A new YouGov survey shows that British people have a residual positive attitude towards Americans and the USA in general, but that US foreign policy has left a deep well of anti-Americanism, with people deeply hostile towards present US policy.
Asked about their general feelings towards the US, 54% of British people say they have positive feelings about the USA, 39% negative. Asked about individual Americans people are overwhelmingly positive - 70% say they like Americans in general, with only 21% saying they dislike them. It is only when George Bush and the present US polity are brought into the equation that British attitudes become hostile.
Only 16% of British people think President Bush is satisfactory or better as President, 34% think he is a poor President, and 43% think he is “terrible”. 65% of people think that “the policies and actions of the present American government” make the world a worse place to live in, and 74% think US policy has made the Middle East more unstable. 72% think President Bush’s claim that he would like to make a more democratic world is merely a smokescreen for US interests, and 76% think that even if he did want to make a more democratic world, he is going about it in the wrong way. 58% think that the US can be fairly described as an “imperial power - one that wants to dominate the world by one means or another”.
Asked about the effect of American culture on the world, there is also a negative reaction - although opinion is less one sided than towards US foreign policy: 36% think US culture makes the world a better place, 52% a worse place. Very few people (7%) say they often buy things because they are American, but opinions of many examples of US culture are positive - attitudes towards individual American film stars like Brad Pitt & Tom Hanks, to Steven Spielberg, to Microsoft, the Disney Corporation, US television shows, Coca-Cola and so on were all positive (of course, these could just mean that people like Tom Hanks’ films - but in the context of the questions these things were presented as examples of US culture). Those examples of American culture that were viewed negatively were all for quite obvious reasons - McDonalds, Michael Jackson, the Hilton sisters, SUVs.
Finally YouGov gave respondents a list of paired adjectives and asked people which best described the USA - it didn’t paint a particularly pleasant picture. The US was seen as unequal (72%), divided by class(63%) and race(71%) , crime-ridden (90%), vulgar(65%), uncultured (56%), ignorant of (73%) and uncaring of (83%) what the wider world thought, preoccupied with money (84%) and dominated by big business (90%). 61% thought the US was religious. The only areas where the more unambigiously “positive” of the paired verbs was chosen were forward looking and democratic (though by a tiny margin - 40% thought the US was democratic, 37% thought it undemocratic).
Overall, people who had personally visited the USA tended to be slightly more positive towards it (although not towards to George Bush). It would be wrong to ascribe any causality to this though - people who like the USA in the first place might very well be more likely to go there. There were some meaningful political differences though. Conservative voters are the most well disposed towards the USA, followed by Labour voters, with Liberal Democrat voters significantly more anti-American. 77% of Tory voters have a positive view of America, compared to 58% of Labour voters and only 42% of Lib Dem voters. 30% of Tory voters think the present US government has made the world a better place, only 11% of Lib Dems agree. 21% of Labour and Conservative voters think President Bush is a great or reasonably satisfactory President, only 9% of Lib Dem voters agree.
14 Responses
Anthony,
Tried the link on latest polls and got something that didn’t mention America. Any noticable differences between parts of the UK.
Peter.
July 4th, 2006 at 1:01 pmThanks Peter - I’ve had it fixed. There aren’t any published breaks by region I’m afraid.
July 4th, 2006 at 1:53 pmWho said polls don’t tell the truth? Now, can we get Americans to understand the way world attitudes are changing given that we are more inclined to vieew the USA psoitively than most of the rest of the western world…
July 4th, 2006 at 4:12 pmI woud love to have taken part in this survey all I get is consumer surveys, why?
July 4th, 2006 at 5:29 pmDunno, Jack - who does say polls don’t tell the truth? Polls are just statistics; it is people who spin those statistics depending on their own prejudices - just as you yourself have in your comment.
“World attitudes are changing” are they? Are you the arbiter of world views? You speak for us all do you? Tell us, great oracle, how our views are changing…
The interesting question in my view from this poll is actually the questionnable validity of even attempting to measure something like this…they may as well have conducted a survey into the popularity of the colour mauve.
McDonalds is unpopular is it? Well, the fact they’ve branches in every major (and not so major) town centre undermines that rather, doesn’t it? SUVs evil? Well maybe, but curious how there are so many on British streets then, isn’t it? And only 61% believes the US is religious - despite the fact that the US (both on any empirical measure, and indeed how Americans view themselves) is one of the most religious countries on earth?
All these polls show is that - shock horror - an awful lot of respondents to polls are either ignorant of the subject they’re pontificating about; and/or that there are far too many sheep around - people who’ll answer based on their understanding of what it’s trendy to say about any given subject just so they can believe that they’re part of the herd.
Oh, and one other thing they show: what an arrogant, patronising, condescending and ignorant light they show the respondents in.
July 4th, 2006 at 5:38 pmI like the USA, but sadly not the twit running the place, to be fair the USA could not stand by and allow all the Oil in Iraq to just go to waste, anyone who thinks the USA was interested in peoples rights in Iraq are wrong. I agree it was an unfinished item for the USA, but Robert Mugabe should be an unfinhed article for all parts of the world. I am afraid Oil was a major factor, as such we have a really serious problem.
July 4th, 2006 at 7:21 pmAdam - views towards America certainly are changing. The Pew global attitudes survey shows postive attitudes towards the US falling over the last 6 years, from 83% in 2000 to 56% now (comparable to the 54% in this poll).
