Public opinion studies on war attitudes say little about civilians who are related to military service members. The authors argue that military ''service-connected'' individuals are missing voices in the research that examines public support for war. Using over 50,000 observations from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the authors estimate attitudes toward the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the use of US military troops in general. The authors find that service-connected civilians express greater support for war and the use of troops than civilians without such a connection. This study discusses the implications of these findings for theoretical advancements in the literature addressing war attitudes and the conceptualization of the ''civil-military gap.''
The article focuses on group-based features of issue publics and advances the concept of residual group saliency as a way to organize members of issue publics. We accord veterans exemplar or prototype status, and civilians as periphery members of this issue public. As issue public exemplars, veterans anchor the "right" attitudes and behaviors for the veteran issue public, and civilians, especially those with family ties to veterans, gravitate toward those exemplar attitudes. We argue that pressure to conform to these "right" attitudes among civilians who are connected to a veteran is greater when there are more veterans in their environment. However, veterans and civilians who are not connected to a veteran are not responsive to such contextual effects, the former because they are already exemplars, and the latter because there is no motivation to evaluate the self in relation to veterans. We test and find support for these claims using data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We conclude with an evaluative discussion and suggestions for future research.
ObjectiveWe extend prototype theory to explain why nonmembers who are socially connected to group members hold political attitudes that differ from nonmembers lacking that connection. We anticipate that the intensity of nonmember attitudes varies by connection to a prototype or periphery group member.MethodsUsing data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we model group‐salient political attitudes for veterans, union members, and their family members.ResultsWe find social distance from group members is theoretically linked to within‐group variation that distinguishes prototype from periphery group members.ConclusionAnalysis of political attitudes is enhanced beyond the traditional member/nonmember dichotomy by accounting for nonmembers’ social distance from group members.
Recent social scientific research has examined connections between public opinion and weather conditions. This article contributes to this literature by analyzing the relationship between high temperature and survey response. Because hot temperatures are associated with aggression, irritation, and negativity, such conditions should lead to the expression of aggression, irritation, and negativity in survey response. This relationship is tested in a likely realm: feelings about policies relating to racial minorities. Data are drawn from the National Climatic Data Center and the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Logistic regressions demonstrate that even after controlling for demographic and geographic factors, average daily temperatures above 74 F are associated with preferences for a stricter immigration policy as well as against permissive affirmative action policies. Acknowledging the role of this contextual variable reduces nonrandom error in estimates of public opinion on these issues.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.