Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

The paper looks at the question of relationship between the evolution of the Russian foreign policy priorities as evidenced in the Foreign Policy Concepts (2000, 2008, 2013, and 2016) and public opinion regarding the foreign policy related issues measured between 1997 and 2017. It turns out that as general support for the policy course remains high, whereas the perception of international threats to the country’s security has witnessed considerable fluctuations. Moreover, the Russians demonstrate significant shift in perceiving the country’s international image and the amity/enmity feelings towards the others. These changes are equivalently fixed inside the Foreign Policy Concepts as they have been reformulated and updated.
Empirical studies in democracies have shown a strong causal relationship between public opinion and policy. The relationship between foreign policy and public preferences relationship in Russia have been widely discussed in the literature, however is less explored empirically. However, recent research revealed a high degree of consistency between public preferences and foreign policy in Russia. Horne estimated a remarkably high degree of consistency between preferences and policies in Russia in the period from 1992 to 2006 by using consistency analysis (Horne 2012). The empirical study of foreign policy and public preferences relationship however may require a dynamic design.
To test the congruence proposition we use time-series of data on public foreign policy attitudes and a time-series on official foreign policy preferences. However, since we are limited by the lack of time series data on official foreign policy preferences, at this stage we are able to run an exploratory data analysis to analyze data sets to summarize their main characteristics with visual methods.
The examination of the attitudes toward foreign policy revealed that on the whole, public opinion and official policy line have been moving in the same direction. Most of the policy changes can be attributed to reaction to major international crises and can be observed in the charts that were created with the polling data. Commonly, official policy formulation appears after changes in international politics have already occurred. Thus to answer the broader question of collective opinion and foreign policy congruence we had to analytically describe changes in attitudes over time and in their historical context.
Having observed that changes public opinion and official policy doctrines in Russia have largely matched each other, we have also found evidence that public opinion followed the official line and not the opposite (attitudes toward the U.S. and China). Additionally, the correlation matrix showed strong relationships between attitudes towards specific states and no correlations in respect to others.
The disproportions in the available time points of the data on public opinion and the data on the official policy line is one of the limits of this research. Though it has been possible to identify international events that occurred in-between the two foreign policy concepts, it has not been sufficient to trace changes or fluctuations of the official policy line to associate them to changes in public opinion, and vice versa.