can bring to poliheuristic theory is
in providing the latter with a measure of the extent to which the first stage of
decision making can be expected to narrow down the choice set to be consid-
ered on the theory’s second stage. To this purpose, empirical investigations into
the noncompensatory phase of decision making would have to be comple-
mented by analyses of the respective issues’ salience to members of the decision
makers’ selectorate, that is, the actors who hold the power of selecting, deselect-
ing, and replacing political leaders (Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson and
Smith 2002:561).8 In democracies, most straightforward, this would involve mea-
suring the salience of foreign affairs to the general public and—in parliamentary
democracies—to a government’s parliamentary support coalition. Although cer-
tainly fraught with methodological problems, applications of poliheuristic theory
to autocratic regimes could equally be supported by assessing the salience of the
issues in question to whomever the decision makers depend for their political
survival (see Kinne 2005).
First, the concept of issue salience can help poliheuristic theory delineate the
conditions under which the avoidance of domestic audience costs should figure
most prominently in the calculus of foreign policy decision makers. On issues
which are highly salient to their selectorate, unpopular foreign policy decisions
will come at high domestic political costs.9 In these cases, political advisors who

8
Strictly speaking, such analyses are a methodological means to approximate the decision makers’ perception
of the salience of foreign policy issues to their selectorate.
9
It is important to note that the domestic salience of foreign policy issues must not be conflated with the pref-
erences of domestic actors on these issues. In fact, issue salience and preferences are to be kept strictly separate.
High domestic issue salience is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for domestic audience costs to arise. Such
costs rather come from policies that are both highly salient in the domestic arena and go against the preferences
of the selectorate. Still, the argument is that high domestic issue salience will precisely induce decision makers to
anticipate the preferences of domestic constituents and to screen those alternatives out in a noncompensatory fash-
ion which are incompatible with these preferences.
 K AI O PPERMANN 29

alert decision makers to these costs are likely to enjoy privileged influence on
the making of foreign policy. The attention of foreign policy decision makers
will thus be focused on the potential domestic political implications of their
choices; the threat of domestic audience costs should be at the top of their
heads; and evading these costs can be expected to be a prime concern. When
the salience of foreign policy issues to a government’s selectorate is low, in con-
trast, the attention of decision makers should move beyond the dimension of
domestic politics.
Second and closely related, the concept of issue salience speaks to the restric-
tiveness of the noncompensatory principle on the first stage of the poliheuristic
model: the higher the domestic salience of a foreign policy issue is, the more
this principle will constrain the set of choices to be considered in the second
stage of the model, other things being equal. In low-salience environments, on
the contrary, the choices available to decision makers will not tend to come
along with significant audience costs and they will be unlikely to be eliminated
in the first stage of decision making. Compared to high-salience environments,
therefore, foreign policy decision making on low-salience issues is less marked by
processes of dimension-based and noncompensatory information processing on
available options and more guided by alternative-based and compensatory assess-
ments of these options.
Thus, the concept of issue salience can be employed to assess the explanatory
power of the cognitivist component of poliheuristic theory relative to its rational-
ist component. This represents a major theoretical advance on the poliheuristic
framework. On issues of high domestic salience, the cognitive shortcut of the
noncompensatory principle contributes more to explaining foreign policy
choices than it does on issues of low domestic salience, in case of which the
explanatory burden is mainly borne by the theory’s rationalist stage. On low-
salience issues, the noncompensatory stage of decision making does little or
nothing to reduce the decision matrix on the second stage of the model: it thus
fails both to ease the cognitive burdens on foreign policy decision makers and to
simplify the task of analyzing foreign policy decisions.
Since the added value of poliheuristic theory, however, to a large extent rests
on having introduced the noncompensatory principle of decision making to FPA
and thus on the effectiveness of this principle, the concept of issue salience can
be construed as a scope condition of poliheuristic theory: the theory holds more
explanatory promise when it is applied to foreign policy issues which are highly
salient to a government’s selectorate than in relation to issues which are of low
domestic salience.
At this point, an important caveat is in order which relates back to the differ-
ence between the narrow and broad understandings of the poliheuristic model
and to the question of considering issue salience as a scope condition of it.
Indeed, if the theory is taken to allow for other dimensions than domestic politics
to be noncompensatory, decision making on low-salience issues will not automati-
cally imply the bypassing of the first stage of the model. Rather, decision makers
may apply the noncompensatory principle to other dimensions when their screen-
ing of alternatives on the domestic politics dimension was ineffective. The implica-
tion is that issue salience would then no longer be seen as a scope condition of
poliheuristic theory, but rather as a variable within the poliheuristic model that
helps specify the conditions under which decision makers rely on other screening
criteria than domestic audience costs at the noncompensatory stage of poliheuris-
tic theory. This precisely fills in a gap in poliheuristic theory which emerges from
a broad perspective on the model (Keller and Yang 2008; :689–690). The concept
of issue salience has thus no less to add to poliheuristic theory as a within-model
variable in a broad understanding of the theory than as a scope condition in a
narrow reading of the model (see Mahoney and Goertz 2004:660–662).
30 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

