Study title

A companion survey was conducted in April of 2017 (prior to the announcement of the 2017 General Election). The overall objective of the survey is to offer insights about the foreign policy attitudes and security policy preferences of the general UK public. Topics covered include: (1) Identifying what participants consider should be important national foreign policy goals; (2) Identifying what they identify as critical threats to the United Kingdom; (3) Understanding perceptions regarding what the UK’s role in the world should be, including militaristic attitudes and support for national defence; (4) Examining general dispositional approaches that security elites/the general public have towards foreign policy such as multilateralism, unilateralism, and isolationism. The survey was fielded by YouGov with a representative sample of 2,000 UK adults.This project seeks to explain how security policy is developed in the UK, and suggest how relationships between different security and defence agencies can be improved. Security policies protect the borders of a nation-state and the security of its citizens and include military, economic, environmental and cybersecurity policies. These policies are designed and implemented by different agencies including military organizations, the intelligence community, and government departments such as the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence. We live in a fast-paced world where security threats may unexpectedly emerge from state actors such as the Syrian government, or non-state actors such as terrorist organizations. In this rapidly changing security environment it is paramount that national security policies be designed with enough flexibility so as to increase the likelihood of success. Important constraints can hinder this need for flexibility. One such constraint is that members of the security and defence community might fear losing support, appearing as incompetent, or harming the reputation of their agency if they...