| Sumario: | Some scholars have argued that the American public is minimally engaged in foreign policy issues and rarely makes use of them when making vote choices in elections. This article takes a novel approach to revisiting this issue in the context of the 2000 presidential election: focusing on Americans' attitudes toward the goals of foreign policy (e.g., preventing other countries from polluting the environment, converting nondemocratic governments into democratic ones) rather than on the specific procedural means for achieving those goals. The authors find that citizens' evaluations of foreign policy goals appear to have had considerable impact on their candidate preferences, especially among members of a goal's “issue public” and among the segment of the public most generally attentive to public affairs, and when candidates took clear and distinct stands on the issues. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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