The overwhelming majority of empirical applications of poliheuristic theory,

however, investigate decision making on foreign policy issues, which can pre-
cisely be assumed to be highly salient in the domestic arena.10 This is true, in
particular, for the two types of decisions which have most commonly been stud-
ied from the poliheuristic perspective: crisis decision making and decisions
involving the use (or nonuse) of military force.11 According to the theory of
news values, these types of decisions are predestined to become highly salient in
domestic politics because they combine a number of news factors which spur
their visibility in domestic discourse, notably a sense of urgency, threats to basic
values, and violence (see Galtung and Ruge 1965:66–68). Indeed, case studies
on such decisions generally find that domestic political considerations have sig-
nificantly narrowed down the menu of alternatives on the second stage of the
model and thus attest to the analytic utility of poliheuristic theory (see, for
example, Mintz 1993:605–611; Redd 2005:132–137).
What is largely missing, however, is an explicit recognition that this utility may
actually depend on the issues under study being highly salient in the domestic
arena. Although there is some discussion on the scope conditions of poliheuris-
tic theory, most notably with respect to the theory’s promise in crisis situations
(James and Zhang 2005:46–47) and on issues of “high” vs. “low” politics (Below
2008), this discussion does not extend to the role of domestic issue salience.
Indeed, the notion of issue salience hardly figures at all in existing poliheuristic
analyses—the one notable exception in the literature being Brulé’s (2005) analy-
sis of US decision making on the 1980 Iran hostage rescue mission.
Given the theoretical case for the influence of domestic issue salience on the
workings of poliheuristic theory, however, a more systematic consideration of the
concept of issue salience at the noncompensatory stage of decision making is
called for. Comparing the theory’s performance in domestic high- and low-
salience environments, in particular, would contribute to specifying the condi-
tions under which it has—on a narrow reading of the theory—the greatest ana-
lytic value. The following analysis of British European policy toward the Anglo-
French declaration of St. Malo and the single European currency under the
Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is meant to be a first step in
this direction.

Issue Salience and Noncompensatory Domestic Political Loss Avoidance: The

Case of British European Policy on St. Malo and the Single European Currency
The British Labour government under Tony Blair came to office in 1997 with a
manifesto commitment to a more constructive European policy (Labour Party
1997), which was to turn Britain into a “leading partner” (Blair 2000) at the
heart of the EU. The Blair government’s European defense initiative that led to
the 1998 St. Malo declaration and its policy on the single European currency
stand out as two landmark European policy decisions and high-profile test cases

10
A notable exception to this pattern is Amy Below’s (2008) analysis of US policy toward the Montreal and
Kyoto protocols. Although the study does not explicitly relate to the concept of issue salience, it deals with issues
that by all standards were of low salience to the American public. Contrary to the theoretical expectations of this
article, Below concludes that poliheuristic theory did very well in accounting for the cases under study and that it
was “especially effective in explaining the first phase of the decision-making process” (Below 2008:1). However,
Below only arrives at this conclusion because she appears to unduly stretch the meaning of the domestic politics
dimension in poliheuristic theory to include, for example, the concerns of President Reagan with the competitive-
ness of US industry or the affinity of President George W. Bush for the energy industry (Below 2008:13–16). Such
considerations are a long way from poliheuristic theory’s indicators of noncompensatory political loss aversion,
though, which essentially list threats to a government’s survival in office (Mintz 2004:9).
11
For recent examples, see DeRouen and Sprecher (2004), Brulé (2005), James and Zhang (2005), Keller and
Yang (2009), Redd (2005), Ye (2007). See also the case studies in Mintz (2003) and the overview in Mintz (2004:4).
 K AI O PPERMANN 31

for these European aspirations during its early years in office (see Holden
2002:145–173; Smith 2005:707–714).
The declaration of St. Malo in essence enshrined an Anglo-French agreement
that the EU should be able to respond with self-contained military operations to
international crises in which NATO would not be engaged. It stemmed in large
part from the decision of the Blair government to relinquish the UK’s longstand-
ing opposition toward an autonomous European defense capacity and to take
the lead in calling for the EU to develop an independent defense dimension.
The declaration unleashed a sustained integration dynamic toward a European
Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), which was in important respects shaped by
British interests (see Howorth 2000). St. Malo thus ranks as the most significant
success of the Blair government to position itself at the center of the European
debate on a major field of European integration.
European Monetary Union, in contrast, represents the most glaring failure of
the Blair government to live up to its European policy objectives. The Labour
government came to power with a commitment “in principle” to join the single
currency, subject to the endorsement of such a step in a referendum. In October
1997, however, it decided to rule out entry to the single currency for its first
term in office and to put the holding of a referendum on the issue under the
proviso of a positive assessment of five economic tests (see Carter 2003). These
tests provided the Blair government with an economic cover to indefinitely post-
pone a decision on joining the Euro and it did not put the issue to the people
during its entire tenure.
The decisions of the Blair government to launch its European defense initia-
tive in early 1998 and not to pursue early membership to the single currency in
October 1997 have been selected for this case study, more than anything,
because they are well suited to illustrate the theoretical argument put forward in
the article. It should be noted that the purpose of the case study is not to make
an original contribution to our understanding of two already well-studied turn-
ing points in the British European policy. Rather, the two decisions have been
chosen precisely because they are rather uncontentious in the empirical analysis
and thus lend themselves as easy cases for a plausibility probe (Eckstein
1975:108–113) of the article’s theoretical contentions.
In particular, the two cases approximate a most similar cases design (see Prze-
worski and Teune 1970). While the cases are taken from different subject areas,
they strongly resemble each other on a number of important dimensions of the
decision-making context: first, the decisions were both made by the same British
Labour government around the same time and in a broadly similar domestic
and European context. Most notably, the Blair government in both cases enjoyed
an unassailable three-digit majority in parliament and was still in the midst of its
early “Eurohoneymoon” (Economist 1997) with British voters and European gov-
ernments. Second, the decisions both represented highly significant turning
points in the British policy on two of the foremost projects of European integra-
tion at the time, which were set to have far-reaching implications for the UK’s
relations to the EU. Third, decision making on the two issues was equally embed-
ded in the Blair government’s overall strategic objective of putting Britain “at
the centre of Europe and its debates” (Blair 1999:4). In fact, the single currency
and European defense were discussed within the government as alternative (or
complementary) means to the same end (Grant 1998:23–50).12 Finally, defense