And unlike the colour mauve, it is important. It doesn’t matter how ill-founded or ignorant peoples’ opinions are - the point of polling isn’t to divine the correct answer, to tell what America is actually like, it is to measure public opinion however ignorant or mistaken it may be because, in a democracy, it matters - politicians still have to operate within the framework of that public opinion.
Were the US to ask for British support in military action against Iran, for example, the British public’s attitude towards the US would become a factor that the British government would inevitably bear in mind to some greater or lesser extent.
John - the majority of all large pollsters turnover is based on consumer and commercial polling. There are well over 100,000 on the YouGov panel, and most polls are of 2,000 people. There is a pretty low change of any one individual being randomly selected for any one poll.
July 4th, 2006 at 10:19 pmI think the real reason people don’t like America is simple - they resent its success, and the enormous power that stems from that success.
This kind of poll seems to suggest that the USA should pay enormous attention to the views of other countries like, for example, France and Germany when exercising its power. But why should America listen to countries which seem to be backward looking, defeatist, morally relativist, etc?
July 5th, 2006 at 10:11 amI wonder how many people here resents Americas success, I for one dont, The course they are taking is basically flawed, PAX AMERICA is not the route that brings peace long-term, it does not instill confidence in a powerful country which has shown a total lack of common sense for years. The Bush Years has been a total disaster. I have been to the US many times (got family there), there is a definate change. Paranoia and fear has taken over the thinking of the “intelligensia”.
America just does not listen to logical reasoning anymore, When you loose your head, that is a recipe of disaster down the line, America has to change course. Neo-conservatism is not the answer and this PNAC that has been implemented in part will cause wars for no other reason than wealth.
Going to war because another country is richer than you sounds obscene, that is on the cards years from now. With great power brings greater responsibility, if not, massive conflicts all over the world for years.
America has lost my faith.
Dialogue not conflict is needed now, is that being defeatist!!!!…
If so, God help us.
July 6th, 2006 at 1:27 amPerhaps one of the most interesting - even illustrative - things about this survey was the reported response of the US Embassy, which was not only dismissive but agressively so.
I mean - if this is Britain’s opinion you dread to think what the opinion of people in somewhere like Iraq must be.
What will it take for the US to realise that the only way the are gong to “win” in places like Iraq - that is change the shift of opinion in their favour - is by making ordinary people trust, or even just like, them. So when an opinion poll from the US’s supposed No. 1 ally is as bad as this its time for a little bit of humility, not all guns blazing “its your fault you hate us” (which seems to be more of less what they seem to have said) or adopting the Millwall Position (”No-one likes us, we don’t care”).
For heavens sake this is the country that INVENTED PR! Surely they must see that an approval rating in the teens is not going to result in many sales of “The American Way”. Quite the contrary in fact…
July 7th, 2006 at 11:15 amAnthony - my point was not that polls don’t matter: it was that if a poll asks questions about a subject there is little public understanding of then the results aren’t going to weigh particularly heavily.
There was an episode of the West Wing once which involved the White House staffers pressurising US representatives to support a Senate motion on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on the basis that the public support for the Treaty was overwhelming. President Bartlett made the point that the population could not possibly have the grasp of the issue to sincerely convey an educated view on the issue - even though he was on the side of the overwhelming majority in supporting the Treaty.
Which is why I made my point about ignorance among the electorate - polls like this render themselves “dismissable” because they demonstrate how woefully uninformed respondents are: they are almost counter-productive.
Does that mean those on the “losing” side of the polls have to do more work? Yes. But it also exposes, in my view, the limitations of polls - excellent (provided consistency is enforced) for measuring trends, moods or broad-brush questions; rather meaningless in other respects. Unfortunately, meaningless polls like this one tend to get as much - if not more - coverage than the useful ones.
July 10th, 2006 at 10:38 pmAdam, you’re still looking at polls to support ‘Facts’ which, don’t get me wrong, are important, but what these polls are showing is what the majority thinks.
It doesn’t matter if these people know the facts or not, it is still the way that they view us, and the majority of them, as you would put it, are misinformed. This is still the way we, Americans, are viewed in the rest of the world (if not worse, being as this was done in the UK).
Polls throughout the public may not show your opinion, no matter what you know to be true, they only show what the rest of the public perceives to be true.
Even worse is that if it’s not true, which in most of these international polls I find to be the case, it tends to persuade others to think in the favor of the majority of those polled. Which means that basically one group thinks something in a larger number than the other, and the other group sees what the other is thinking - starts to ponder themselves, this time with a view more aimed towards the other side, and then a percentage leans more towards the opposition (growing more and more as the void increases).
I, believe it or not, really do agree with what you’re saying. I think a lot of these people ARE misinformed. Just as I think we as Americans are ‘misinformed’ about the rest of the world. They see this as ignorance, but fail to see the ignorance in their own assumptions. So what I agree with is that, yes, these polls SHOULD be wrong. These people have no idea what the American people are like, and are only speaking from what they perceive according to what they are told through their own media. In that light, yes, they are misinformed and do not know what is truly going on, or what America is really like, it is only opinion.
However, it is still the way that the rest of the world sees us, true or not, and we need to change that.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:51 amwhat also sucks is that this blog is from over a year ago, and I’m drunk so I did not notice this at first. Oh well, the point is still there for future surfers to see. =)
July 25th, 2007 at 3:53 amHa! Its another year later, happy July 4th!
July 5th, 2008 at 4:55 am