It is one thing to change the opinions of individual elites and yet another for governments
to change their policies in response. More often than not, the policy making
process is complex, which makes it difficult to trace the political impact of even elite focused
public diplomacy. For example, Carol Atkinson argues that American military
exchange programs produce “liberalizing trends” in authoritarian regimes by socializing
their military personnel with democratic norms. But while there may be a
statistically significant correlation between these exchange programs and democratic
transitions, that tells us little about the process through which these transitions come
about and thus what causal role, if any, this kind of public diplomacy might have played.