12
Decision making on the two issues was thus not completely independent from each other. Indeed, it has
been argued that the Blair government partly saw St. Malo as a means to compensate for its failure to take a more
positive line on the single currency (see Holden 2002:162–166). This does not, however, impair the rationale for
selecting the two cases for the present purpose, which is not to offer a comprehensive explanation of the respective
decisions but rather to illustrate the role of domestic issue salience for a poliheuristic analysis of them.
32 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

cooperation and monetary union have traditionally been two of the most con-
tested European policy issues in British politics: a greater role of the EU in Euro-
pean defense and British membership to the single currency were anathema to
British eurosceptics and strictly opposed by the eurosceptic press as well as the
main opposition party at the time, the Conservative Party (Turner 2000:220–
260).
In contrast to these similarities, the two cases starkly differ in terms of their
domestic salience: whereas the single currency was a highly salient issue to the
British public and to Labour MPs alike, the St. Malo declaration was a low-sal-
ience issue in both arenas. In consequence, the avoidance of domestic audience
costs loomed much larger in decision making on the Euro than on St. Malo.
This is not to claim, however, that the comparative framework can control for
every difference between the two cases other than the issues’ domestic salience.13
The case study does therefore not suggest that the different outcomes of the two
decisions can be entirely put down to differences in the issues’ domestic sal-
ience. More modestly, the focus is exclusively on illustrating the theoretical case
of this article regarding the role of issue salience. Specifically, the argument is
that the noncompensatory principle of domestic loss avoidance only restricted
the Blair government’s choices on the single currency but not on European
defense and that the poliheuristic theory is thus more useful in analyzing deci-
sion making on the first case than on the second.
In order to develop this argument, the case study will proceed in three steps:
the next section will outline a simplified decision matrix of the Blair government
regarding the two issues (see Mintz and DeRouen 2010:90–91); the case study
will then present the empirical evidence on the domestic salience of the deci-
sions on the single currency and St. Malo; finally, the implications for a poliheu-
ristic analysis of the two decisions will be discussed.

The Blair Government’s Decision Matrix on St. Malo and the Single Currency
The decision matrix of the Blair government when it took the initiative on Euro-
pean defense in early 1998 and when it decided not to endorse an early referen-
dum on the single currency in October 1997 can in both cases be represented
in terms of three alternatives and three dimensions for assessing the alternatives.
Although this representation clearly discounts certain nuances of the respective
decision contexts, it is still broadly consistent with the historical record (see
Figure 1).
On the question of European defense, the first alternative available to the
Blair government was to “do nothing.” In fact, the British government faced no
particular European or domestic pressures or deadlines to come up with a new
policy in this field and could very well have upheld the status quo of the Amster-
dam Treaty (see Whitman 1999). The second alternative would have been to

13
Two potentially significant differences come to mind. These differences do not, however, impair the argu-
ment presented in the case study. First, the European defense initiative was firmly in the realm of intergovernmen-
tal cooperation whereas the single currency clearly was a supranational project. The latter thus involved more
immediate and far-reaching transfers of sovereignty to the European level than the former. Particularly in countries
like Britain, which are marked out by strong eurosceptic sentiments in the political discourse, sovereignty-sensitive
supranational initiatives on the scale of the single currency should be more likely to become politicized and highly
salient in the domestic arena than less invasive forms of intergovernmental cooperation, other things being equal.
A second difference concerns the distinction between “high” and “low” politics (see Redd 2008). In contrast to the
“high politics” character of defense policy, monetary policy could arguably––albeit controversially (see Hill 2003:4–
5)––be seen as a matter of “low politics.” However, there is no clear-cut theoretical link between the “high” and
“low” politics distinction and different levels of domestic issue salience. Depending on the specific decision context,
the evidence is that both types of issues may potentially attain a high news value, become politicized and contested
in the domestic arena, and thus turn out to be highly salient in domestic politics (Oppermann and Viehrig
2009:928–931).
 K AI O PPERMANN 33

FIG 1. The Decision Matrices of the Blair Government on St. Malo and the Single Currency

accept an incremental development of the status quo. For example, the Blair
government was widely expected to drop its opposition against integrating the
WEU into the EU (see Biscop 1999:256–257). The third alternative, finally, was
to implement a fundamental shift in British policy toward ESDP and to embark
on a high-profile initiative in this regard. It was this option, of course, which was
chosen by the Blair government and which culminated in the St. Malo declara-
tion.
On the single currency, in turn, the “do nothing” option was not part of the
decision matrix from the outset since the Blair government was legally obligated
under the Maastricht protocol on the UK’s opt-out from the single currency to
notify its partners by the end of 1997 if it wanted to take part in the third stage
of economic and monetary union at its launch on January 1, 1999 (Gowland and
Turner 2000:329–332). Rather, the first alternative available to the government
was to unambiguously commit to joining the single currency and to embrace an
early referendum. This course of action was pushed by pro-European voices in
the government and in the Labour Party who argued that the initial popularity
of the new government provided it with a unique window of opportunity to win
a referendum on the issue (Blair 2002:223–226). The second alternative which
was eventually selected by the Blair government, however, was to delay a definite
decision on the issue without moving away from supporting membership of the
single currency in principle. This was the essence of the government’s “prepare
and then decide” (Brown 1997) policy and its five economic tests. The third
alternative would have been to declare that, after reassessing the economic case
for monetary union, the government will not seek membership of the single cur-
rency. Although being at odds with Labour’s 1997 manifesto, this option was
favoured by a minority of outright opponents of monetary union among Labour
MPs (Gamble and Kelly 2000:11–20).
These alternatives, moreover, were to be rated on three dimensions: one, the
European policy dimension, on which they had to be screened for their impact
on the government’s objective of becoming a “leading partner” in the EU; two, a
policy-specific dimension which was about the substantive merits of the alterna-
tives in the issue area in question, that is, defense policy in the case of St. Malo
and economic policy in the case of monetary union; and three, the noncompen-
satory domestic politics dimension on the first stage of the poliheuristic model.
As for European defense, a high-profile initiative on the scale of the St. Malo
declaration ranked highest on the European policy dimension. Indeed, an
extensive European policy review within Whitehall spelled out the potential
benefits of such an initiative for the government’s agenda of taking a lead in
shaping European integration (Williams 2005:57–62). Neither the “incremental”
nor, in particular, the “do nothing” option promised to yield comparable bene-
fits. On the defense policy dimension, both the “incremental” and the “large
initiative” alternatives were, in principle, compatible with the Blair govern-
34 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

