Iran in American Public Opinion

In the past decades, the importance of public opinion has increased in foreign policy decision making. Although public opinion itself is influenced by political leaders and the media, it plays an important role in the decision making process. The question we ask in this article asks is: how the American public views Iran, and how Iran may influence this view? We study more than 4000 question items from numerous public opinion surveys from 1979 to 2017. The overarching observation is that the American public has a consistently negative view of Iran, which does not seem to change from decade to decade. Moreover, all of the foreign policy decisions made by the United States government has been in line with public opinion at the time. Finally, we offer some lessons drawn from the experience of other countries in how Iran’s image may be improved in the United States to better resemble reality.