gartner and segura what is the relationship between casualties and public opinion about war? —Mueller: the log of cumulative casualties is the best predictor of wartime opinion —Gartner and Segura: level of recent, marginal casualties is critical to predicting opposition at home. Why do gartner and segura believe that recent, marginal casualties are more important? 1. captures the effects of pivotal events and shocks 2. does not artificially homogenize different conflicts Mueller’s argument -nothing special about events, rather it is about cumulative total of casualties -across korea and vietnam respondents largely reacted the same to casualties in the two different wars Why is using the log cumulative national casualties as the exclusive measure of human war costs problematic? 1. it cannot help but be correlated with time (and support for war might be correlated with time) 2. homogenizes conflicts with very different patterns of casualty accumulation 3. underestimates the importance of turning points, decisive events, and exogenous shocks to opinion Discuss Figures 1 and 2 Why might marginal casualties be better predictors of opinion? 1. recent information is more salient 2. marginal casualties are not correlated with time —no contamination with other causal factors correlated with time —opinion change doesn’t need to be monotonic —it could shift in either direction and is likely to do so in fits and starts rather than at a steady or constant rate 3. salient events may have high impact on opinion Discuss Figure 3 Discuss the hypotheses 1. variation in marginal casualties plays a greater role than cumulative casualties in explaining opinion in wars, or periods within a war, with generally increasing marginal casualty figures 2. variation in cumulative casualties performs better than marginal casualties in explaining opinion in wars, or periods within a war, with generally decreasing marginal casualty figures marginal casualties will be more important than cumulative casualties in explaining opinion in Vietnam but will be less helpful for korea what is their data and model? why do they control for war duration and change in administration? —wars vary in length and survey instruments within wars are given at different airregular time intervals thus need to control for time with the number of war days since initiation evidence: 1. casualty rates from three conflicts show that logging of casualties artificially homogenizes dfifferent wars 2. new opinion data shows that marginal casualties track Californian support for the vietnam war better than cumulative casualties 3. cumulative casualties explain opinion in the korean war and marginal casualties capture opinion change in the vietnam war 4. evidence for the interaction laid out in the hypotheses Eichenberg Covers a literature that suggests several factors contribute to public opinion about warfare 1. casualties 2. type of conflict matters: willing to defend state from aggression but not get involved in an internal insurgency 3. principal policy objectives outweigh factors 4. multilateralism vs unilaterialsm 5. success or failure how would we define success? would we want to measure relative casualties? like we had this many people die, but the other guy had more so we must be winning What is the method? is this convincing? talk about table 4 what are the results with respect to multilaterlism? The overall totals help to explain why the impact of multilateral sentiment has been weak in previous comparative studies: across the entire set of questions, there is little difference in support for using force. what are the results with respect to policy objectives? The striking feature of the data in this table is the clear conarmation of Jentleson’s argument: foreign policy restraint and hu- manitarian intervention enjoy the strongest support by far. Internal political change and peacekeeping are equally unpopular. What are the results with respect to winning? Berinsky costs and benefits are the dominant model (calls these “event-response” theories) what does berinsky find problematic about these? 1. presume that members of the public incorporate knowledge of political developments 2. looked at support for war across interventions not the differences among individuals within particular conflicts (people might respond differently to casualties) (what are the mechanisms by which members of the mass public process information concerning the events of war and come to determine either to support or oppose a given military operation? 3. ignores the partisan nature of domestic politics what is the elite competition theory in berinsky’s story? how do individuals with different political predilections react to different forms of elite discourse? 1. citizens can use the positions of elites to come to reasonable political decisions (they delegate the difficult process of arriving at an opinion on a complicated policy matter to trusted political experts 2. still this theory requires that citizens know what different actors think 3. you might not need to hear both sides, just need to hear one side and know that you’re either in general pro or con that side to know how to position yourself on that issue Expectations 1. events will have little influence over day to day judgments regarding war because individuals do not have enough knowledge, however big events still could. 2. patterns of elite discourse will play a large role 3. only one elite needs to take a position What is the data? What is the experiment? What is the evidence for the elite cues theory?