ment’s stated goal of strengthening the military capacities of the EU to

respond to international crises without undermining NATO and would thus
have received positive scores. Only the “do nothing” option clearly failed on
this criterion.
Regarding monetary union, the highest ranking alternative on the European
policy dimension would have been to give a strong signal of the government’s
intent to take Britain into the single currency and to go for an early referen-
dum. Prime Minister Blair, for example, was quite clear that his government’s
ambition to play a leading role in the EU was seriously hampered as long as
it did not participate in the single currency (Seldon 2005:317, 710–711).
Correspondingly, giving up the aspiration of joining the single currency
altogether would have scored lowest on the European policy dimension. The
economic case for British membership of the single currency, in turn, was
strongly contested and highly ambiguous (HM Treasury 1997; Begg 2003).
Decision makers could thus not rely on a clear-cut ranking of alternatives on
the economic policy dimension. Since the “prepare and decide” policy allowed
the government to defer a definite decision for or against the single currency
until the economic consequences of such a move became more predictable,
however, this alternative probably enjoyed a slight advantage on the economic
dimension.
When it comes to the domestic politics dimension, the common starting point
of the government’s decision making on the two issues was that the most pro-
integrationist alternatives which scored highest on the European policy dimen-
sion were also most likely to attract eurosceptic criticism. In particular, both a
move toward ESDP and British participation in the single currency were strongly
opposed by the Conservative opposition and the eurosceptic press (Riddell
1998:106–107; Bale 2006:385–388). Also, the two policies would have gone
against widespread eurosceptic sentiments in British public opinion, and
convincing the public of a stronger role of the EU in defense and of the single
currency was set to be an uphill battle (Geddes 2004:211–224). These similarities
notwithstanding the extent to which the Blair government was indeed threa-
tened by domestic audience costs when it decided on the two cases and thus the
restrictiveness of the noncompensatory principle of major domestic loss avoid-
ance, however, crucially hinged on the respective issues’ salience to its domestic
selectorate.

The Domestic Salience of St. Malo and the Single Currency in Britain
The empirical evidence is that the Blair government’s European defense ini-
tiative was a domestic low-salience issue, whereas decision making on the sin-
gle currency took place in a decidedly high-salience environment. As for
public opinion, the best indicator for this difference is the amount of press
reporting on the two issues around the time the decisions were taken (see
Figure 2).
In the case of the single currency, the four selected newspapers referred to
the issue in no less than 680 articles in October 1997 alone and thus strongly
focused public attention on the Blair government’s decision in this regard at the
end of that month. Between August and October 1997, there was a ninefold
increase in the monthly number of articles on the single currency. During the 6-
month period between the Labour Party’s election victory in May 1997 and its
October 27 policy statement on monetary union, the selected papers on average
devoted 290 articles to the issue. In stark contrast, the six months leading up to
the St. Malo declaration in December 1998 only saw a monthly average of 24
articles on the Blair government’s defense initiative in these newspapers: press
coverage of the initiative peaked in the immediate aftermath of the St. Malo
 K AI O PPERMANN 35

800

October 27, 1997:

700
1st assessment of
economic tests
Euro St. Malo
on St. Malo and the Single Currency Per Month
Number of Articles in Selected Newspapers

600

January 1, 1999:
Transition to third
500
stage of EMU

400

300

200

100 December 3-4, 1998:

Declaration of
St. Malo

0
Jan-96

Jul-96

Jan-97

Jul-97

Jan-98

Jul-98

Jan-99

Jul-99

Jan-00

Jul-00

Jan-01
FIG 2. Press Reporting on St. Malo and the Single Currency in Britain (Notes. Source: LexisNexis
database; full-text search in Guardian, Daily Mail/Sunday Mail, Mirror, Times/Sunday Times; search
terms: (a) “EMU” and “Single Currency” and (b) “European Defence,” “European Union Defence,”
“ESDP,” “Portschach,” “Anglo-French Declaration,” “Franco-British Declaration,” “St. Malo AND
Defence,” and “St. Malo AND Summit.” Author’s figure.)

summit when the issue was taken up in 70 articles in December 1998, which is
little more than one-tenth of the number of articles on the single currency in
October 1997. Thus, the coverage of European policy in the British press
exerted a much stronger priming effect in the case of the single currency than
in the case of ESDP.
Further empirical support for the difference in the public salience of decision
making on the two issues comes from public opinion research. For example, vot-
ers viewed the European policy divide between the Labour Party and the Conser-
vative Party during the Blair government’s first term in office primarily through
the lens of the two parties’ stances on the single currency rather than in terms
of policy differences on any other European issue (Evans 2002:102–103). More-
over, the extremely high public salience of European monetary union is
reflected in the issue’s considerable electoral significance in this period: prior to
the 1999 European elections, 33% of respondents to an Ipsos Mori poll named
the single currency as a very important determinant of their voting decisions14;
in the 2001 general elections, 40% of respondents put the issue on their list of
important considerations in deciding whom to vote for.15 In contrast, existing
polling data do not suggest any meaningful role of the issue of European
defense in these two elections.
Moving on to the second pillar of the Blair government’s selectorate, its major-
ity in the House of Commons, it is plausible to assume that the salience of the
two European issues under study to the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP)
broadly followed the findings on the general public. One indicator in support of
this assumption is that Labour MPs regularly introduced Early Day Motions
(EDMs) on the single currency after the Blair government came to office while

