Following up on the general theme of the US’s image in the world, The Pew Global Attitudes Project has a new report (“summary”:http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=264; “full report”:http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/264.pdf) out on this topic. The bottom line: those who thought that the replacement of President Bush with President Obama would improve the image of the US internationally were definitely on to something. Some interesting numbers in the report:
bq. The Obama effect appears to have been most dramatic in Western Europe, where the proportion of the population thinking that the US will “do the right thing in world affairs” increased in Spain, Britain, France and Germany by 64%, 70%, 78%, and 79%, respectfully. To give a little more sense of what these numbers mean, in Germany in 2008, only 14% of the population thought the US would do the right thing in world affairs; now 93% of the population feels that way.
bq. Despite large increases in the proportion of people believing the US would do the right thing in world affairs in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories, in none of these places does a majority of the population share this sentiment. Other countries lacking a majority of the population in 2009 agreeing that the US will do the right thing in world affairs include Russia (37%), Pakistan (13%), and Turkey (33%), although it should be noted that these proportions had increased in all four countries since 2008 (with Turkey witnessing perhaps the most dramatic increase from 2% to 33%).
bq. Of the 24 countries (plus the Palestinian Territories) included in the survey, the only one where the belief that the US would do the right thing in world affairs has fallen from 2008 to 2009 is Israel, where support dropped from 57% to 56% (in what I’m guessing is a statistically meaningless difference).
These observations are only scratching the surface of what is contained in the the full report, which includes topics such as reactions to Obama’s Cairo speech in the middle east, beliefs about the acceptability of suicide bombing, opinions of Obama’s international policy, attitudes towards the US generally, beliefs about the US’s economic influence on the rest of the world, and many other topics. I don’t know if Pew releases the individual level data to scholars (has anyone ever worked with them?), but this does seem to be a potential treasure trove of data for comparative public opinion studies.