UK Security Policy: National Institutions and the Gap between Expert and Public Opinion

This joint RUSI-University of Exeter event on UK security policy will take place on Tuesday, 19 September 2017 at the RUSI Library.

We are delighted to confirm the following speakers:

Event presentations will respond to and discuss findings from the Economic and Social Research Council Project (ES/L010879/1) “Constraints on the Design of Security Policy: Insights from Audience Costs Theory and Security and Defence Elites in the United Kingdom”.

Three panels will focus on the following key areas:

 (1) Formal and Informal Interactions in the National Security Council and the fixed-term Strategic Defence and Security Review

What are the roles of central government institutions in the design and implementation of effective national security policy? Using the case of post-2010 reform to Britain’s central government security policy machinery, we find that formal institutions can help the informal strategy-making institutions on their periphery to function better. Through interviews with 23 high-ranking officials, we find that Britain’s National Security Council and quinquennial Strategic Defence and Security Reviews – both instituted in 2010 with the intention of improving UK security policymaking – remain limited as formal makers of national strategy. But the networks of individuals and ideas they support, by absolving some decision-makers of audience costs while immersing others in creative yet coherent strategy-development communities, have improved the overall quality of UK security policymaking compared to its pre-2010 condition.

Discussants include Mr. Nicholas Beadle CMG (RUSI) and Professor Michael Clarke (University of Exeter, King’s College London and University of Aberystwyth).

(2) Foreign Policy Attitudes and Security Policy Preferences: Comparing UK Elites and the General Public

In recent years, the way in which the UK designs its security policies has changed significantly. An in-depth survey of foreign policy attitudes and security policy preferences was designed and fielded among national elites and area experts. The survey is a joint Exeter-RUSI collaboration and constitutes the first survey of this kind to be fielded on security-policy experts in the UK, with the aim of identifying whether the redesign of the security policy apparatus can be considered fit for purpose in a world where security threats may unexpectedly emerge from state actors such as the Russian government, or non-state actors such as terrorist organizations. In addition to collecting data on security elites’ views and preferences, we also asked them what they anticipated the mass public preferences on these topics were. We followed the same two-step process when surveying members of the public in order to assess if elites or mass audiences have a better grasp of other groups views. Topics covered include views on post-Brexit EU defence integration.

Discussants will include Thomas Raines (Chatham House).

(3) How wide is that Pond Anyway: Comparing Foreign Policy Attitudes and Security Policy Preferences of UK and US elites

After an initial exploratory phase consisting of in-depth interviews with British security elites, a survey of foreign and security policy attitudes was designed and fielded with members of the Defence Academy and RUSI. Respondents were asked items routinely employed in similar elite surveys in the United States, to enable a cross-national comparison of security differences and communalities. Topics covered include: vital national interests we will face in the next decade, principal foreign policy goals, as well as views on allied defence (particularly NATO). We also compare shared (and diverging) views towards Russian expansionism and employ sociological entailment network analyses to identify clusters of security elites who justify supporting military action against Russia based on national security justifications versus a moral imperative to intervene. The expected effects of Trump’s presidency on American foreign policy are also explored.

Discussants include Professor Jason Reifler (University of Exeter) and Dina Smeltz (Chicago Council on Global Affairs).

Schedule