Responding to War on Capitol Hill: Battlefield Casualties, Congressional Response, and Public Support for the War in Iraq
نویسندگان
چکیده
Recent scholarship argues that how members of Congress respond to an ongoing war significantly influences the president’s strategic calculations. However, the literature is comparably silent on the factors influencing the public positions members take during the course of a military venture. Accounting for both national and local electoral incentives, we develop a theory positing that partisanship conditions congressional responses to casualties in the aggregate, but that all members respond to casualties in their constituency by increasingly criticizing the war. Analyzing an original database of more than 7,500 content-coded House floor speeches on the Iraq War, we find strong support for both hypotheses. We also find that Democrats from high-casualty constituencies were significantly more likely to cast antiwar roll-call votes than their peers. Finally, we show that this significant variation in congressional antiwar position taking strongly correlates with geographic differences in public support for war.
منابع مشابه
Exploring the Management Competencies and Experiences of Healthcare Providers to Reduce Casualties and Injuries to Veterans during the Iran-Iraq war: A Qualitative Study
متن کامل
Semiotics of Collective Memory of the Iran-Iraq War (Holy Defence): A Case Study of the Shared Images in Virtual Social Networks
This study aims to achieve a semiotic understanding of collective memory of the Iran-Iraq war. For this purpose, samples of images in virtual social networks shared in response to the news of discovery and return of the bodies of more than 175 divers have been analyzed. Visual signs in photographs, cartoons, graphic designs, prints, paintings and posters, in methods of historical pictures and f...
متن کاملOn Why the United States Should Not Attack Iran: A Conservative, Evangelical Christian Response
In the midst of American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the aftermath of the presidential election in Iran, support for American involvement in Iran has increased in some circles. In this piece, our desire is to give a conservative, evangelical Christian response to why America should not support any military action against Iran. A position advocated by many of us is “Just War.” I...
متن کاملAssuming the Costs of War: Events, Elites, and American Public Support for Military Conflict
Many political scientists and policymakers argue that unmediated events—the successes and failures on the battlefield—determine whether the mass public will support military excursions. The public supports war, the story goes, if the benefits of action outweigh the costs of conflict. Other scholars contend that the balance of elite discourse influences public support for war. I draw upon survey...
متن کاملThe Sociological Analysis of Iran-Iraq War based on Parsons' Theory
The present study attempts to analyze Iraq war against Iran based on Parsons' subsystems. The main question aims at finding the social positive/negative functions of the war. According to the studies, the first effect of the war was damaging behavioral organism subsystem so that it couldn't realize its functions. Subsequently, the chaos spread to the personality subsystem. Except for the qualit...
متن کامل