And I want to introduce Jamie Kwong, who's the Marshall scholar and war studies at King's College, London, and amongst other things,
she'll be talking about information and misinformation, which is a topic that also in another context has been examining as well,
because it can be quite harrowing as we start to think through the power of not just lack of information,
but also the power of misinformation and how that shapes not just the dialogue, but actually has potentially very dangerous consequences.
So welcome, Jamie, and thank you. Thank you so much.
And it's actually great to end on Jeremy's point, just touching on some of these public attitudes, because my talk will focus on that.
But before I begin, I just wanted to thank the organisers for having me, as well as all of my fellow speakers for their fascinating insights.
I hope I can add some additional insights to that. So just a little bit about me.
I'm a research assistant and PhD candidate at King's College, London, where my PhD focuses on US public opinion of North Korean nuclear proliferation.
So I hope to zoom out a bit and talk about public opinion of nuclear weapons issues more broadly here.
So I'm going to spend a lot of time covering three key areas.
So first, thinking about interpreting public opinion polls, what can polls tell us?
And importantly, what can't they tell us? Second, looking at the state of play, so what do we know about public opinion of nuclear issues?
And then to Isabel's point, I thirdly want to talk about kind of contextualising these opinions.
So talking about these non public actors, as I'll be calling them.
So the role of NGOs, advocacy organisations, media policymakers, the like in reporting and shaping public opinion.
So my bottom line up front here is that the public holds complex views about nuclear weapons issues.
And so therefore we as experts and scholars need to be very thoughtful about how we analyse public
opinion polls and should be wary about how various actors influence and report public opinion.
So for us to begin with interpreting public opinion polls, what can and can't they tell us?
So there's three things I want to consider here. So first, thinking about question types.
So ultimately there's different attitudes that we can measure through public opinion polling.
So first we have knowledge questions.
So this again gets back to Jeremy's presentation, asking the public objective questions with a right and a wrong answer.
So something that comes up in my research, for example, is what country does Kim Jong Il lead?
And so these questions, unfortunately, are few and far between.
But they're really helpful when they do pop up to gauge the public's actual understanding of the issues they're asked to express opinions about.
And second, we have awareness questions.
So this kind of helps gauge public salience of the topics, how much the public is paying attention to a particular issue,
which again, hopefully builds on Jeremy's point of where are they getting this information?
How much does it relate to media coverage? And third, you can also think about support for different policies.
And so this often in the literature comes up as support for the use of force.
But there's other formulations. So, for example, do you think your country should join the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons or the TPN,
as Nick Ritchie addressed in his his talk earlier?
And so I think those questions, these kind of attitudes questions are the most commonly thought of metrics when you talk about public opinion polling.
Right. It's called public opinion polling for a reason, but it's important to remember that there are different metrics that we can gauge.
And so it's critical not to overstate what each specific question is measuring.
So second type of consideration to think about when looking at public opinion polls is longitudinal data.
So I'm just going to quickly pull up a slide here. Oops.
There we are. Hoping that's popping up now,
but it's so it's really helpful for analysis purposes when polling companies ask the same question
repeatedly because it allows for a fairly robust assessment of changes in public opinion over time.
And having this trend data helps us pinpoint fluctuations and allow us to explore why there might be particular spikes or dips,
in particular attitude metrics.
So, for example, again, this is one that comes up in my research, but you'll see that this looks at public threat perception of North Korea over time.
And that box and red highlights a particular spike when the public found North Korea to be a very serious threat.
And if you're aware of the North Korean nuclear timeline, that twenty seven year in July,
North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile and in September, it tested a North Korean nuclear weapon.
And so you do see kind of a correlation there. So that's something that we can help analyse to see these trends over time.
And ultimately, this longitudinal data allows us to draw more reliable conclusions about public
attitudes and give this more full and comprehensive picture of public opinion.
And so it's a much stronger and better practise than relying on one discrete public
opinion poll and asserting that that poll accurately reflects public attitudes.
Which leads me to my final point and perhaps most importantly, question wording matters.
So actually, considering what the words in the question say.
So, for example, here we're just seeing do you think North Korea presents a serious or non serious threat to the US?
That's distinct from saying, do you think North Korea's nuclear weapons programme poses a serious threat to US interests?
