The Power of Humanitarian Narratives: A Domestic Coalition Theory of Justifications for Military Action

Maxey, Sarah

doi:10.1177/1065912919852169

Cited by 29 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…For policy-oriented qualitative research, this claim is hardly self-evident. Impressively designed experimental studies have, for example, shed valuable light on US public opinion regarding such issues as the use of nuclear weapons (Press, Sagan, and Valentino, 2013; Sagan and Valentino, 2017; but see Carpenter and Montgomery, 2020) and humanitarian justifications for military force (Maxey, 2019; Maxey and Kreps, 2018). Yet, absent convincing evidence that US policymakers actually pay attention to the public when they carry out their decisions on the use of force, these elegant experiments lack policy relevance.…”

Section: Conclusion and Ways Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for a middle ground? A spectrum of views of causality in qualitative research

Ruffa

Evangelista

2021

Riv. ital. sci. polit.

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Qualitative scholars exhibit a wide range of views on and approaches to causality. While some approaches reject causality from the outset, a large strand of qualitative research in political science and international relations does, however, pursue causal explanation. Qualitative scholars nevertheless disagree about what causality means. Our paper reviews what causality means within different strands of qualitative research and how qualitative scholars engage in causal explanations. We focus particular attention on the fertile middle ground between qualitative research that seeks to mimic the statistical model and research that rejects causality entirely. In broad strokes, we understand views of causality as lying on a spectrum and partly overlapping. Along the spectrum, we identify three main clusters: ‘positivist leaning,’ ‘postpositivist leaning,’ and ‘interpretivist leaning.’ Within each cluster, we identify the main traits and provide illustrative examples. We find merit in each of these three clusters of approaches and in the ongoing dialogue among qualitative scholars of different orientations. Understanding similarities and differences in the way various scholars address causality might encourage some to take steps along the spectrum and expand their repertoires to embrace elements of other approaches. By making these distinctions more explicit, we hope to be able to enhance our understanding of different views of causality and the extent to which they overlap and provide the potential for collaboration.

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Section: Conclusion and Ways Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for a middle ground? A spectrum of views of causality in qualitative research

Ruffa

Evangelista

2021

Riv. ital. sci. polit.

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“…Following this literature, we differentiate respondents by whether they have underlying cooperative internationalist, militant internationalist, or isolationist attitudes (e.g. Maxey 2020;Hurwitz and Peffley 1987;Herrmann, Tetlock and Visser 1999;Wittkopf 1990), Kertzer et al (2014). 3 This framework conceptualizes basic foreign policy convictions along two lines: whether an individual supports an active role of their country in international politics (i.e.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deontological and Consequentialist Preferences Towards Arms Exports -- A Comparative Conjoint Experiment in France and Germany

Rudolph¹,

Freitag²,

Thurner³

2021

Preprint

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Despite fierce politicization and heated public debates in arms-exporting democracies, systematic research on mass public preferences on arms trade is lacking. Combining political economy models of arms trade with the literatures on trade preferences and foreign policy attitudes, we argue that citizens trade off economic incentives, strategic interests and moral considerations when assessing arms trade and that deeply rooted `strategic cultures’ lead to differences in citizen preferences between countries. To derive the implicit weighting of different features of arms trade, we draw on population-representative conjoint survey experiments (N=6,617), fielded in November/December 2020 in two of the global top-5 exporting countries of major arms: Germany and France. We find that both country populations show structured preferences towards arms exports which predominantly center around their moral repercussions. However, German respondents place more weight on moral consequences and, compared to French respondents, a larger share is in fundamental opposition. We conclude that these diverging preferences potentially conflict with plans of a common European defense and security policy.

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“…Wars framed as humanitarian missions have traditionally had more support among the US public than other kinds of conflict, and humanitarian justifications can be key to mobilizing domestic coalitions (Jentleson and Britton, 1998; Maxey, 2019). Such conflicts have more support if they are endorsed by international organizations such as the UN or domestic political elites (Grillo and Pupcenoks, 2017; Grillo et al, 2011) and are seen as having a higher likelihood of success (Boettcher and Williams, 2004; Grieco et al, 2011; Lyon and Malone, 2009).…”

Section: Humanitarian Intervention and Prejudicementioning

confidence: 99%

The prejudice first model and foreign policy values: racial and religious bias among conservatives and liberals

Hanania

Trager

2020

European Journal of International Relations

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Scholars who study public opinion and American foreign policy have accepted what Rathbun et al. (2016) call the “Vertical Hierarchy Model,” which says that policy attitudes are determined by more abstract moral ideas about right and wrong. This article turns this idea on its head by introducing the Prejudice First Model, arguing that foreign policy preferences and orientations are driven by attitudes toward the groups being affected by specific policies. Three experiments are used to test the utility of this framework. First, when conservatives heard about Muslims killing Christians, as opposed to the opposite scenario, they were more likely to support a humanitarian intervention and agree that the United States has a moral obligation to help those persecuted by their governments. Liberals showed no religious preference. When the relevant identity group was race, however, liberals were more likely to want to help blacks persecuted by whites, while conservatives showed no racial bias. In contrast, the degree of persecution mattered relatively little to respondents in either experiment, and the effects of moral foundations were shown to be generally weak relative to those of prejudice. In another experiment, conservatives adopted more isolationist policies after reading a text about the country becoming more liberal, as opposed to a paragraph that said the United States was a relatively conservative country. While not necessarily contradicting the Vertical Hierarchy Model, the results indicate that under most conditions the Prejudice First Model presents a better lens through which to understand how foreign policy preferences are formed.

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The Power of Humanitarian Narratives: A Domestic Coalition Theory of Justifications for Military Action

Cited by 29 publications

References 46 publications

Searching for a middle ground? A spectrum of views of causality in qualitative research

Searching for a middle ground? A spectrum of views of causality in qualitative research

Deontological and Consequentialist Preferences Towards Arms Exports -- A Comparative Conjoint Experiment in France and Germany

The prejudice first model and foreign policy values: racial and religious bias among conservatives and liberals

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