14
See Ipsos Mori, European Parliament Elections 1999: Public Attitudes, 16 February 1999, http://www.ipsos-
mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=1800. (Accessed December 22, 2011.)
15
See ICM Research, Guardian Campaign Poll, 3 May 2001, http://www.icmresearch.co.uk/pdfs/2001_may_26-
28_guardian_campaign_poll.pdf (Accessed December 22, 2011.)
36 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

they did not initiate a single one on the government’s European defense initia-
tive.16 Since EDMs serve members of the House of Commons to document their
positions on issues they consider particularly important, they offer themselves as
a good indirect measure of the salience MPs attach to different policies (House
of Commons Information Office 2011). In addition, the salience of the single
currency in the PLP was such that Labour MPs against and in favour of member-
ship took the unusual step of spelling out their views in open letters before the
Blair government took office and on the very day of its landmark decision on
the issue in October 1997 (Independent 1996:14; Guardian 1997:16). Later on
in the Blair premiership, moreover, the single currency became the raison d’être
of organized groups within the PLP on both sides of the argument (Howarth
2004:4).
In summary, the decision making of the Blair government on European
defense and on the single currency had to start out from the premise that the
first issue was only of low salience to the government’s domestic selectorate
whereas the second issue was highly salient both to the British public and to
Labour MPs. In consequence, poliheuristic theory’s noncompensatory principle
of avoiding major domestic political costs should have played out differently in
the two cases.

Implications for Poliheuristic Analyses of the Two Cases

In the low-salience case of the St. Malo declaration, an initial screening of alter-
natives on the domestic politics dimension would not have eliminated any
option from the Blair government’s choice set. Rather, the selectorate’s lack of
attention to decision making on European defense allowed the government to
discount domestic audience costs in this regard. Since the expected domestic
repercussions of government policy were weak, no decision alternative was to be
seen as unacceptable on this score. In consequence, each of the three original
options of the British government—”do nothing,” “incremental development,”
and “large initiative”—would have moved on to the second stage of compensa-
tory and alternative-based information processing.17 On this stage, the launching
of a high-profile European defense initiative would have received the highest
overall score on the European and defense policy dimensions. The noncompen-
satory dimension of major domestic political costs on the first stage of poliheu-
ristic theory, thus, did not work to simplify the decision matrix of the Blair
government, and the explanatory burden in this case falls squarely on the
theory’s second stage.
In the high-salience case of the single currency, in contrast, the potential
domestic audience costs were extremely high. Given the issue’s prominence to
the Blair government’s selectorate, decision making in this regard was sure to
attract strong domestic scrutiny and could be expected to have far-reaching
repercussions in the domestic arena. Thus, the domestic politics dimension had
to figure as a foremost concern of decision makers. In particular, the noncom-
pensatory principle of avoiding major domestic political loss would have elimi-
nated offering a clear commitment to joining the single currency and pushing
for an early referendum from the Blair government’s choice set: in view of pub-
lic scepticism toward monetary union, the uneasiness over the issue among

16
Over the entire tenure of the Blair government, Labour MPs introduced 45 EDMs on the single currency
which on average had 24 signatories. The only EDM on the Labour’s change of course in European defense was
introduced not by a Labour MP but by Conservative MP Crispin Blunt. The data come from a title and full text
search of the Early Day Motion Database of the British Parliament.
17
According to the broader understanding of poliheuristic theory, decision making could also have proceeded
with screening the alternatives on a second noncompensatory dimension.
 K AI O PPERMANN 37

Labour MPs and the sustained campaign of the eurosceptic press, and the Con-
servative opposition against membership to the single currency, this alternative
carried a considerable risk of defeat in the referendum and of doing serious
harm to the government’s domestic political prospects (see Oppermann
2008:185–193).
Looking at the process of decision making, moreover, the evidence indeed sug-
gests that Blair ruled the “early membership” option out very early on in his pre-
miership precisely because he was not prepared to take the domestic risks
involved. While Blair certainly regretted the setback for his European ambitions,
there is no evidence that the government has ever seriously contemplated weigh-
ing up the potential domestic costs of this alternative and the gains to be
expected on the European policy dimension (Holden 2002:193; Smith 2005:718
–719). In consequence, the “early membership” option was not considered any-
more during the later stages of decision making. Most notably, in terms of pro-
cess, the debate within the government on the eve of Gordon Brown’s crucial
House of Commons statement on October 27, 1997 solely revolved around
whether government policy would gravitate toward the “prepare and decide”
alternative or whether it would effectively work to rule out membership of the
single currency for the foreseeable future. Specifically, this debate very much
involved trade-offs between the costs and benefits of the two remaining alterna-
tives across the European policy and economic dimensions (Seldon 2005:
321–328). On the high-salience issue of the single currency, therefore, the non-
compensatory principle on the first stage of the poliheuristic theory has indeed
reduced the decision matrix of the Blair government on the second stage of the
model.

