Scott Sigmund Gartner

War, Casualties, and Public Opinion

The authors begin the construction of a generalizable theory of casualties and opinion, reexamining the logic employed by Mueller and showing that although human costs are an important predictor of wartime opinion, Muellers operationalization of those costs solely as the log of cumulative national casualties is problematic and incomplete. The authors argue that temporally proximate costs, captured as marginal casualty figures, are an important additional aspect of human costs and a critical factor in determining wartime opinion. Using Muellers data on opinion in the Vietnam and Korean wars, the authors find that marginal casualties are important in explaining opinion when casualty accumulation is accelerating, and earlier findings about the importance and generalizability of the log of cumulative casualties as the sole casualty-based predictor of opinion are overstated. Finally, the authors offer some thoughts about other factors that should be considered when building a model of war deaths and domestic opinion.

The Multiple Effects of Casualties on Public Support for War: An Experimental Approach

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.

Threat and Repression: The Non-Linear Relationship between Government and Opposition Violence

An understanding of the causes of political repression has continually eluded researchers for the past decade. We argue that much of this can be tied to the theoretical specifications of the models employed. We developed a decision-theoretic model that predicts the level of repression used by governments to suppress political opposition. We believe that analysis of repression needs to include the political contexts in which states operate. In particular, we theorize and find that the nature of the threat posed by an opposition group influences the impact of both the domestic and international factors on the governments decision to repress. We argue that the international and domestic costs associated with a given level of government repression are best represented by separate, non-linear functions of the level of demand made by a dissident opposition group. From this model we deduce an equilibrium level of repression for any given demand; we then empirically test these predictions against original data generated from 18 Latin American countries during the years 1977-86. We find that as the nature of the threat posed by an opposition group moves from minor to extreme, the marginal increment of government repression decreases. Analyses of these data support our theoretical propositions, and suggest that both non-linear approaches and the inclusion of opposition group demands provide a useful tool for studying state repression.

War Expansion and War Outcome

Most wars do not expand beyond the initial two participants. Why is this so? We argue that wars remain small because initiators select as targets states that they believe will not receive third-party help and that they can defeat without such help. Drawing on the idea of selection effect, a model of this choice is presented and a hypothesis is derived in which initiators (1) will win most often in wars of one against one and (2) will win least often when the target receives any help. This hypothesis is tested against war outcomes for initiators and targets in the period 1816-1975 using probit regression. The expectation is supported. The authors conclude that initiators act as predators and are likely to attack target states they know they can defeat if these targets are not joined by coalition partners. This selection pattern tends to make small wars likely.

Is There Method in the Madness of Mediation? Some Lessons for Mediators from Quantitative Studies of Mediation

Key mediation attributes, such as mediating actors, the strategy they choose, and previous mediation experiences, are widely thought to influence the nature of a conflict management outcome. But how and when these features shape outcomes is not a straightforward matter, and a standard analysis of these factors does not lead to their widely anticipated results. Why? We develop a new analytical framework that argues that a disputes intensity alters the conflict management processes. Furthermore, in order to observe this variation, we also need to expand the traditional, dichotomous notion of conflict management outcomes (success or failure) to include a fuller range of observed results. Using the most recent International Conflict Management data set and our new analytical framework, we analyze the effect on conflict management outcome of mediator (a) identity, (b) strategy and (c) history. We find that directive strategies and international mediators are effective in resolving high intensity conflicts, procedural strategies and regional mediators are effective in resolving low intensity conflicts, and that mediation history always affects resolution. Our results have implications for both the study and practice of international dispute mediation.

All Politics Are Local

Inquiries into the domestic determinants of international behavior, including democratic peace arguments, build on the pioneering work of Mueller by presupposing that individuals in a democracy are extremely sensitive to casualties. The authors hypothesize that this relationship is, in part, dependent on the rate at which casualties accumulate and the local variation in these costs. Employing, for the first time, spatially disaggregated “killed in action” data, the authors offer a multivariate logit model of individual opinion on the administrations policies in Vietnam as a function of both local- and national-level casualties. The authors find that recent county-level losses and partisanship are important predictors of individual opinion on the presidents policies early in the war as marginal casualties increased but are less helpful in understanding opinion in the wars later years when marginal casualties declined. Conversely, a number of individual-level variables that had minimal explanatory power at the beginning of the conflict become more important.

War Casualties, Policy Positions, and the Fate of Legislators

Politicians appear to anticipate that the public will hold them accountable for war deaths. Yet, little is known about why some politicians openly oppose costly conflicts while others do not and the difference this makes to their electoral fortunes. Examining U.S. Senate elections from 1966-1972, we find that state-level casualties, military experience, and a variety of other factors affect candidate positions on the Vietnam War. Challenger and incumbent positions are negatively related, suggesting that strategic considerations play a role in wartime policy formation. We also find that war plays a role in elections. Incumbents from states that experience higher casualties receive a smaller percentage of the vote, an effect ameliorated when the incumbent opposes the war and his or her opponent does not. Wartime casualties, we conclude, influence both the perceived cost of the war and its salience, affecting both candidate positions and elections, suggesting that selectorate/electorate-type arguments about war and domestic politics can apply to the US system.

Casualties and Constituencies : Democratic Accountability, Electoral Institutions, and Costly Conflicts

Electoral institutions influence legislators’ constituency size and makeup and, as a result, affect the lens that representatives look through to assess the costs of military conflict. Given the uneven distribution of casualties during a conflict, the costs of international violence vary between constituencies and thus affect representatives differently. The authors develop a constituency-based theory of legislator accountability and legislature behavior that predicts when democracies are willing to pay human costs in an interstate conflict and their likelihood of being involved in a dispute. The results suggest that the more diffuse political account-ability, the less likely a state is to get involved in a militarized dispute, but that once involved, the more likely a state will sustain casualties. The authors’theory suggests that choices over the mechanisms of political representation have far-reaching effects on political accountability and foreign policy.

Signs of Trouble: Regional Organization Mediation and Civil War Agreement Durability

Practitioners and scholars have long championed the positive effects of mediation by regional organizations on conflict resolution—an influence much quantitative research fails to confirm. Mediation by regional organizations signals powerful selection effects that can lead to erroneous inferences about the factors observed to influence the duration of dispute peace agreements. In order to control for selection, I develop a theory that accounts for the nature of the conflict and the identity of third-party mediators. Theoretically and statistically controlling for the negative effects of selection on agreement durability evinced through mediation by regional organizations makes clear their positive process effects. That is, by taking into account that regional mediators get especially hard-to-manage disputes we can observe the positive ways that regional mediation contributes to dispute resolution. This study advances our understanding of conflict management, regional organizations, and civil war.

Ties to the Dead: Connections to Iraq War and 9/11 Casualties and Disapproval of the President

Although played out on a global stage, 9/11 and the Iraq War represent highly personal events for those connected to the victims. A social tie to a conflicts casualty transforms abstract costs into a vivid personal experience that increases the likelihood an individual disapproves of the president. Despite variation between civilian and military losses and historically high and low levels of presidential support, those who know 9/11 or Iraq War casualties are consistently more likely to disapprove of President Bush, suggesting that social structure, and not just personal characteristics, influence wartime opinion.