Choosing your battles Feaver, Peter D; Gelpi, Christopher
2011., 20111030, 2011, 2003, 20040101
eBook
America's debate over whether and how to invade Iraq clustered into civilian versus military camps. Top military officials appeared reluctant to use force, the most hawkish voices in government were ...civilians who had not served in uniform, and everyone was worried that the American public would not tolerate casualties in war. This book shows that this civilian-military argument--which has characterized earlier debates over Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo--is typical, not exceptional. Indeed, the underlying pattern has shaped U.S. foreign policy at least since 1816. The new afterword by Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi traces these themes through the first two years of the current Iraq war, showing how civil-military debates and concerns about sensitivity to casualties continue to shape American foreign policy in profound ways.
Paying the human costs of war Gelpi,Christopher; Feaver, Peter D; Reifler, Jason
2009., 20090209, 2009, 2009-02-09, 20090101
eBook
From the Korean War to the current conflict in Iraq, Paying the Human Costs of War examines the ways in which the American public decides whether to support the use of military force. Contrary to the ...conventional view, the authors demonstrate that the public does not respond reflexively and solely to the number of casualties in a conflict. Instead, the book argues that the public makes reasoned and reasonable cost-benefit calculations for their continued support of a war based on the justifications for it and the likelihood it will succeed, along with the costs that have been suffered in casualties. Of these factors, the book finds that the most important consideration for the public is the expectation of success. If the public believes that a mission will succeed, the public will support it even if the costs are high. When the public does not expect the mission to succeed, even small costs will cause the withdrawal of support. Providing a wealth of new evidence about American attitudes toward military conflict, Paying the Human Costs of War offers insights into a controversial, timely, and ongoing national discussion.
Over the last decade, there has been a notable surge in the movement of refugees across international borders, posing significant challenges for the international community. In response, various ...policy measures have been implemented, including the construction of border walls, with the aim of impeding refugee influx. However, scholars have expressed doubts regarding the effectiveness of these fortifications, suggesting that walls merely redirect migrants to alternative routes, discourage return migration, or alter migrants’ cost–benefit calculations. Despite these concerns, there has been a lack of rigorous testing to support or refute these claims beyond case-specific evidence. This article addresses this research gap by thoroughly examining the arguments surrounding the impact of border fencing on refugee flows. We conduct a systematic, cross-national test of these arguments with a two-way fixed-effects estimator, an equivalence test, and a recently developed matching estimator designed for use on time-series cross-sectional data. Our results strongly support those who are skeptical of the impact of walls. We consistently demonstrate either that border fencing has not had any causal impact on refugee flows between 1970 and 2017 or that the statistical state-of-the-art is incapable of discerning that true effect. In either scenario, the evidence suggests that border fences fail to deliver the anticipated outcomes. These findings hold significant implications as violence-driven refugee flows persist, underscoring that while walls may serve as politically attractive tools for populist leaders, their actual deterrent effects are highly questionable at best.
States traditionally build walls to repel the armies of adversaries and consolidate control over territory. More recently, the growth in violence by nonstate groups has led governments to use fences ...to prevent insurgent activity and transnational terrorism. This practice, which has accelerated since the end of World War II, challenges liberal expectations of a borderless world. We use a new and unique data set on twentieth century interstate border barriers to evaluate the effectiveness of fencing as a defense against transnational terrorist attacks. The strategic nature of barrier construction makes the assessment of causal effects complex. However, our analyses suggest that fences reduce the annual relative risk of a terrorist attack by at least 67 percent. Much of the literature on transnational terrorism focuses on variables such as democracy, development, and distance—that is, factors that are difficult for policy–makers to manipulate. But our analysis suggests that fencing may provide an effective policy tool for leaders seeking to insulate their states from transnational terrorist attacks.
The vast literature on the impact of democratic political institutions on foreign policy behavior has yielded some of the most important developments in our understanding of violence and war over the ...past thirty years. The Journal of Conflict Resolution has played a prominent role in this growth and development. Critics of the democratic peace have dismissed this literature as a correlation in search of an explanation. However, I argue that the democratic peace literature and its various descendants represent a surprisingly productive example of an empirically focused and puzzle-oriented research program that has produced cumulative scientific knowledge regarding our understanding of international politics. This sustained investigation of democracy and foreign policy has yielded an increasingly robust and sophisticated model of democratic constraint that is the consequence of a progressive research program that compares favorably to earlier research programs that emphasized clashing paradigms of international politics.
We explore the conditions under which individuals are attentive to positive and negative battlefield information when forming beliefs about a conflict's success or failure. We use three experiments ...to explore the impact of visual and textual battlefield cues on individuals' emotional states and attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan. We find that both visual and textual information convey information about failure that influences public attitudes and emotions toward war. In keeping with rational expectations theory, but contrary to widespread beliefs within the journalistic and policymaking communities, textual cues and images of battlefield failure have similar effects on emotions and attitudes. The consistency of multiple war cues, however, greatly affects peoples' reactions. Simply put, in war the content of information matters, not its delivery style.
In this article, we demonstrate that changes in the partisan orientation of a country's executive branch influence the likelihood that the government of that country complies with international legal ...commitments aimed at integration of capital markets. We argue that relative shifts in executive partisan orientation, whether toward the left or toward the right, represent important shifts in “national preferences” that have heretofore been absent from statistical models of treaty compliance. Using a matching estimator combined with a genetic algorithm to maximize balance in our sample, we show that the causal impact of a state signing Article VIII of the IMF Articles of Agreement is conditioned by right-to-left shifts in partisan orientation. The evidence indicates that such preference changes reduce the constraining effects of Article VIII but also indicates that Article VIII continues to exercise significant causal effects even in the face of relative shifts in executive partisan orientation.
We attempt to explain when and why democratic states will prevail in international crises. We review several of the prominent theories about democratic political structures and derive hypotheses from ...each framework about crisis outcomes. These hypotheses are tested against the population of 422 international crises between 1918 and 1994. Our findings provide further evidence that the democratic peace is not a spurious result of common interests. Moreover, we also begin the difficult task of differentiating among the many theories of the democratic peace. In particular, we find strong evidence that democratic political structures are important because of their ability to generate domestic audience costs. Our findings also support the argument that democratic political structures encourage leaders to select international conflicts that they will win.
The public's inability to gain direct personal experience or information about American military operations means that individuals must rely on cues to form opinions about war. But in an environment ...filled will potential cues, which ones do Americans tend to rely on when deciding whether to support an ongoing military operation? This experimental study uses two distinct cues within the context of a newspaper story about the Iraq War to test four theoretical models of the American public's reliance on cues. The results provide fairly consistent support for the "surprising events" model of opinion formation, which suggests that individuals will attend to news events that conflict with their expectations in an effort to update their attitudes toward the war. These results also provide support for the cost/benefit perspective on the formation of public opinion toward war that underpins much of the literature on casualty tolerance during military conflicts.
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