Conclusion
The article has made the theoretical case that the concept of issue salience can
help the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making spell out its
“bounds of applicability” (King et al. 1994:101). At least on a narrow domestic
politics-centered reading of the theory, its analytic value to a large extent
depends on the noncompensatory principle of major domestic political avoid-
ance on the first stage of the model to reduce the number of alternatives to be
considered on the second stage. This, in turn, is more likely to happen in the
case of decision making on issues that are highly salient to a government’s selec-
torate than in the case of issues that are not very salient in the domestic arena.
Poliheuristic theory should therefore hold more analytic promise if it is applied
to domestic high-salience rather than low-salience decisions. Figure 3 summa-
rizes the main argument of the article.
In principle, there are two ways of responding to the restrictions on the ana-
lytic value of poliheuristic theory regarding domestic low-salience issues. The first
would be to accept these limits and to consider clearly demarcated scope condi-
tions as a sign of strength of poliheuristic theory as a middle-range theory. The
theory would then have to be measured against lower expectations if it were
applied to low-salience issues. The alternative would be to refine the theory to
make it better suited to low-salience environments. This would probably entail
either settling for a broad view of the first stage of the theory to include other
noncompensatory dimensions when the domestic politics dimension is ineffec-
tive or focusing more on specifying the decision rules on the theory’s second
stage of decision making.
Along these lines, the concept of issue salience should be seen to complement
and strengthen the poliheuristic framework—rather than to supersede or under-
mine it. Above all, the suggested consideration of the domestic salience of for-
eign policy issues on the stage of noncompensatory decision making would do
38 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

Poliheuristic Analysis of Foreign Policy

Decision making

Low Domestic High Domestic

Issue Salience Issue Salience

Noncompensatory screening of alternatives Noncompensatory screening of alternatives

on domestic politics dimension does not on domestic politics dimension is effective
reduce decision matrix
Case Study: Single Currency
Case Study: St. Malo

Restricted analytical value of poliheuristic theory

(narrow reading of the theory)
or
Alternatives are screened on other non-compensatory
dimensions (broader reading of the theory)
Alternatives which go against the preferences of the
selectorate are eliminated on first stage of the model
Case Study on Single Currency: ‘early membership’
option

Remaining alternatives move on to more analytical

processing on second stage of the model
Case Study on Single Currency: ‘prepare and decide’
and ‘rule out membership’ options

FIG 3. Issue Salience and Poliheuristic Theory

nothing to compromise the core of poliheuristic theory, that is, the two-stage
model of foreign policy decision making. Linking issue salience to the poliheu-
ristic framework does not question the noncompensatory principle on the first
stage of the theory per se, but it sharpens our understanding of how that princi-
ple plays out in different decision-making contexts. In particular, the concept of
issue salience provides a criterion for assessing the conditions under which deci-
sion makers are likely to move from the noncompensatory to the compensatory
stage of the poliheuristic model, which has been singled out as one of the next
steps on the poliheuristic research agenda (Mintz 2004:10). In helping to delin-
eate the scope conditions of poliheuristic theory, in addition, the concept of
issue salience should also facilitate further empirical tests and applications of the
theory by distinguishing between hard and easy cases for poliheuristic analyses
and by accounting for possible anomalies, in particular, when the theory is
employed in domestic low-salience environments.
Thus, the theoretical contentions of the article call for more rigorous empiri-
cal testing beyond the illustrative case study on the Blair government’s policy
toward ESDP and the single European currency. The most promising way for-
ward in this respect would probably be to test these contentions in experimental
settings. Experimental methods have always played a prominent role in the
 K AI O PPERMANN 39

development of the poliheuristic theory (see Redd 2003) and they would be well
suited to isolate the impact of different levels of domestic issue salience. Also, it
would be useful to have case studies which explicitly investigate domestic low-sal-
ience issues as hard cases for poliheuristic theory in order to further test the
argument on the theory’s scope conditions (see George and Bennett 2005:119–
120). Given the theoretical promise of linking the concept of issue salience to
the poliheuristic analysis of foreign policy decision making, empirical research
along these lines certainly looks worth the while.

References
ALDRICH, JOHN H., CHRISTOPHER GELPI, PETER FEAVER, JASON REIFLER, AND KRISTIN T. SHARP. (2006) Foreign
Policy and the Electoral Connection. Annual Review of Political Science 9: 477–502.
BALE, TIM. (2006) Between a Soft and a Hard Place? The Conservative Party, Valence Politics and the
Need for a New ‘Eurorealism’. Parliamentary Affairs 59 (3): 385–400.
BEGG, DAVID. (2003) The Consequences of Saying No: An Independent Report into the Economic Consequences
of the UK Saying No to the Euro. London: ESP Print.
BELOW, AMY. (2008) U.S. Presidential Decisions on Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: A Foreign
Policy Analysis. Foreign Policy Analysis 4 (1): 1–20.
BISCOP, SVEN. (1999) The UK’s Change of Course: A New Chance for the ESDI. European Foreign
Affairs Review 4 (2): 253–268.
BLAIR, TONY. (JULY 27, 1999) Making the case for Britain in Europe. The Prime Minister’s Full Speech
to the London Business School. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/1999/jul/27/
emu.theeuro2. (Accessed December 22, 2011.)
BLAIR, TONY. (NOVEMBER 13, 2000) Mansion House Speech. Available at http://webarchive.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page1535. (Accessed December 22,
2011.)
BLAIR, ALASDAIR. (2002) Saving the Pound? Britain’s Road to Monetary Union. Harlow: Prentice-Hall.
BROWN, GORDON. (NOVEMBER 10, 1997) Speech at the CBI National Conference. Available at http://
archive.treasury.gov.uk/press/1997/p138_97.html. (Accessed December 22, 2011.)
BRULÉ, DAVID J. (2005) Explaining and Forecasting Leaders’ Decisions: A Poliheuristic Analysis of the
Iran Hostage Rescue Mission. International Studies Perspectives 6 (1): 99–113.
BRUMMER, KLAUS. (2012) The Reluctant Peacekeeper: Governmental Politics and Germany’s
Participation in EUFOR RD Congo. Foreign Policy Analysis DOI:10.1111/j.1743-8594.2011.00174.x.
BUENO DE MESQUITA, BRUCE, JAMES D. MORROW, RANDOLPH M. SIVERSON, AND ALASTAIR SMITH. (2002)
Political Institutions, Policy Choice and the Survival of Leaders. British Journal of Political Science
32 (4): 559–590.
CARLSNAES, WALTER. (1993) On Analysing the Dynamics of Foreign Policy Change: A Critique and
Reconceptualization. Cooperation and Conflict 28 (1): 5–30.
CARTER, NICK. (2003) Whither (Wither) the Euro? Labour and the Single Currency. Politics 23 (1): 1–
9.
DACEY, RAYMOND, AND LISA J. CARLSON. (2004) Traditional Decision Analysis and the Poliheuristic
Theory of Foreign Policy Decision Making. Journal of Conflict Resolution 48 (1): 38–55.
DEROUEN JR, KARL. (2003) The Decision Not to Use Force at Dien Bien Phu: A Poliheuristic
Perspective. In Integrating Cognitive and Rational Theories of Foreign Policy Decision Making, edited by
Alex Mintz. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DEROUEN JR, KARL, AND CHRISTOPHER SPRECHER. (2004) Initial Crisis Reaction and Poliheuristic Theory.
Journal of Conflict Resolution 48 (1): 56–68.
ECKSTEIN, HARRY. (1975) Case Study and Theory in Political Science. In Strategies of Inquiry. Handbook of
Political Science, Vol. 7, edited by Fred I. Greenstein, and Nelson W. Polsby. Reading: Addison-
Wesley.
ECONOMIST. (JUNE 12, 1997) Eurohoneymoon, pp. 27–28.
EVANS, GEOFFREY. (2002) European Integration, Party Politics and Voting in the 2001 Election. British
Elections and Parties Review 12: 95–110.
FISKE, SUSAN T., AND SHELLEY E. TAYLOR. (1984) Social Cognition. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
GALTUNG, JOHAN, AND MARI H. RUGE. (1965) The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the
Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Foreign Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research 2 (1): 64–91.
GAMBLE, ANDREW, AND GAVIN KELLY. (2000) The British Labour Party and Monetary Union. West
European Politics 23 (1): 1–25.
40 Poliheuristic Theory and Domestic Issue Salience

