The DOI matches its Crossref record; 45 of the 45 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Multiple Effects of Casualties on Public Support for War: An Experimental Approach
Abstract
Public support for a conflict is not a blank check. Combat provides information people use to update their expectations about the outcome, direction, value, and cost of a war. Critical are fatalities—the most salient costs of conflict. I develop a rational expectations theory in which both increasing recent casualties and rising casualty trends lead to decreased support. Traditional studies neither recognize nor provide a method for untangling these multiple influences. I conduct six experiments, three on the Iraq War (two with national, representative samples) and three with a new type of panel experiment design on hypothetical military interventions. The results of hazard and ordered logit analyses of almost 3,000 subjects support a rational expectations theory linking recent casualties, casualty trends, and their interaction to wartime approval. I also examine the effects of the probability of victory, information levels, and individual characteristics on the support for war, and contrast results from representative and convenience samples.
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“Casualties influence elections in the house (Carson et al. 2001), senate (Gartner et al. 2004, Gartner and Segura forthcoming), and presidency (Karol and Miguel 2007; Voeten and Brewer 2006), and they affect leader tenure more broadly (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003).”
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Cited by
Retrospective Voting Reconsidered
Healy, A., & Malhotra, N. (2013) · Annual Review of Political Science · doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-032211-212920 · Cited by 667
A Bottom‐Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy
Kertzer, J. D., & Zeitzoff, T. (2017) · American Journal of Political Science · doi:10.1111/ajps.12314 · Cited by 443
Explaining External Support for Insurgent Groups
Salehyan, I., Gleditsch, K. S., & Cunningham, D. E. (2011) · International Organization · doi:10.1017/s0020818311000233 · Cited by 391
Reality Asserts Itself: Public Opinion on Iraq and the Elasticity of Reality
Baum, M. A., & Groeling, T. (2010) · International Organization · doi:10.1017/s0020818310000172 · Cited by 161
Cheap fights, credible threats: The future of armed drones and coercion
Zegart, A. (2020) · Journal of Strategic Studies · doi:10.1080/01402390.2018.1439747 · Cited by 81
Metadata
- Authors
- GARTNER, S. S.
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2008-02
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 95-106
- ISSN
- 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5943
- OpenAlex
- W2156024651
- Cited by
- 425
- References
- 45
- FWCI
- 134.62
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
