How Citizens Respond to Combat Casualties The DifferenTial impacT of local casualTies on supporT for The War in afghanisTan

scholars have long analyzed the influence of combat casualties on public support for war. however, the mechanisms through which casualties—particularly local casualties—affect wartime opinion formation have received much less attention. We employ a novel survey experiment to test three mechanisms that might explain previously observed cleavages in war support between residents of highand low-casualty communities. We find that subjects who read a news story concerning a casualty from their home state were significantly more likely to oppose the war in afghanistan than were subjects who read an identically worded news story in which the fallen soldier was not identified as being from the respondent’s home state. moreover, this difference emerged regardless of whether the story followed the coverage patterns and emphasis typical of national or local media reporting. We conclude that the local connections triggered by learning of a homestate casualty, not the emotionally charged nature of local media reporting, is most responsible for generating opinion cleavages observed in previous research. international relations scholarship, from kant’s (1983 [1795]) theory of perpetual peace to contemporary analyses of the importance of ballot box constraints in understanding state conflict behavior (see russett 1990; Bueno de mesquita and lalman 1992; reiter and stam 1998; Bueno de mesquita et al. 2003), has long emphasized the political importance of domestic public opinion. most analyses of wartime opinion formation have conceptualized the process by which citizens decide whether or not to support a war as a cost-benefit Douglas l. kriner is an associate professor of political science at Boston university, Boston, ma, usa. francis x. shen is an associate professor of law at the university of minnesota, minneapolis, mn, usa. *address correspondence to Douglas kriner, Boston university, Department of political science, 232 Bay state rd., Boston, ma, usa; e-mail: [email protected]. Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 76, no. 4, Winter 2012, pp. 761–770 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] doi:10.1093/poq/nfs048 advance access publication 19 october 2012 at B oton U niersity L ibaries on A uust 2, 2013 http://poqrdjournals.org/ D ow nladed from calculation (see page, shapiro, and Dempsey 1987; gartner and segura 1998; gelpi, feaver, and reifler 2009). and, in the low-mobilization wars waged since World War ii, casualties have been the primary way in which most americans see a conflict’s costs (aldrich et al. 2006; gartner 2008). across a range of military actions, from Vietnam and korea, to more minor missions in panama and the persian gulf, to recent conflicts in afghanistan and iraq, scholars have shown that public support declines as casualties accumulate (e.g., mueller 1973; larson 1996; mueller 1994; eichenberg, stoll, and lebo 2006; Jacobson 2010). however, recent scholarship also finds that casualties are far from uniformly distributed across the country. This unequal exposure to casualties, in turn, has produced significant cleavages in policy opinions and political behaviors between americans who live in communities that have suffered high versus low numbers of casualties. for example, in both the Vietnam and iraq wars, residents of high-casualty communities were more likely to believe each war was a mistake and to favor an early withdrawal than demographically identical residents of communities that had experienced substantially lower casualty rates (gartner, segura, and Wilkening 1997; hayes and myers 2009; kriner and shen 2010; althaus, Bramlett, and gimpel 2011). moreover, these cleavages reappeared at the ballot box; state and county casualties strongly influenced both house and senate races during the Vietnam era (gartner, segura, and Barratt 2004; kriner and shen 2010), as well as the 2004 presidential election (karol and miguel 2007) and house and senate races during the 2006 midterms (kriner and shen 2007; grose and oppenheimer 2007; gartner and segura 2008). although these political consequences are well established, existing scholarship tells us significantly less about the mechanisms through which local casualties generate these political effects. how, precisely, do local casualties affect citizens’ cost-benefit calculations when forming their wartime policy preferences? are residents of high-casualty communities simply more aware of the human costs of war than residents of low-casualty communities? are local casualties covered differently in the media in ways that disproportionately sway public opinion? or do local casualties cause citizens to update their cost-benefit calculations differently than information about national casualties? The answers to these questions may compel us to fundamentally reexamine how citizens respond to war and its human costs. three potential mechanisms most prior analyses of the political effects of local casualties emphasize the greater exposure to the human costs of war that residents of high-casualty communities receive versus their peers in low-casualty communities. We term this the differential exposure mechanism. given the absence of mass mobilization Kriner and Shen 762 at B oton U niersity L ibaries on A uust 2, 2013 http://poqrdjournals.org/ D ow nladed from in america’s post–World War ii conflicts and the widespread lack of information concerning casualty totals observed in the iraq War (Berinsky 2007; myers and hayes 2010), there are at least three reasons that residents of highcasualty communities may be more likely to hear about casualties than other americans. first, gartner, segura, and Wilkening (1997, p. 670) argue that “interpersonal and community-based information networks” make local casualties “better known” to citizens. second, residents of high-casualty communities may receive significantly more elite cues critical of the war than residents of low-casualty communities (kriner and shen 2010). Third, media scholars continue to find that a large percentage of americans rely on local news outlets for their information on international affairs (gilliam and iyengar 2000), and that local news outlets give significantly more attention to local casualties than they do to casualties from other communities (gartner 2004). alternatively, americans may simply respond differently to casualties suffered in their communities than to casualties with whom they share no local connection. We term this the differential processing mechanism, as it implies that citizens may weight information about local casualties differently than nonlocal casualties when forming their policy judgments and preferences. This mechanism is suggested in gartner, segura, and Wilkening’s (1997, p. 670) argument that local war deaths are not only “better known” but also more “highly salient” in citizens’ decision calculus. in a similar vein, in an analysis of gallup polling data from the iraq War, kriner and shen (2010) found that respondents from high-casualty states were significantly more likely to report that they personally knew a soldier killed or wounded in iraq than were respondents from low-casualty communities. and those who perceived a personal connection were significantly more likely to oppose the war and support withdrawal than were respondents who did not. a third possibility, a hybrid of the differential exposure and differential processing mechanisms, emphasizes the key role played by the local media. local media outlets do more than simply report on casualties in their coverage areas; they provide a certain type of coverage that may be particularly suited to triggering the personal, emotive connections that influence public opinion. even a cursory comparative review of casualty coverage in national and local news outlets reveals that the two report on casualties in dramatically different ways. With some exceptions, most coverage mentioning casualties in national news outlets does so within the frame of a larger story concerning the battle or incident in which the casualties occurred and what that incident reveals about the overall strategy in the theater. local media coverage of casualties, by contrast, is often intensely personal. it routinely features interviews with surviving family members, friends, neighbors, high school teachers, and athletic coaches. The details emphasized are not of the firefight and what the battle tells us about the larger strategy; rather, the emphasis is on personal details of the fallen soldier and the effects of his or her death on family, friends, and neighbors left behind. in short, local media coverage appears designed to How Citizens Respond to Combat Casualties 763 at B oton U niersity L ibaries on A uust 2, 2013 http://poqrdjournals.org/ D ow nladed from produce the emotional reaction and sense of connection with a fallen soldier that might lead readers to weight local war deaths disproportionately in their cost-benefit calculations. as a result, residents of high-casualty communities may become more critical of a war than their peers—not because of a shared local connection with fallen soldiers, but because they receive more emotionally charged media coverage that personalizes a war’s human costs. We label this the emotional news coverage mechanism.