GEDDES, ANDREW. (2004) The European Union and British Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
GEORGE, ALEXANDER L., AND ANDREW BENNETT. (2005) Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social
Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press.
GOERTZ, GARY. (2004) Constraints, Compromises, and Decision Making. Journal of Conflict Resolution
48 (1): 14–37.
GOERTZ, GARY, AND JAMES MAHONEY. (2009) Scope in Case Study Research. In The SAGE Handbook of
Case-Based Methods, edited by David Byrne, and Charles C. Ragin. London: Sage.
GOWLAND, DAVID, AND ARTHUR TURNER. (2000) Reluctant Europeans. Britain and European Integration 1945–
1998. Harlow: Longman.
GRANT, CHARLES. (1998) Can Britain Lead in Europe?. London: Centre for European Reform.
GUARDIAN. (OCTOBER 27, 1997) Backbench Memo to Mr Brown: Let’s Do this Euro Thing ASAP, p. 16.
HILL, CHRISTOPHER. (2003) The Changing Politics of Foreign Policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
HILL, KIM Q., AND PATRICIA A. HURLEY. (1999) Dyadic Representation Reappraised. American Journal of
Political Science 43 (1): 109–137.
HM TREASURY. (1997) UK Membership of the Single Currency. An Assessment of the Five Economic Tests.
London: HM Treasury.
HOLDEN, RUSSELL. (2002) The Making of New Labour’s European Policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
HOUSE OF COMMONS INFORMATION OFFICE. (2011) Early Day Motions, Factsheet P3. July 2011. Available
at http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-information-office/p03.pdf. (Accessed
December 22, 2011.)
HOWARTH, DAVID. (2004) Explaining British Policy on the Euro. European Integration Online Papers 8
(17): 1–19.
HOWORTH, JOLYON. (2000) Britain, France and the European Defence Initiative. Survival 42 (2): 33–55.
HUDSON, VALERIE M. (2007) Foreign Policy Analysis. Classic and Contemporary Theory. Lanham:
Rowman&Littlefield.
INDEPENDENT. (MARCH 29, 1996) Labour Shows Sceptical Side, p. 14.
JAMES, PATRICK, AND ENYU ZHANG. (2005) Chinese Choices: A Poliheuristic Analysis of Foreign Policy
Crises, 1950-1996. Foreign Policy Analysis 1 (1): 31–54.
JENNINGS, WILL, AND CHRISTOPHER WLEZIEN. (2011) Distinguishing Between Most Important Problems
and Issues?. Public Opinion Quarterly 75 (3): 545–555.
JONES, BRYAN D. (1994) Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice, and Public
Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
KELLER, JONATHAN W., AND YI E. YANG. (2008) Leadership Style, Decision Context, and the Poliheuristic
Theory of Decision Making. An Experimental Analysis. Journal of Conflict Resolution 52 (5):
687–712.
KELLER, JONATHAN W., AND YI E. YANG. (2009) Empathy and Strategic Interaction in Crises: A
Poliheuristic Perspective. Foreign Policy Analysis 5 (2): 169–189.
KING, GARY, ROBERT O. KEOHANE, AND SIDNEY VERBA. (1994) Designing Social Inquiry. Scientific Inference in
Qualitative Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
KINNE, BRANDON J. (2005) Decision Making in Autocratic Regimes: A Poliheuristic Perspective.
International Studies Perspectives 6 (1): 114–128.
KNECHT, THOMAS, AND M. STEPHEN WEATHERFORD. (2006) Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Stages
of Presidential Decision Making. International Studies Quarterly 50 (3): 705–727.
LABOUR PARTY. (1997) New Labour–Because Britain Deserves Better. Labour Party Manifesto 1997.
London: The Labour Party.
MAHONEY, JAMES, AND GARY GOERTZ. (2004) The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in
Comparative Research. American Political Science Review 98 (4): 653–669.
MINTZ, ALEX. (1993) The Decision to Attack Iraq: A Noncompensatory Theory of Decision Making.
Journal of Conflict Resolution 37 (4): 595–618.
MINTZ, ALEX, ED. (2003) Integrating Cognitive and Rational Theories of Foreign Policy Decision Making. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
MINTZ, ALEX. (2004) How Do Leaders Make Decisions? A Poliheuristic Perspective. Journal of Conflict
Resolution 48 (1): 3–13.
MINTZ, ALEX. (2005) Applied Decision Analysis: Utilizing Poliheuristic Theory to Explain and Predict
Foreign Policy and National Security Decisions. International Studies Perspectives 6 (1): 94–98.
MINTZ, ALEX, AND KARL JR, DEROUEN. (2010) Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
MINTZ, ALEX, AND NEHEMIA GEVA. (1997) The Poliheuristic Theory of Foreign Policy Decisionmaking.
In Decision-Making on War and Peace. The Cognitive-Rational Debate, edited by Nehemia Geva, and
Alex Mintz. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.
 K AI O PPERMANN 41

