Richard C. Eichenberg

Victory Has Many Friends: U.S. Public Opinion and the Use of Military Force, 1981-2005

Although previous studies have examined U.S. public support for the use of military force in particular historical cases, and have even made limited comparisons among cases, a full comparison of a large number of historical episodes in which the United States contemplated, threatened, or actually used military force has been missing. An analysis of U.S. public support for the use of military force in twenty-two historical episodes from the early 1980s through the Iraq war and occupation (2003-05) underscores the continuing relevance of Bruce Jentlesons principal policy objectives framework: the objective for which military force is used is an important determinant of the base level of public support. The U.S. public supports restraining aggressive adversaries, but it is leery of involvement in civil-war situations. Although the objective of the mission strongly conditions this base level of support, the public is also sensitive to the relative risk of different military actions; to the prospect of civilian or military casualties; to multilateral participation in the mission; and to the likelihood of success or failure of the mission. These results suggest that support for U.S. military involvement in Iraq is unlikely to increase; indeed, given the ongoing civil strife in Iraq, continuing casualties, and substantial disagreement about the prospects for success, the publics support is likely to remain low or even decline.

Gender Differences in Public Attitudes toward the Use of Force by the United States, 1990-2003

In their study of gender differences in public reactions to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf crisis and war, Virginia Sapiro and Pamela Conover analyzed a number of American survey items dealing with hypothetical security policies as well as concrete questions involving the use of military force and its consequences. The results were clear: Although a gender difference on the more abstract, hypothetical questions was weak or nonexistent, when the analysis turned to the speciac questions of using force against Iraq and the civilian and military casualties that could result, the differences became large indeed. Sapiro and Conover concluded that “when we moved from the abstract to the concrete—from hypothetical wars to the Gulf War—the distance separating women and men grew, and on every measure, women reacted more negatively. These gender differences are some of the largest and most consistent in the study of political psychology and are clearly of a magnitude that can have real political signiacance under the right circumstances.”1 Less than ten years later, as NATO warplanes continued their attacks against Serbia, the Christian Science Monitor reported that the gender difference in public opinion concerning the war over Kosovo was far smaller than it had been in previous wars: “As debate persists in America over how much to use force, Gender Differences and the Use of Force

The Illusion of Choice: Defense and Welfare in Advanced Industrial Democracies, 1948-1978

Research on the tendency of governments to trade off welfare spending for defense has generated diverse and often contradictory findings. This study attempts to clarify the issue of trade-offs by examining expenditure patterns since 1948 for the four major NA TO allies: United States, United Kingdom, Federal Republic of Germany, and France. When viewed from the perspective of long-term trends in shares of outlays, trade-offs are evident. When short-term changes in expenditure, which are more germane to the potential for one spending category to benefit at the expense of the other are studied, no pattern of trade-off can be detected. A three-equation model is estimated to control for the variety of possible determining factors of public resource allocation. In none of the four nations does a pattern of trade-off emerge, except in periods of wartime or postwar reconstruction. These findings are consistent with the ability of governments to finance new spending through either increased taxes or larger budget deficits. The growing disinclination to use these methods, however, suggests that the potential for trade-offs has perhaps reappeared in the 1980s.

War President The Approval Ratings of George W. Bush

The authors estimate a model of the job approval ratings of President George W. Bush that includes five sets of variables: a “honeymoon” effect, an autoregressive function that tracks a decline in approval, measures of economic performance, measures of important “rally events,” and a measure of the costs of war—in this case, the U.S. death toll in the Iraq War. Several significant effects are found, including the rally that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001; the commencement of the war in Iraq; and the capture of Baghdad in April 2003. Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, however, the casualties of war have had a significant negative impact on Bush’s approval ratings. Although the effects of additional battle deaths in Iraq will decrease approval only marginally, results suggest that there is also little prospect for sustained improvement so long as casualties continue to accumulate.

