Indian Elites Mirror U.S. Patterns in Foreign Policy Beliefs

📚 Why This Question Matters

Foreign policy belief systems have been studied extensively, but nearly all work focuses on Western democracies—chiefly the United States. The current security environment raises the question of whether elites in other regional powers hold foreign policy views with a similar internal structure. This article investigates that question for India, examining variance, structure, and shared elements in elite opinion.

🧭 How the Study Tests U.S.-Based Claims Using an Original Indian Elites Dataset

• Builds on existing studies of U.S. public and elite opinion to derive a set of testable claims.
• Tests those claims with an original dataset of Indian elites' foreign policy attitudes.
• Models the dimensions of Indian attitudes as functions of domestic ideology to assess the domestic drivers of foreign policy belief structures.

🔎 Key Findings

• Wittkopf's framework for organizing foreign policy belief systems fits the Indian elite case, showing comparable structural patterns.
• The framework becomes more broadly applicable after revising its emphasis on different types of internationalism and by rethinking what counts as isolationist preferences in non-Western contexts.
• Placing India in comparative perspective highlights both variance across elites and common denominators that align with patterns observed in the U.S.
• Statistical modeling links distinct dimensions of Indian foreign policy attitudes to domestic ideological positions, clarifying how internal politics shape external orientations.

⚖️ Why It Matters

These results show that analytic tools developed from U.S. opinion research can be adapted to understand elite foreign policy belief systems in major non-Western powers, with important implications for comparative politics, the study of belief-system structure beyond the Global North, and interpretations of how domestic ideology informs foreign policy preferences.