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The Costs of Conflict and Support for the Use of Force: Accounting for Information Equivalence in Survey Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

Jared McDonald Open the ORCID record for Jared McDonald [Opens in a new window]  and
James Igoe Walsh Open the ORCID record for James Igoe Walsh [Opens in a new window]
Jared McDonald*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication, Stanford University, 300N McClatchy Hall, Stanford, CA, 94305
James Igoe Walsh
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC28223
*
*Corresponding author. Email: jared0209@gmail.com
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Abstract

How do the costs of conflict influence public support for the use of force? Existing research finds that weapons that eliminate the possibility of military casualties, such as drones, increase popular support for engaging in conflict. We argue that this effect may be overstated because the choice of weapons technology is endogenous to conflict. Leaders may select to use drones in conflicts where the risk of harm to ground forces is especially high. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design of Walsh and Schulzke across three survey experiments. The key innovation in our experiments is that subjects are led to believe that the choice of attack type – drones or ground troops – is determined by weather conditions rather than strategic considerations. We find that support for military action does not differ across treatments in which subjects are told that the attack involves drone strikes or ground troops.

Keywords

international conflictpublic opinionsurvey experimentsinformation equivalence
Type
Replications
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 195 - 202
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association, 2020

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Footnotes

This research was made possible through support from the POLS Lab at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network at doi: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EPJBOO.

References

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Supplementary material: Link

McDonald and Walsh Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EPJBOO
Link
Supplementary material: File

McDonald and Walsh supplementary material

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