Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka and Ondřej Rosendorf just published a new article on the topic of public support for arms control in the third nuclear age. They argue that due to the complex and overly technicist nature of arms control practices, the public generally exhibits low levels of awareness and domain-specific knowledge.
As a result, the general public relies on simplified heuristic frames to build an internally consistent attitude toward individual arms control treaties, and public opinion on arms control tends to be elastic and susceptible to “elite cues” from experts and politicians who build on these heuristic frames in their messaging to shape mass attitudes in this domain.
They test their theoretical expectations empirically through two studies: a cross-national survey of public attitudes toward arms control in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland, and a follow-up survey experiment investigating the impact of elite cues on public opinion in the United States and the United Kingdom.