And so you generally find that the one when the word nuclear is mentioned, threat perception increases, which makes intuitive sense.
But the point being phrasing can prime respondents to answer specific and often biased ways.
And second, to think about here as well are what assumptions are we making when we're asking these questions?
So it's critical, again, to Jeremy's point that we don't assume that the public has a fundamental knowledge or
understanding of the context and even just the factual notions around nuclear weapons issues.
And so, for example, asking the public if they support the Tea Party and W is less helpful than providing
a description of the TPN W and then asking whether or not the public support it.
However, it's critical to provide objective context to truly inform the public and gauge their nonbiased responses to the information presented,
which again gets back to the phrasing and potential priming effects. So the large takeaway here is that when we're analysing public opinion polls,
we should be very wary of any polls that don't provide objective context or don't provide any context at all.
And it's especially problematic if we rely on single data points or polls that are continually making these
assumptions without either measuring public knowledge or providing this additional contextual information.
OK, so to get off my scholarly, how do we think about these polls?
What do we actually know about public opinion of nuclear issues?
So importantly, it's first important to note that public,
the public rarely considers nuclear issues as the most important problem facing their country.
They're much more likely to give attention to domestic issues.
So you might interpret this as nuclear weapons are unlikely to be a central voting issue.
But nevertheless, we care about public opinion and understanding of nuclear issues for many of the reasons discussed.
I'm happy to go into them further in the Q&A,
but what exactly do we know about these opinions so we can divide public opinion of these issues into a few big buckets?
And so these aren't all encompassing, but it kind of gives a sense of the key areas where contemporary polling tends to focus.
And no surprise, I'll look at three of them. So first, nuclear use.
Second, nuclear capabilities and third, disarmament slash the TPN w so to the first,
a lot of the experimental survey work that occurs in the literature.
And by this I mean researchers conducting their own surveys to test for very clear causal relationships between public attitudes and specific factors.
A lot of these surveys are looking at the public attitudes around the use of nuclear weapons.
And so key scholars here, Scott Sagan and Ben Valentino, who have conducted a series of studies showing that despite the tradition of nuclear non use,
the US public in particular is willing to support the use of nuclear weapons to preserve American lives and win a war quickly.
And this attitude is tempered less by the nuclear taboo.
Another key point in the nuclear literature and more so by fear of retribution and setting a negative precedent.
Additional work by some scholars named Cocain Wells have gone further to show that this attitude.
Is also significantly tempered when given vivid information about the physical
effects of a nuclear attack and the possible nuclear risks and retaliation,
so again, this point of educating the public helps them make more informed decisions and attitudes.
Second, thinking about public attitudes around nuclear capabilities.
So this is probably the biggest bucket and can take many forms, but often it relates to particularly policy, relevant topics.
So, for example, US public attitudes on the replacement ICBM programme, which is called the ground based strategic deterrent or for short.
So this is an increasingly contested topic amongst the expert community and within
Congress as to whether or not the United States should continue to pursue this programme,
given its costs, potential incomplete consideration of other alternatives, like I won't get into that there.
But the Federation of American Scientists has told the public what they think about this,
and they found that most support alternatives to leave and go so far as to support phasing out ICBMs altogether.
So there's not much polling yet for comparison to this poll,
but it suggests that this can be an area for future research and also to think about capabilities from a non US perspective,
we can look at South Korean public attitudes on a national nuclear arsenal.
And so we tend to see relatively high levels of support amongst the South Korean public for developing its own nuclear arsenal.
But again, once you provide additional context,
that support is significantly tempered when questions include discussion of the economic and security implications
of doing so and finally thinking about public attitudes around disarmament in general and the TPN in particular,
I want to kind of address this in a few different ways, because I know it's a topic that has come up already this morning.
So one way to think about this is through the polling work of advocacy organisations.
So, for example, the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, I can does some original polling on this topic.
And so their polls show that majorities in NATO states support joining the TPN W
and most support even doing so unilaterally and in spite of US pressure not to,
then we can think about experimental survey work on the TPN.
So a lot of this work is done by Rebecca Gibbons' and Stephen Hertzog.
And they show that in the US elite cues, so arguments by people in the government against the treaty and social cues saying,
you know, my peer also is against the treaty because the US public support for the TPN to decrease.