Representing Defense Democratic Control of the Defense Budget in the United States and Western Europe

There is nowsubstantial evidence that defense spending decisions in the United States are influenced by citizen preferences. However, there is little time-series evidence for countries other than the United States. Regression models of citizen responsiveness and opinion representation in the politics of defense spending in five democracies are estimated. Results showthat public opinion in all five countries is systematically responsive to recent changes in defense spending, and the form of the responses across countries uniformly resembles the “thermostat” metaphor developed by Wlezien and the more general theory of opinion dynamics developed by Stimson. Findings showalso that defense budgeting is representative: public support for defense spending is the most consistently significant influence on defense budgeting change in four countries; thus, a parsimonious theory of comparative policy representation is potentially within reach. The implications of the results for defense spending in the NATO alliance and the European Union are discussed.

Gender Difference or Parallel Publics? The Dynamics of Defense Spending Opinions in the United States, 1965–2007

Gender is now recognized as an important dividing line in American political life, and scholars have accumulated evidence that national security issues are an important reason for gender differences in policy preferences. We therefore expect that the dynamics of support for defense spending among men and women will differ. In contrast, several scholars have shown that population subgroups exhibit a “parallel” dynamic in which the evolution of their preferences over time is very similar, despite differences in the average level of support. Unfortunately, there is little time series evidence on gendered reactions to policy, including defense spending, that would allow one to arbitrate between these competing perspectives. In this research note, we assemble a time series of support for defense spending among men and women and model the determinants of that support for the period 1967–2007. We find that women are on average less supportive of defense spending than are men. However, we also find that the over time variation of support for defense spending among men and women is very similar—each is conditioned principally by the past year’s change in defense spending and occasionally by war casualties and a trade-off between defense and civilian spending.

Guns, Butter, and Growth: Expenditure Patterns in Four Advanced Democracies

Abstract This paper reports results of research on the so-called “guns/butter” question. Using multiple regression techniques, we estimate the relationship between military and social spending for the United States (1929-72), France (1920-1973), West Germany (1950-1969), and the United Kingdom (1920-1976). Reasoning from theories of budgeting, the controllability of social expenditures, and the effects of economic conditions on government resource allocation, we argue that “guns/butter tradeoffs” are unlikely to appear in short-term expenditure changes. The results generally confirm this hypothesis: only for the United States does a negative association appear between the two types of expenditure. For the other three countries, economic factors seem to be the driving force in social expenditure change.

The Acceptability of War and Support for Defense Spending: Evidence from Fourteen Democracies, 2004-2013

We study the factors that influence citizen support for defense spending in fourteen democracies over the period 2004–2013. We pose two research questions. First, what factors influence citizen support for war and military force? We refer to this as the acceptability of war. Second, in addition to the acceptability of war, what other factors affect support for defense spending? Our principal finding is that citizen acceptance of war and support for defense spending are most influenced by basic beliefs and values. Gender also has a strong negative influence on attitudes toward war and thus indirectly lowers support for defense spending among women. Attitudes toward war and defense spending are also sometimes influenced by short-term threats and by alliance considerations, but the effects are not as substantively meaningful. We conclude with a summary of the results and a discussion of the implications for theory and policy.

Crisis or Consensus? Public Opinion and National Security in Western Europe

When the NATO Alliance celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1979, few would have predicted that the very existence of the Alliance would soon be in doubt. Most commentaries stressed the theme of continuity in the Alliance, a continuity that rested on a firm basis of common interest in security, economic, and political affairs. In addition, the mutual interests of the Western nations were reinforced by a stable East-West power structure that rendered alternative security arrangements infeasible, unpopular or both.1

Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues

One consistent finding in the public opinion literature is that gender is correlated with political attitudes and behavior. In this chapter, we examine cross-national gender differences in attitudes towards international affairs, focusing on attitudes towards war and the use of force, international institutions, and the relationship between gender difference and the political mobilization of women.