OPPERMANN, KAI. (2008) Salience and Sanctions: A Principal-Agent Analysis of Domestic Win-sets in
Two-level Games – The Case of British European Policy under the Blair Government. Cambridge
Review of International Affairs 21 (2): 179–197.
OPPERMANN, KAI, AND CATHERINE E. DE VRIES. (2011) Analyzing Issue Salience in International Politics:
Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Approaches. In: Issue Salience in International
Politics, edited by Kai Oppermann, and Henrike Viehrig. London: Routledge.
OPPERMANN, KAI, AND ALEXANDER SPENCER. (2011) Thinking Alike? Salience and Metaphor Analyses as
Cognitive Approaches to Foreign Policy Analysis. Foreign Policy Analysis DOI: 10.1111/j.1743-8594.
2011.00167.x.
OPPERMANN, KAI, AND HENRIKE VIEHRIG. (2009) The Public Salience of Foreign and Security Policy in
Britain, Germany and France. West European Politics 32 (5): 925–942.
POWLICK, PHILIP J. (1995) The Sources of Public Opinion for American Foreign Policy Officials.
Interntaional Studies Quarterly 39 (4): 427–451.
PRZEWORSKI, ADAM, AND HENRY TEUNE. (1970) The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. New York: John
Wiley & Sons.
RAGIN, CHARLES C. (2000) Fuzzy-Set Social Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
REDD, STEVEN B. (2002) The Influence of Advisers on Foreign Policy Decision Making – An
Experimental Study. Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (3): 335–364.
REDD, STEVEN B. (2003) The Poliheuristic Theory of Foreign Policy Decision Making: Experimental
Evidence. In Integrating Cognitive and Rational Theories of Foreign Policy Decision Making, edited by
Alex Mintz. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
REDD, STEVEN B. (2005) The Influence of Advisers and Decision Strategies on Foreign Policy Choices:
President Clinton’s Decision to Use Force in Kosovo. International Studies Perspectives 6 (1): 129–
150.
REDD, STEVEN B. (2008) A Tale of Two Scenarios: High versus Low Politics and the Poliheuristic
Theory of Decision. Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the International
Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, March 26–29.
RIDDELL, PETER. (1998) EMU and the Press. In Understanding the Euro, edited by Andrew Duff. London:
Federal Trust.
SELDON, ANTHONY. (2005) Blair. London: Free Press.
SIMON, HERBERT A. (1985) Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political
Science. American Political Science Review 79 (2): 293–304.
SMITH, JULIE. (2005) A Missed Opportunity? New Labour’s European Policy 1997-2005. International
Affairs 81 (4): 703–721.
SOROKA, STUART N. (2003) Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy. The Harvard International
Journal of Press/Politics 8 (1): 27–48.
STERN, ERIC. (2004) Contextualizing and Critiquing the Poliheuristic Theory. Journal of Conflict
Resolution 48 (1): 105–126.
TAYLOR, SHELLEY E., AND SUSAN T. FISKE. (1978) Salience, Attention, and Attribution: Top-of-the-head
phenomena. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 11, edited by Leonard Berkowitz.
New York: Academic Press.
TURNER, JOHN. (2000) The Tories and Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
TVERSKY, AMOS, AND DANIEL KAHNEMAN. (1982) Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. In
Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, edited by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and
Amos Tversky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
VAN BELLE, DOUGLAS. (1993) Domestic Imperatives and Rational Models of Foreign Policy Decision
Making. In The Limits of State Autonomy. Societal Groups and Foreign Policy Formulation, edited by
David Skidmore, and Valerie M. Hudson. Boulder: Westview Press.
VERTZBERGER, YAACOV Y.I.. (1990) The World in Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition, and
Percezption in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
WALKER, HENRY A., AND BERNARD P. COHEN. (1985) Scope Statements: Imperatives for Evaluating
Theory. American Sociological Review 50 (3): 288–301.
WHITMAN, RICHARD G. (1999) Amsterdam’s Unfinished Business? The Blair Government’s Initiative and the
Future of the Western European Union. Occasional Papers 7. Paris: Institute for Security Studies.
WILLIAMS, PAUL D. (2005) British Foreign Policy under New Labour, 1997-2005. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
WLEZIEN, CHRISTOPHER. (2005) On the Salience of Political Issues: The Problem with ‘Most Important
Problem’. Electoral Studies 24 (4): 555–579.
YE, MIN. (2007) Poliheuristic Theory, Bargaining, and Crisis Decision Making. Foreign Policy Analysis
3 (4): 317–344.