However, interestingly, in Japan,
their work shows that public support for the TPN W remains fairly high and constant when introduced to arguments by the government against the treaty,
as I'm pretty sure Professor Northmoor will touch on in his remarks.
And a final way to think about public attitudes on disarmament is analysis of existing public opinion polling data.
So one of my colleagues at King's College London, Amelia Morgan,
has done this in a recent piece where she shows that the public supports public support
for the abstract concept of disarmament is much higher than support for the TPN itself.
So kind of thinking about these different ways of how we can interpret public opinion of disarmament reminds us that to the points outlined above,
it's important not to take polls at their face value.
And in particular, you need to consider these non public actors involved in shaping, collecting information about and reporting public opinion.
But just before I conclude and discuss those actors quickly, I want to underscore with these findings of these different attitudes buckets,
as I've called them collectively tell us, and that's that public opinion of nuclear weapons issues is complex.
So it's something I discuss often with my colleague Amelia is something that her piece really excellently demonstrates.
But it's unfair for us as nuclear weapons experts to expect the public to have more clear and concise views of nuclear issues than we do.
Right. We've spent all morning having contesting perspectives of this.
So why should we expect the public to have figured it out any better than we have?
So finally, just to conclude, I want to touch on these non-public actors,
kind of a cheeky little term I came up with, but those that can kind of influence and shape public opinion.
So I'm thinking any non public actors, so NGOs, advocacy organisations, the media, subject matter experts, policymakers.
Again, let me touch on three considerations here. So a lot of academic work focuses on what's called elite use.
So because foreign policy issues aren't proximate to the public, the public instead relies on cues from elites about how to think about these issues.
So there's exceptions for when this is effective and not effective.
But generally speaking, we tend to see that elite curlicues influence public opinion again.
Makes intuitive sense, right?
If you don't know much about a particular foreign policy issue, you're likely to consider in similar terms to an elite that you respect.
So whether that's a New York Times columnist who you turn to or an elected official, second thinking about the media and a potential feedback loop.
So we actually see that a lot of the regular polling that's done, especially in the US, is by media organisations.
So you'll see on the Roper Centre, for instance, which houses a huge collection of public opinion polls, you'll see ABC and The Washington Post.
You'll see CBS and The New York Times collecting these polls.
So in doing so, there's this inherent feedback loop where questions reflect particularly salient news topics.
And it's the same case for your classic polling organisations like Gallup and Pew.
So we're seeing that these polling organisations are interested in knowing what the public thinks about the hot topics of the day.
And that's partly, I think, why we don't see consistent polling on nuclear weapons issues.
Right. It's as episodic as is the news coverage of these issues, which again,
is problematic as analysts when we want to track these attitudes and better understand
what the public thinks of nuclear issues in non salient times or in normal circumstances.
And then finally, just to conclude,
I think we need to think about these non-public actors interests and how that might be influencing not only public opinion,
but reporting of public opinion in particular. And so a lot of these non public actors are purposely advancing particular perspectives.
So, for example, advocacy organisations, it's the whole point right there advocating a particular position.
And so in promoting interests, this is typically where we see.
The most priming from question phrasing, so a question is skewed towards a particular position and so that, for example,
could mean that a question doesn't provide an objective account of a debate on
a particular issue and instead leads respondents in a particular direction.
So that way, the organisation conducting the poll kind of gets the the results that they want.
And so this often results in biased reporting and it becomes a particular issue when these groups are particularly skilled at public messaging.
So that reporting often gets misrepresented as a comprehensive review of public opinion on a particular issue.
But I'd argue that injecting non-public actor's interests into public polling is a disservice not only to the public, but also to policymakers.
We should be striving to objectively consider what the public thinks about nuclear issues and try to better
understand the complexity of those issues to ensure that our nuclear policies are as representative as possible.
And so I'll just go ahead and conclude there and turn it back over to Isabella. Thanks so much again.
Jamie, thank you so much for that and also how you helped us think through the nature of polling and its limitations and then,
of course, the content or what is revealed through polling and then the cautions about even if we have those poll results,
we have to also be very careful and do our due diligence in terms of who's doing the
polling and what other kinds of agendas might be influencing what is then often
perceived as a empirical result or a more powerful result than is actually the case
if you scratch below the surface and went through the methodology that you did. So thank you so much for that.