Borrowing Support for War: The Effect of War Finance on Public Attitudes toward Conflict

Abstract

How does the way states finance wars affect public support for conflict? Most existing research has focused on costs as casualties rather than financial burdens, and arguments that do speak to the cost in treasure either minimize potential differences between the two main forms of war finance—debt and taxes—or imply that war taxes do not dent support for war among a populace rallying around the fiscal flag. Using original experiments conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom, we evaluate the relationship between war finance and support for war. We find that how states finance wars has an important effect on support for war and that the gap in support resulting from different modes of war finance holds across the main democracies engaging in conflict, regardless of the type of war or individuals’ party identification. The findings have important implications for theories of democratic accountability in wartime and the conduct of conflict, since borrowing shields the public from the direct costs of war and in turn reduces opposition to it, giving leaders greater latitude in how they carry out war.

How Do People Evaluate Foreign Aid To ‘Nasty’ Regimes?

“… 4 See examples concerning immigration policy (Facchini and Mayda 2009; Scheve and Slaughter 2001a), trade policy (Hays, Ehrlich, and Peinhardt 2005; Scheve and Slaughter 2001b), monetary policy (Bearce and Tuxhorn 2017), economic sanctions (Heinrich, Kobayashi, and Peterson 2017), diplomacy (Tanaka 2016), counterterrorism (Garcia and Geva 2016), and the use and financing of the military (Flores-Macıas and Kreps 2017; Johns and Davies 2014; Tomz and Weeks 2013). …”

Think Ahead: Cost Discounting and External Validity in Foreign Policy Survey Experiments

“…This is especially true of ACT experiments, which are meant to teach us something about how people reason about impending military engagement in foreign civil wars, a costly endeavor. Prior work tells us that pecuniary costs affect support for presidential belligerence (Flores-Macías and Kreps 2015; Geys 2010; Kriner et al 2015). Moreover, casualty levels—“the most salient cost of war” (Gartner 2008, 105)—have repeatedly been found to influence popular support for foreign intervention (Boettcher and Cobb 2006; Eichenberg 2005; Gelpi et al 2009; Karol and Miguel 2007; Kriner 2006; Walsh 2015).…”

“…Some researchers have explored the effects of cost on opinion in ACT experiments. They directly manipulate the cost of an action within the vignettes themselves, inserting a definite quantity within the mind of the respondent and measuring the effect of that number (Flores-Macías and Kreps 2015; Kriner et al 2015; Kriner and Shen 2012; Walsh 2015). However, in many of these experiments, costs are neither purposefully manipulated nor discussed at all, and the context of the survey vignette remains one of low information and high abstraction.…”

Self-interest, partisanship, and the conditional influence of taxation on support for war in the USA

“…The majority of works studying war finance and its relation to the various costs of war simplify the conversation to a tax vs debt dichotomy (Flores-Macı´as and Kreps, 2015;Schultz and Weingast, 2003). More importantly, these works argue that wartime borrowing is politically advantageous relative to war taxation.…”

“…The CCES allows us to examine the influence of war tax mechanisms on support for the use of force among a nationally representative sample of 1000 adult Americans (Ansolabehere and Rivers, 2013;Vavreck and Rivers, 2008). 15 Core design elements of both experiments were explicitly modeled after those conducted in Flores-Macı´as and Kreps (2015) to insure comparability with the only previous experimental investigation of the impact of taxation on war support. …”