Four Tiers for America: A Scale of Foreign Attitudes Toward the United States and U.S. Foreign Policies

By Alvin Richman

In the past several years, multicountry surveys by the Pew Research Center have provided data on a wide range of foreign attitudes toward the United States and U.S. foreign policies. While these measures individually tell us a lot about foreign attitudes toward specific U.S. policies and characteristics, a sense of how we rate in the eyes of the various members of the international community in more general respects can be gained by considering responses to several questions asked conjointly in the surveys in terms of a unidimensional four-point scale.

For example, most foreign publics in the Pew Center’s 2005 survey (thirteen of the fifteen surveyed) can be assigned to one of four major groups, or tiers, defined by their predominant responses (positive or negative) to three questions in the survey: views on the respondent country’s military involvement in Iraq, on U.S.-led counterterrorism efforts, and on Americans. We can further observe that a public’s predominant approval (majority or plurality positive) on one of the three criterion variables usually predicts its predominant approval on other variables.

Table 1 lists the countries as they fall into four “tiers” that range from consistently supportive of the United States (tier 1) to consistently and overwhelmingly negative toward American foreign policies and Americans themselves (tier 4). Other foreign publics can be divided into those who—while opposing intervention in Iraq—mainly support “the U.S.-led efforts to fight terrorism” and also view Americans positively (tier 2); and those who hold a positive image of Americans but mainly oppose U.S.-led antiterrorism efforts, as well as their countries’ military involvement in Iraq (tier 3). 

In creating this scale, no attempt is made to determine an overall score for each country, as this would require making bold assumptions about the relative value of the different variables. Rather, the objective is to show that, in today's world, foreign publics' predominant views of the United States and U.S. foreign policy can be sorted fairly economically and consistently in terms of their views of U.S. society (such as opinion of "Americans," our most widely-approved criterion) and differently supported U.S. foreign policies (in this case, counterterrorism and the war in Iraq).