War, Casualties, and Public Opinion

Gartner, Scott Sigmund; Segura, Gary M.

doi:10.1177/0022002798042003004

Cited by 334 publications

(274 citation statements)

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“…Larson 1996; Gartner and Segura 1998;Gelpi et al 2006Gelpi et al , 2009Boettcher and Cobb 2006;Gartner 2008a;Kriner and Shen 2013). The works just cited represent only a fraction of that research, and there is no space to review it in detail here.…”

Section: The Possibility Of Civilian Casualty Aversionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Johns

Davies

2017

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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(RES-062-23-1952) as part of a project to investigate 'Foreign policy attitudes and support for war among the British public'. We gratefully acknowledge the support from both funders, and the guidance we received from colleagues in designing the surveys. The research in this article has been presented at the 2012 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association and at seminars at Nuffield College, the University of Essex and the University of Lancaster. In all cases, we thank participants for comments and suggestions. 2At the height of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, civilians risked being the forgotten casualties. They received much less attention from the same American media which give extensive and sympathetic coverage to the deaths, repatriation and funerals of military casualties (Althaus et al., 2014). They were downplayed by the same British leaders who solemnly read out tributes to fallen service personnel in Parliament. And military strategists in both countries favored a doctrine of air strikes which, despite advances in precision munitions, still risks foreign civilian lives in significant numbers in order to minimize the risks to their own troops.In more recent years, however, civilian casualties have begun to receive more attention. This is partly due to the strategic choice mentioned above: with action increasingly taken via unmanned drones, military casualties have become much rarer while civilian death tolls continue to mount. The need to protect civilians has also become central to the case for military action in a context like Syria (e.g. Landay et al., 2015;Wright, 2015), even if the risks to US and British military remain equally central to the case against intervention.Given the earlier imbalance, it is not surprising that civilian casualties were largely overlooked in research -much of it triggered by Iraq and Afghanistan -on the drivers of public support for war. Since military casualties were more conspicuous in public debate, it made sense that they would have a greater influence on citizens' reactions, and in turn that researchers would focus on military casualty aversion. Now that civilian casualties are becoming more prominent in media coverage of conflict, however, a question arises about public reactions. Would we expect reporting of foreign civilian deaths to have a dampening effect on public support for military action? Or did media and academic focus on military casualties reflect the public's own preoccupation with its own servicemen and women over foreign civilians? Answering this question would make both an empirical and a normative contribution. It would improve our understanding of the conditions under which citizens are prepared to support military action. It would also tell us whether support for force is systematically higher than it would be if civilian deaths become a more central presence in elite discussion and media coverage of military action. 3The scant existing evidence makes it hard to assess the strength of public reactions to civilian casualt...

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Section: The Possibility Of Civilian Casualty Aversionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Johns

Davies

2017

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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“…Based largely upon polling of Californians during the Vietnam War, these authors argue that it is not cumulative casualties that affected support for the Vietnam War as Mueller argued, but rather the marginal casualties that were accumulated in each period, especially during the period when casualties were accumulating at an increasing rate (Gartner and Segura, 1998). According to these authors, moreover, we should anticipate that a point will be reached in any conflict that initially is popular and has an S-shaped cumulative casualty curve, when casualties cease to play a role in explaining opinion and other factors become more important (Gartner, Segura, and Wilkening, 1997).…”

Section: Peter D Feaver and Christopher Gelpimentioning

confidence: 99%

Misfortunes of War: Press and Public Reactions to Civilian Deaths in Wartime

Larson¹,

Savych²

2006

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“…A vast range of specific contextual or situational factors can affect public support for military action, both initially -at the outset of the war -and as the conflict progresses. Examples include the objective of military action (Jentleson, 1992;Oneal et al, 1996), the extent of domestic elite consensus (Zaller, 1992;Dixon, 2000), casualty rates (Gartner & Segura, 1998;Karol & Miguel, 2007), and the extent of international backing, from other states or supranational organisations (Kull & Destler, 1999;Holsti, 2004;Smith, 2005).…”

Section: International Backing and Public Support For Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Johns

Davies

2014

Journal of Peace Research

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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.

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War, Casualties, and Public Opinion

Cited by 334 publications

References 23 publications

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Misfortunes of War: Press and Public Reactions to Civilian Deaths in Wartime

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

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