Graeme A. M. Davies

Democratic Peace or Clash of Civilizations? Target States and Support for War in Britain and the United States

Research on public support for war shows that citizens are responsive to various aspects of strategic context. Less attention has been paid to the core characteristics of the target state. In this comparative study we report survey experiments manipulating two such characteristics, regime type and dominant faith, to test whether the “democratic peace” and the “clash of civilizations” theses are reflected in U.S. and British public opinion. The basic findings show small differences across the two cases: both publics were somewhat more inclined to use force against dictatorships than against democracies and against Islamic than against Christian countries. Respondent religion played no moderating role in Britain: Christians and nonbelievers were alike readier to attack Islamic states. However, in the United States, the dominant faith effect was driven entirely by Christians. Together, our results imply that public judgments are driven as much by images and identities as by strategic calculations of threat.

Still saving the earth? The European Parliament's environmental record

The European Parliament has been heralded as a champion of environmental policy within the European Union. However, there have been few recent studies of the European Parliaments treatment of environmental legislation, despite the many changes that have taken place within the EU. To correct this oversight all European Parliament amendments to environmental co-decision legislation between 1999 and 2009 have been classified according to their environmental importance and analysed to determine how the chambers behaviour has changed over time and which factors shape its success. The European Parliament appears to have become both less radical and less successful in incorporating strong green amendments into legislation, and the European Commission emerges as a central explanation for the European Parliaments ability to do so. Despite the Commissions reputation as a partner seeking to advance the environmental agenda, it does not appear inclined to support the European Parliaments attempts to green legislation.

Policy Selection in the Face of Political Instability

This article bridges the divide between comparative politics and international relations by examining the interaction between domestic instability and policy choices made at the domestic and international level. It is theorized that leaders select from a basket of options that include diversion, repression, and political concessions. It is argued that governmental institutions affect political leaders choices, with more domestically constrained democratic governments eschewing the use of repression, instead opting for diversion and concessions. Whereas autocratic governments will use repression as it is the most effective and least costly option. Using a panel vector autoregression model, the study tests whether political leaders use one or a mixture of responses when confronted with widespread dissatisfaction. The analysis models feedback loops enabling it to simultaneously evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies at reducing instability within the different institutional contexts. The study found little evidence of diversion, but it did find that the international environment affects both policy choices and affected the level of instability in the state. The use of concessions for all states is generally counterproductive when that state is involved in a strategic rivalry whereas they tend to reduce instability when both democracies and autocracies are in a more peaceful international environment.

The domestic consequences of international over-cooperation: An experimental study of microfoundations

While questions about the diplomatic effectiveness of hawkish or dovish policies are crucially important, little research has been conducted on the domestic political risks and benefits associated with a chosen policy. This paper provides evidence to suggest why elites avoid the use of inducements and focus on more hawkish policies. Specifically this article focuses on the public opinion risks associated with offering an inducement that does not result in a change in behaviour of a target state. Using an experiment embedded within a wider survey instrument, we assess public ex post evaluations of government behaviour towards a nascent nuclear power that is believed to threaten British national security. The study examines not only the rewards associated with successful policies and the costs of failure, but also whether those costs are particularly heavy when it is dovish policies that fail. The results indicate that the public does have a particular aversion for unsuccessful engagement policies. Successful policies are generally more popular than unsuccessful policies, but a hawkish failure wins more public sympathy than a failed inducement. These results provide an important explanation as to why inducements tend to be avoided on the international stage: the risks of failure are too severe.

Coalitions of the willing? International backing and British public support for military action:

Studies of public support for war highlight the importance of context. Most people do not simply support or oppose the use of force but instead assess its merits depending on various aspects of the situation. One such aspect is the extent of international backing – whether from individual states or supranational organizations – for military action. This backing may be active, notably through the contribution of troops, or more a passive matter of endorsement or authorization of action. In this article, a survey experiment embedded in a major internet survey of British foreign policy attitudes (N = 2,205) is used to explore how international backing affects public support for military action. Britain’s military potential and recent history make it an obvious case study here. Both active and endorsement backing prove to have separate and significant positive effects on support. Importantly, the absolute number of troops involved matters far less than the proportion of total troop numbers to be contributed. And the perceived strength of the enemy predicts support only when the British are to contribute a large proportion of total forces. Predispositional variables are used to investigate the sources of the experimental effects but with little success: the impact of international backing proves remarkably consistent across the sample.

British Public Confidence in MI6 and Government Use of Intelligence: The Effect on Support for Preventive Military Action

Abstract There are considerable concerns about public perceptions of intelligence stemming directly from the highly politicized nature of intelligence estimates in the run-up to the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this article we use a new public attitudes dataset to provide the first ever analysis of British public confidence in MI6 and Government use of intelligence. The article demonstrates that the public have relatively high confidence in the intelligence produced by MI6 but are extremely sceptical about how the Government will present that intelligence. Using an ordered logit model this article then examines the factors that influence public perceptions of both intelligence and Government, finding that women are a lot less confident in both the intelligence services and government presentation of intelligence than men, suggesting that this might help explain gender differences in support for military action. The study also demonstrates that party identifiers and Catholics have very low confidence in the intelligence produced by MI6. The study shows that public confidence in both government and intelligence has a strong effect on support for preventive military action against terror camps, suggesting that the intelligence agencies need to avoid being contaminated by political agendas as much as possible if the intelligence case for future military actions is to be supported by the public.

Sheltering the president from blame: Drone strikes, media assessments and heterogeneous responsibility 2002–2014

This article presents the first systematic analysis of how location of drone strikes and the identification of civilian or terrorist casualties in newspaper reporting affect media assessments of operational outcomes and elite responsibility. Conducting a content analysis of several hundred newspaper articles, we evaluate the likelihood of these newspapers identifying the civilian casualties, the role those casualties play in media assessments of operational outcomes, and who they blame for failure. We found that there were significant differences in the likelihood of the two newspapers reporting civilian casualties. We demonstrate that political elites including the US President tended to avoid blame for failure, with much of the focus of newspaper dissatisfaction being directed at the intelligence agencies. We believe these findings have serious ramifications for the democratic oversight for future warfare and have the potential to undermine the ability of public to constrain elites from launching military operations using drones.

Civilian casualties and public support for military action: Experimental evidence

In contrast to the expansive literature on military casualties and support for war, we know very little about public reactions to foreign civilian casualties. This article, based on representative sample surveys in the United States and Britain, reports four survey experiments weaving information about civilian casualties into vignettes about Western military action. These produce consistent evidence of civilian casualty aversion: where death tolls were higher, support for force was invariably and significantly lower. Casualty effects were moderate in size but robust across our two cases and across different scenarios. They were also strikingly resistant to moderation by other factors manipulated in the experiments, such as the framing of casualties or their religious affiliation. The importance of numbers over even strongly humanizing frames points toward a utilitarian rather than a social psychological model of casualty aversion. Either way, civilian casualties deserve a more prominent place in the literature on public support for war.